Staff Recommendations
Daryl M.
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Your Favorite Band Cannot Save You
by Moore, Scotto
July 15, 2019
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It’s happened to all of us. You hear a song and it instantly raises your spirits. Or, you hear a different song and it instantly makes you feel melancholy. Some music makes you want to move, while other music makes you want to relax and be still. Something reminds you of a song and then it is repeatedly playing in your head all day long. Music elicits reactions, whether wanted or unwanted. But what if music were used, intentionally, for questionable purposes? This is the intriguing question explored by Scotto Moore in Your Favorite Band Cannot Save You.A long-time music blogger... Read Full Review
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Middlegame
by McGuire, Seanan
July 1, 2019
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Roger Middleton is a rather typical seven-year-old boy. He lives with his adopted parents in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He seems to be exceptionally gifted when it comes to grammar, spelling, anything to do with languages, really. But he struggles with even the most basic levels of mathematics.Dodger Cheswich is not a typical seven-year-old girl. She lives with her parents in Palo Alto, California and she is a mathematical genius. She appears to be able to comprehend and master increasingly complex levels of equations far beyond her limited number of years. But she doesn’t deal well with... Read Full Review
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Snow White Learns Witchcraft: Stories and Poems
by Goss, Theodora
June 24, 2019
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"Fairy tales are another kind of Bible, for those who know how to read them.” 'Red as Blood and White as Bone' in Snow White Learns Witchcraft by Theodora GossTheodora Goss is an award winning-author, a professor of literature and writing at both Boston University and the Stonecoast MFA program. Her debut novel, The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter (2017) and its sequel, European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman (2018) are wonderful and long-overdue adventures with a group of “girl monsters or monstrous young women,” who are the daughters of... Read Full Review
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The Reign of the Kingfisher: A Novel
by Martinson, T. J.
June 10, 2019
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The first appearance of Batman was in Detective Comics in the Spring of 1939, making 2019 the character’s 80th anniversary. Batman is a sharp contrast to most “superheroes” in that he possesses no “super” powers. His prowess, whether physical or intellectual, comes from rigorous training and study. He patrols the fictional metropolis of Gotham City, an urban center so rife with criminal proceedings that law enforcement simply cannot stem the tide of illegal activities. While Batman has the tacit endorsement of the local police force, through his unauthorized partnership with Police... Read Full Review
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The Sentence is Death
by Horowitz, Anthony
May 28, 2019
Call Number: M
In 2018, readers discovered the first book in Anthony Horowitz’s new mystery series: The Word is Murder. In it, a wealthy woman enters a London funeral parlor in the morning to make her final arrangements. She is found in her home, murdered, six hours later. When disgraced Detective Inspector Daniel Hawthorne is asked to consult on the case, he approaches television writer Anthony Horowitz with a proposition: shadow him while he solves the mystery, and then write everything up into a novel. Horowitz... Read Full Review
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Radicalized
by Doctorow, Cory
May 20, 2019
Call Number: SF
Speculative Fiction has a long history of using the tropes of the genre to comment on our world. Ursula K. Le Guin used The Left Hand of Darkness to examine cultural gender constructs. Using the original Star Trek television series, show creator Gene Roddenberry commented on issues like race relations and the Vietnam War. And in her novel Tooth and Claw, author Jo Walton illustrated the absurdity of Victorian rules of behavior by way of dragons. Sometimes the cultural criticism is playful and fun. Other times, it is subtle and sly, barely noticeable until the author wants... Read Full Review
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The Night Tiger
by Choo, Yangsze
May 6, 2019
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Ji Lin is a young woman who is working as an apprentice dressmaker by day and secretly working as a “dance instructor” at a dance-hall in the evenings to repay a family debt. Ren is eleven, but tells everyone that he is thirteen. He has lost his entire family, including his twin brother, and is working as a houseboy for an aging English doctor. As the doctor nears death, he makes a final request of Ren that he cannot refuse, even though he has no idea how he will fulfill his promise.And then there is the severed finger, mummified and preserved in a glass vial. Ren needs to locate it and bury... Read Full Review
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Record of a Spaceborn Few.
by Chambers, Becky.
April 1, 2019
Call Number: SF
Becky Chambers has become a name to watch in Science Fiction. She published her first novel, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet in 2014 after completing it via a successful Kickstarter campaign, which was later picked up by Harper Voyager and released to a much wider readership and received several notable awards. Chambers’ sophomore effort, A Closed and... Read Full Review
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Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick
by O'Meara, Mallory
March 18, 2019
Call Number: 812.092 P3135Om
"Milicent Patrick's final resting place is in every single Creature from the Black Lagoon T-shirt, every Metaluna Mutant toy, every VHS tape of Fantasia, every DVD of The Shape of Water. It's on the desk of every female animator and in the pen of every woman doodling a monster in the margins of her notebook. It's always been there. It's just been hidden, purposely obfuscated."From: The Lady from the Black Lagoon by Mallory O'MearaThe Creature from the Black Lagoon is a name we all know. Released in 1954, it is considered to be the last... Read Full Review
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An absolutely remarkable thing : a novel
by Green, Hank,
March 11, 2019
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We’ve all done it. We’ve all seen something extraordinary, glanced at it briefly, and then continued on toward our current destination, wherever that may be. We may be in a hurry, we may not. We may be alone, with someone else, or part of a group. But, regardless of our circumstances, often when we are confronted with something unexpected, even if it is remarkable, we take a glance and then keep moving. In Hank Green’s debut novel, the story opens with a young woman coming across something amazing, and she ALMOST walks by after giving it only a cursory glance. But she chides herself for that... Read Full Review
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Finding Baba Yaga : a short novel in verse
by Yolen, Jane,
March 4, 2019
Call Number: YA
Jane Yolen has been working as an author for over 50 years. She has published over 300 titles, ranging from children’s books to speculative fiction (both fantasy and science fiction), and to nonfiction. She is also a poet, an instructor of writing and a reviewer of children’s literature.Jane Yolen’s books and stories have won numerous awards, including the Caldecott Medal, the Nebula, the Christopher Medal, the World Fantasy Award, the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award, and the Jewish Book Award, to name just a few. In 2009, Yolen was the recipient of the World Fantasy Association’s Lifetime... Read Full Review
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Holy Lands: A Novel
by Sthers, Amanda, 1978- author, translator.
February 4, 2019
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Harry Rosenmerck, a successful Jewish Cardiologist, just walked away. He walked away from his family, his career, his life, and everything he knew and loved to start a pig farm in Israel. This sounds like the set-up for a potentially insensitive joke, but it isn’t. Harry is deadly serious, as he explains to Rabbi Moshe Cattan. But Rabbi Cattan isn’t the only person demanding explanations. Monique Rosenmerck, Harry’s recently divorced ex-wife, wants to know why he left and why he won’t install a telephone so they can talk. His son David, a successful playwright, also wants to know why Harry... Read Full Review