Patron Recommendation: Becoming Mrs. Lewis

“When poet and writer Joy Davidman began writing letters to C. S. Lewis—known as Jack—she was looking for spiritual answers, not love. Love, after all, wasn’t holding together her crumbling marriage. Everything about New Yorker Joy seemed ill-matched for an Oxford professor and the beloved writer of The Chronicles of Narnia, yet their minds bonded…

Recommendations from the Middle School Book Club

The Witch Boy – Molly Knox Ostertag (ebook) “In thirteen-year-old Aster’s family, all the girls are raised to be witches, while boys grow up to be shapeshifters. Anyone who dares cross those lines is exiled. Unfortunately for Aster, he still hasn’t shifted . . . and he’s still fascinated by witchery, no matter how forbidden…

Recommendations from the Middle School Book Club

Keeper of the Lost Cities – Shannon Messenger (ebook) “Twelve-year-old Sophie has never quite fit into her life. She’s skipped multiple grades and doesn’t really connect with the older kids at school, but she’s not comfortable with her family, either. The reason? Sophie’s a Telepath, someone who can read minds. No one knows her secret—at…

Recommendations from the Middle School Book Club

The Darkest Minds – Alexandra Bracken “When Ruby woke up on her tenth birthday, something about her had changed. Something alarming enough to make her parents lock her in the garage and call the police. Something that got her sent to Thurmond, a brutal government “rehabilitation camp.” She might have survived the mysterious disease that…

Patron Recommendation: Hidden Valley Road – Robert Kolker

Our patron’s thoughts on the book: Story of an American family with 12 children – six of whom are diagnosed schizophrenic. Fascinating look at mental illness in America through the mid-20th century. Riveting detail about the scientific pursuit for answers, medical treatments, social stigmas associated with diagnosis, and the impact of all these factors in…

Patron Recommendations

A patron recently returned the two books below and said: “These were both really good.” The Paris Orphan – Natasha Lester “New York City/Paris, 1942: When American model Jessica May arrives in Europe to cover the war as a photojournalist for Vogue, most of the soldiers are determined to make her life as difficult as…

Patron Recommendation: Lies – T.M. Logan

“Six days ago, Joe Lynch was a happily married man, a devoted father, and a respected teacher living in a well-to-do London suburb. But that was before he spotted his wife’s car entering a hotel parking garage. Before he saw her in a heated argument with her best friend’s husband. Before Joe confronted the other…

Patron Recommendation: Audiobooks

An audiobook-loving patron recently recommended the following two titles, both of which, she noted, have good narrators: First up, a work of “inspiring” non-fiction: The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba. “In this memoir adapted for young readers, William Kamkwamba describes the drought that struck his tiny village in Malawi, his subsequent interest…

Patron Recommendation: Gemini by Carol Cassella

A patron returning Gemini said it was terrific. Here’s a bit more about the book, taken from the publisher’s summary: “Dr. Charlotte Reese works in the intensive care unit of Seattle’s Beacon Hospital, tending to patients with the most life-threatening illnesses and injuries. Her job is to battle death—to monitor erratic heartbeats, worry over low…

Patron Recommendation: Somerset – Leila Meacham

Publisher’s summary Leila Meacham’s Somerset: One hundred fifty years of Roses‘ Tolivers, Warwicks, and DuMonts! We begin in the antebellum South on Plantation Alley in South Carolina, where Silas Toliver, deprived of his inheritance, joins up with his best friend Jeremy Warwick to plan a wagon train expedition to the “black waxy” promise of a…

Patron Recommendation: The Killer of Little Shepherds

Publisher’s Summary: “A riveting true crime story that vividly recounts the birth of modern forensics.At the end of the nineteenth century, serial murderer Joseph Vacher, known and feared as “The Killer of Little Shepherds,” terrorized the French countryside. He eluded authorities for years—until he ran up against prosecutor Emile Fourquet and Dr. Alexandre Lacassagne, the…

Patron Recommendation: At Home with the Templetons

Publisher’s Summary: “When the Templeton family takes up residence in an imposing and long-empty manor in the countryside of Victoria, Australia, the locals begin to buzz with gossip. The seven Templetons moved from England and seem unusual, peculiar even—especially when they begin to lead tours through the stately home while dressed in period costume. No…

Patron Recommendation: Pearl Buck in China

Publisher’s Summary: “One of the twentieth century’s most extraordinary Americans, Pearl Buck was the first person to make China accessible to the West. She recreated the lives of ordinary Chinese people in The Good Earth, an overnight worldwide bestseller in 1932, later a blockbuster movie. Buck went on to become the first American woman to…

The Fountainhead ~ Ayn Rand

The Fountainhead has become an enduring piece of literature, more popular now than when published in 1943. On the surface, it is a story of one man, Howard Roark, and his struggles as an architect in the face of a successful rival, Peter Keating, and a newspaper columnist, Ellsworth Toohey. But the book addresses a…

Patron Recommendation

More than a century ago, a school was constructed in Fort Worth, Texas, for the purpose of housing and educating the orphans of Texas Freemasons. It was a humble project that for years existed quietly on a hillside east of town. Life at the Masonic Home was about to change, though, with the arrival of…

The Necklace – Cheryl Jarvis

The true story of thirteen women who took a risk on an expensive diamond necklace and, in the process, changed not only themselves but a community. Four years ago, in Ventura, California, Jonell McLain saw a diamond necklace in a local jewelry store display window. The necklace aroused desire first, then a provocative question: Why…

Good-bye to a friend.

One of our good friends passed on recently.  He was a loyal library patron and an avid reader of non-fiction. True crime was his favorite, but he enjoyed any book that taught him something new.  He submitted many written reviews of the books he read.  Here are few excerpts.  We’ll miss you RA! The Poet…

Furious Improvisation: how the WPA and a cast of thousands made high art out of desperate times ~ Susan Quinn

Quinn (Marie Curie) does a superb job of recounting the rise and fall of the Federal Theatre Project, a wing of FDR’s WPA meant to employ playwrights and actors while providing diversion and inspiration for Depression-ravaged Americans. Quinn shows how, under the management of the irrepressible Hallie Flanagan, the left-leaning FTP facilitated such controversial masterpieces…

Richistan ~ Robert Frank

The Richistanis like to consider themselves ordinary people who just happen to have tons of money, but they live in a world where people buy boats just to carry their cars and helicopters behind their primary yachts, and ordering an alligator-skin toilet seat won’t make even your interior designer blink. But Frank doesn’t just focus…

Haunted Rectory – Katherine Valentine

St. Francis Xavier parish is losing pastors. Over the years, three freaked priests have fled, having beheld Sights Too Terrible To Speak Of. Enter redoubtable replacement Father Rich Melos, who’s both fearless of Satan and Thornbirds-cute. Jane Edwell, plucky proprietor of the Sip and Sit Caf, joins Melos in his bid to blast open the…

The Night Climbers ~ Ivo Stourton

A patron recommends Ivo Stourton’s The Night Climbers; typically he’s a non-fiction reader, but he said this novel was wonderful. When James Walker arrives at Tudor College, Cambridge, he tries to create a vague air of mystery about himself in the hope of making the right kind of friends. By accident or fate he encounters…

Patron Recommendation

A patron said that she loved these books, and was glad to have found a new author: “Daddy’s Girl by Lisa Scottoline Natalie Greco loves being a law professor, even though she can’t keep her students from cruising sex.com during class. She loves her family, too, but as a bookworm, doesn’t quite fit in. Then,…

The Collectors by David Baldacci

A patron loved David Baldacci’s The Collectors. Here’s a synopsis from Amazon: “People are dropping dead in Washington, D.C. First the Speaker of the House falls victim to a hitman in a carefully orchestrated murder in front of dozens of the city’s power elite. Next, the director of the Library of Congress’s Rare Books Room…

The Cabinet of Curiosities

A patron recommends Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child’s The Cabinet of Curiosities. She got so wrapped up in it, she finished it in two days! “In an ancient tunnel underneath New York City a charnel house is discovered. Inside are thirty-six bodies — all murdered and mutilated more than a century ago. While FBI agent…