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Charlotte shares this review:

First, forget the yellow marshmallowy creations; those aren’t the Peeps we’re talking about. Westerfeld’s peeps are parasite-positives: they’re carrying an infection that makes them long-lived, inhumanly strong, violent, light-avoidant, and, um, hungry for raw meat. Like rabies, this infection makes the hosts inclined to bite. In short, we’re talking about vampires. In Manhattan.

Cal Thompson doesn’t like to use the V-word. He works for New York’s Night Watch, a shadowy organization charged with tracking and capturing peeps before they can infect anyone else. Like most of the Night Watch operatives, Cal is a carrier; he’s got the disease but none of its scarier symptoms. At the opening of Peeps, he’s tracking down the feral ex-girlfriends that he unknowingly infected.

That’s the fictional setup of this fast-paced young adult sci-fi thriller, but what makes it memorable is the science. Beyond the sarcastic dialogue and chase scenes through abandoned warehouses and subway tunnels, there’s some great, funny science writing going on here: a crash course in plagues, parasites, hosts, and vectors. Westerfeld makes his case for vampirism as STD by shoring it up with the gruesome truth. Every other chapter introduces some real-life parasite, from toxoplasm to the guinea worm, proving that the truth is both stranger and much more gross than fiction.

You can tell that Westerfeld had a lot of fun writing this.

Check the WRL catalog for Peeps

Todd shares this review:

Twelve year old Catherine is embarrassed by her autistic brother’s behavior so she sets rules for him to follow; rules like “No toys in the fish tank” and “a boy can take off his shirt to swim, but not his shorts”. In this heartfelt story of Catherine, she shares her ups and downs of her family life and life as a tween.

When a Kristi moves next door, Catherine would like to be friends with her, but she is unsure and scared how Kristi will react to David’s “embarrassing behaviors”. Catherine also meets Jason, a paraplegic, and once again finds herself embarrassed to be seen with him. Only later does she realize that acceptance is the only rule that everyone needs to follow.

Cynthia Lord crafts a magnificent story of a young girl longing for acceptance in a world that we can all use some understanding of the differences around us.

Check the WRL catalog for Rules

Kids love joke and riddle books, and this one is great for a large group. It’s not so much a picture book as a “quipture book.”

On the first page, we meet Mr. Putney, a balding, middle-aged guy with a mustache. He owns a veritable menagerie, whose names the reader is invited to guess. For instance, an armadillo stands on the bedside table next to a snoozing Mr. Putney. “Who wakes Mr. Putney up in the morning?” the book asks. The answer: An alarmadillo.

Mr. Putney holds a (somewhat worried) small boy next to a gorilla. “Who does Mr. Putney use to see how tall his nephew is?” A goruler.

You get the idea. Agee’s illustrations are huge and well-defined, so they are easy to see from the back of the room. And after the first few riddles, kids will be eager to guess the rest. I’ve used this with kindergarten through fourth grade, and it was a hit. And it’s a good one to slip between stories.

Check the WRL catalog for Mr. Putney’s Quacking Dog.

Jessica shares this review:

I can think of maybe three books that have left me speechless, books where I turned that last page and then sat there with my fool mouth hanging wide open. The Body of Christopher Creed is one of them.

Christopher Creed is the class loser. His personality is just wrong. No matter how hard he tries, he can’t fit in. He says the wrong things and wears the wrong clothes and generally makes a pest of himself. Maybe the saddest part is that he doesn’t realize what a dweeb he is. He just keeps trying. It’s pathetic.

Then he disappears.

Is it murder? Did he run away? Maybe it was a suicide?

I’ll warn you right now, there are no clear answers. Christopher’s classmate Torey sure wants to know, because his name has been linked to the disappearance. As Torey starts to investigate the mystery, he begins asking some tough questions: Was he guilty? How about his peers? Did their ostracism go too far? Is Christopher dead because of them?

Plum-Ucci crafts a gripping plot unlike anything you’ve read before. The characters are dangerously well-done: every time you read about Christopher, you remember the pain of the times you’ve been picked on; worse, you begin to remember those times when you were the bully. Lucid, believable writing and truly unique storytelling make this a truly stunning young adult novel. It’s impossible to describe the power of this Printz winner, but don’t take it from me: the brisk plot makes this book seem much shorter than its 248 pages. You have no excuses. Go check it out.

Check the WRL catalog for The Body of Christopher Creed

Nathaniel Philbrick is one of our most readable chroniclers of American history. While less well known than his breakout book, In the Heart of the Sea: the Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex and focused on a more obscure event than later works like Mayflower, The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and 2013′s Bunker Hill: a City, a Siege, a Revolution, his book Sea of Glory: America’s Voyage of Discovery: the U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842 is one of his best. The fact that the history of this expedition has mostly been forgotten by modern Americans only makes the book more astonishing.

The Exploring Expedition, often known as the U.S. Ex Ex, would journey down the U.S. and South American coasts, continue into Antarctic waters, then cross into the Pacific and chart South Pacific islands and portions of America’s Northwest coast, including the mouth of the Columbia River before returning via the reverse route over four years later. It would make contact with many native populations, create sea charts that would be used well into the 20th century, and bring home an astonishing number of scientific specimens that would ultimately form the start of the Smithsonian’s collection. It would do all of this in an era when propulsion was still by sail, cold weather gear was substandard, and navigation was hazardous. Pretty good for an expedition unknown to most modern Americans!

But what makes the story even more astonishing is that it succeeded despite the inept, self-aggrandizing leadership of young Charles Wilkes. Wilkes was barely 40 years of age, only a lieutenant, but won command of the expedition through diligent campaigning and the general opposition to the expedition of most of the Navy’s officers. When political wrangling back at home refused him the honor of a Captain’s rank even after he was away with the expedition’s five ships, Wilkes became ever more of a martinet, pretending to have achieved rank that he didn’t have so he could play the other young officers of the expedition against each other. He would often arrange the traveling order of the ships so that he could claim personal discovery of major sites or ignore the successes of other officers. He resorted to corporal punishments at the least offense and subverted the work of the expedition’s scientists.

I’ll let you discover the expedition’s many events for yourself, but I will hint at a bit of the ending. Wilkes returned home to find a different president than the one who backed his expedition, many dismissed officers waiting to level charges against him, a Navy determined to have him court-martialed, and powerful enemies in the country’s political leadership. The last part of the book considers the events of the case made against him. Wilkes may have been a disaster, but modern readers will be enthralled by the adventures of this little known expedition. This is an enthralling history that reads like a suspense novel.

Check the WRL catalog for Sea of Glory

We also have Sea of Glory in large print or audiobook on compact disc formats

Todd shares this review:

After inheriting her Uncle’s land in Montana 16 year-old Hattie sets off to improve the land, stake a claim and finally have a place she can call home. Traveling from Iowa to Eastern Montana, Hattie narrates her struggle of cultivating 40 acres and setting 480 fence posts during a 10 month period. Hattie’s story is also revealed through a series of letters both to and from a friend who is off to war as well as newspaper clippings from back home in Iowa.

Hattie braves the harsh weather, endless hours of farm work, homesickness, and her hopeless cooking. Hattie’s biggest test lies in her standing up to locals who increase the pressure to be a “loyal American” during World War I and the bigotry towards a local German-American family that Hattie befriends.

This novel is based on Kirby Larson’s great-grandmother who staked a claim on the Montana prairie. Please read the author’s note at the end of the novel.

A wonderful parent-child book group selection that provides a magnificent setting and memorable characters, and a story that may want you to search for your ancestors and family history.

Check the WRL catalog for Hattie Big Sky

Todd shares this review:

Eric Poole started out just killing small animals, kittens, and birds, but soon finds himself in a juvenile detention center for killing his parents. Eric claims he was being abused and the murders were in self-defense.

Lori Cranston, a 15-year-old runaway is drawn to Eric. She met him in passing a few years before Eric was arrested and wants to meet him again upon release from the detention home.

Eric and Lori are brought together and the tension begins. With a veteran police officer watching Eric, waiting for his one slip back to a life of crime, Eric finds companionship in Lori and then in a Cormier-esque ending lives are shattered.

Check the WRL catalog for Tenderness

J. R. Moehringer first came to the attention of readers with his 2005 memoir The Tender Bar. In 2012, he returned with a novel, Sutton, which chronicles the life of the American bank robber Willie “the Actor” Sutton. The two works might be closer in nature than that summary first suggests: told from Willie’s perspective, and dependent on his memory (his fictionalized memory: the real life Sutton didn’t talk much to reporters about his exploits, and when he did, as in his 1976 ghostwritten memoir, the information was often questionable), this historical novel reads like one of those contemporary memoirs that leaves readers wondering if they’re getting the whole truth. In this case, however, that’s not a negative, it’s kind of the point.

The novel opens with Sutton’s surprise parole from New York’s Attica prison on Christmas Eve, 1969 at the age of 69. Willie is on death’s doorstep with emphysema and weak arteries in his legs, a bit bewildered by the world’s changes, but he makes a deal with the New York Herald to tell his story. So on Christmas Day, a cub reporter and a beatnik photographer drive him around the city, visiting the sites of all of his life’s major events in chronological order. Arnold Schuster, the young man who spotted the heavily disguised Willie and turned him in to police, was killed by the mob. The question that hung over Sutton’s head was whether he had somehow ordered the hit. In the book, this piece of information is all that the reporter really wants from Willie, but Willie refuses to talk about Schuster until he has visited all of his old stomping grounds. The narrative alternates between Willie’s remembrances and his reactions to what has become of his former haunts and accomplices.

Sutton was born into an Irish Brooklyn neighborhood at the start of the 20th century. As he tells his story, the cycle of economic depressions, a lack of opportunities, and a desperate attempt to win the wealthy girl who was the love of his life away from her parents’ control were the key elements in his descent into a life of crime. He ultimately became famous for nearly one hundred nonviolent bank and jewelry store robberies, made successful mostly through disguises. While highly successful, Willie was always tripped up by undependable accomplices (at least that’s his story, perhaps the largest conflict of the book is deciding whether Willie is a dependable narrator). He went to prison often, but also became famous for his daring prison breaks. Sutton was on the FBI’s first Most Wanted list when it was released in 1950.

This novel should have broad appeal to crime fiction fans, historical fiction lovers, and literary fiction buffs. Willie makes a likable and fascinating narrator, even as one questions his veracity. Moehringer admits up front that he had to create most of his narrative with imagination, but the historical settings feel accurate and just when you think the plot is getting predictable, a surprising twist is always at hand.

I can highly recommend the audiobook, which actor Dylan Baker reads in fine style, switching deftly between many character voices. Baker is one of those great character actors whom everyone recognizes but few recognize by name. He attended college at William and Mary and acted in many local theater productions before making it big on the stage, on television and in films.

Check the WRL catalog for Sutton

Or try Sutton as an audiobook on compact disc

Charlotte shares this review:

This is a little, old-fashioned, enameled music-box of a book, and if it were a music-box, its tune would be a Strauss waltz.

The setting is Vienna in the last golden years before the first World War. Annika is a kind-hearted foundling girl brought up by the cook in a household of professors; her life changes the day her “real” mother shows up and whisks her away to life in the aristocracy. Reuniting with her mother should be the fairytale that Annika has daydreamed about for years, but life on the curiously rundown estate isn’t quite what she envisioned. For one thing, she has to eat turnip jam. Also, her new family’s motto is “Stand Aside Ye Vermin Who Oppose Us.”

Ibbotson, I was surprised to learn, is a living writer who nonetheless captures the feel of a bygone era’s childhood classics: Frances Hodgson Burnett and Marguerite Henry, to name a few. In The Star of Kazan, there are: a foundling raised by elderly caretakers, jewels, a contested inheritance, a secret garden, a gypsy boy, a dreadful boarding school, and horses. Not just any horses, either, but the Lipizzaner stallions of Vienna’s Spanish Riding School. I cannot think of anything else this book needed to be the platonic ideal of the classic girl’s story. Maybe a governess? I was charmed.

Ibbotson is deft at summing up a person’s character in a few, telling lines, and while her picture of old-world Vienna is sentimental, she is not above ridding the story of a villainess by dropping a concert harp on her. (The moral of this episode? It is wrong to drop harps on people, as harps are expensive.) I particularly recommend the audiobook, read with delightful nuance by Patricia Conolly, who won an Audie award for it.

Check the WRL catalog for Star of Kazan

Last summer I brought this book to an outreach storytime where I would be reading to kindergarten through third grade students. When I arrived, I found out that the fourth and fifth graders would be joining us. “Uh oh,” I thought. But I needn’t have worried. Press Here saved the day.

Press Here is the pop-up book that isn’t a pop-up book. On the first page, readers are instructed to “Press here” on a painted yellow dot and then turn the page. On the next page, a second yellow dot has “magically” appeared. On ensuing pages, the reader is instructed to press dots, shake the book up and down or turn it sideways. In response, the dots change color, slide to the edge of the page, or change size. Pressing a whole row of dots “turns out the lights,” making the background turn black. Blow on the book and the black ink gradually (with more blowing), flows back off the page.

It’s irresistible.

This book is particularly fun to share with a group of about 20, because you can carry it around and let the kids can take turns following the directions. If you have more children than pages, it’s okay, because a couple of the instructions—clapping and blowing—can be done by the whole group. You’ll get spit on when everybody blows, so maybe don’t try it during flu season.

Check the WRL catalog for Press Here.

I’m an unabashed fan of fantasy fiction, but the genre has changed massively in the last five years. A few years ago, most fantasy novels were fat books with lots of story lines and a setting that was usually medieval. These books take a certain patience until all of the plot lines and characters are clearly established, but can pack a real wallop of excitement and emotion when the story comes together.

Now, urban fantasy has at least half of the market. The books are shorter, have a clear central character, and are lighter reads. It’s a format that doesn’t usually work for me. The books don’t have enough depth for my tastes, and when they do, that depth often comes after several books. In particular, the contemporary setting makes it hard for me to suspend disbelief, and I can’t buy into the fantastic elements enough to become engrossed.

Jim C. Hines’ Libriomancer, the first in a new series, was a happy exception for me, perhaps because it’s centered on the book world and the magic that can come from reading good fiction. In this case, that magic isn’t just symbolic, it’s a literal manifestation. The book follows Isaac Vainio, a librarian on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. As an encounter with vampires in the book’s first chapter makes clear, Isaac is more than just a book lover: He can reach inside books and pull magic from the pages.

As the story develops, the reader learns more about Isaac’s back story and the limits and costs of his magic. Isaac was once a practicing field agent for the Porters, a group founded and led by the still-living Johannes Gutenberg. They work, unknown to regular folk, to keep other magical figures like vampires under control and to prevent rogue libriomancers from doing wrong. Isaac got in trouble and has been reduced to the role of cataloger. He looks at new books and makes sure that the magic potential in them won’t accidentally destroy the world. As the book opens, the Porters are losing control as mysterious forces attack them on several fronts.

Isaac returns to active duty, but he’s in a precarious position, without the full support of the Porters, who may be succumbing to internal forces, and targeted by a host of powerful enemies. His allies are his pet fire spider Smudge and Lena, a dryad who’s a fierce warrior and whose magic makes her a powerful love draw to those with whom she bonds. These two provide plenty of comic relief and add some physical power to Isaac’s magical gifts.

What really makes this book click for me, however, are all of the loving references to fantasy and science fiction titles that Hines works into the plot. He clearly loves this literature, and cleverly finds a way to make its imaginative power into something more real in his book. Libriomancer is the start of a series which I’ll follow closely. I predict it’s the series that will make the well-reviewed Hines into a more household name.

Check the WRL catalog for Libriomancer

Jessica shares this review:

I was forced to read Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging for a library school class. The narrator is a teenage girl, so there’s a lot of talk about clothing and boys and high school chums. Yeech!

Imagine my surprise when I started liking it anyway.

…and then imagine my embarassment when I began screeching like a hyena in a crowded coffee shop. This book goes beyond the realm of laugh-out-loud and into hyperventilate-till-they-call-for-an-ambulance.

Despite not caring for chick lit or teen girl stories, I couldn’t help liking the narrator. British (and therefore funny) teenager Georgia Nicolson records her life in diary form with a droll, dry sense of humor. For example:

“I wonder if I have got enough friends? I worry that if British Telecom asks me for ten friends and family for my list of cheap calls, I would have to count the astrological phone line for Librans, which I ring more often than not.”

Or:

“Overslept and had to race to get a life to Jas’s with my dad. No time for yoga or makeup. Oh well, I’ll start tomorrow. God alone knows how the Dalai Lama copes on a  daily basis. He must get up at dawn. Actually, I read somewhere that he does get up at dawn.”

The diary entries move the book along at a good clip. It won a Printz Award, and if you like it, you can read the subsequent books in the Confessions of Georgia Nicolson series.

Check the WRL catalog for Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging

Patti Smith is the proto-punk goddess whose music is fierce, but hardly every listener’s cup of tea. Robert Mapplethorpe was a photographer whose most famous works were pictures of nude men, often depicted in sexually explicit poses and masochistic acts. I like some edgy things, but neither of these artists really do much for me, and a more conservative person might run the other way. I’m not even a huge fan of their scene, where style and innovation seem to matter more than substance, but I’ve always been curious about those magical moments in history where a group of creative people find each other and use the energy of their meeting to create something new.

Patti Smith’s memoir, Just Kids, captures just such a time perfectly. Smith came to New  York in 1967 after giving up a baby to adoption upstate. She was young and looking for a fresh start. One of the first people she met was Robert Mapplethorpe, a minor acquaintance who became her fast friend after saving her from a bad date. The two moved in together and tried to make a go of a relationship, even though it soon became apparent that Mapplethorpe was obviously homosexual. Patti somewhat naively believed that their love would overcome Robert’s sexual preference, and so began several years of ups and downs. Robert could be incredibly supportive of Patti and her art, but substance abuse and a need for fame could make him neglectful at other times.

The background here is fascinating, as Smith and Mapplethorpe rub elbows with the artists and scenesters of the Chelsea Hotel, Andy Warhol’s Factory, and the pioneering music venue CBGB’s. The story follows the early rise of both friends, then jumps forward a decade and ends poignantly with Robert’s death from AIDS in 1989.

Smith writes with real heart. The prose gets a bit florid at times, but that’s easy to forgive, as is her sometimes naive view of Mapplethorpe, as the author so clearly feels all of the emotions behind her story honestly. This especially shines through on the audiobook. Smith is a clumsy reader, a bit monotone and with funny pronunciations for some words (“drawlings” instead of “drawings”), but she’s so absolutely free of pretense that I found the awkwardness charming and authentic, not off-putting.

Check the WRL catalog for Just Kids

Or try it on audiobook on CD

Charlotte shares this review:

There are mysteries where you actually find out who did it. And then there are mysteries that send you off on a wild goose chase for the code that Houdini set up with his wife so that she could correctly identify his spirit in a séance. This is the second kind of book.

But aren’t these great opening lines?

“Anna Cayne had moved here in August, just before our sophomore year in high school, but by February she had, one by one, killed everyone in town. She didn’t do it all by herself—I helped with a few, including my best friend—but still, it was no small accomplishment, even if it was a small town.”

Anna Cayne is a hip goth girl with an encyclopedic appreciation of literature and music. Her hobby is writing obituaries for people who are not dead yet. She and the narrator, never named, bond over Kerouac and carry on an intense flirtation via cryptic postcards, found objects, and mix CDs. And then she disappears. The police find one of her dresses neatly laid out next to a hole in the ice of a nearby river. Is she a murder victim? A suicide? A runaway with a sense of theatrics?

This is one smart, creepy mystery. It works if you just read it straight through, but if you chase down the references to artists and folks with tragic or mysterious ends, the story takes on as many angles as a hall of mirrors. I still don’t know what happened to Anna Cayne, but I have my theories, and so do other Galloway fans who have dogeared suspicious paragraphs, Googled clues, and even explored the lyrics of the songs mentioned for more evidence. Like the TV show Lost, there’s something in this open-ended story to support just about any theory you can throw at it.

As Simple as Snow also won an Alex award, which is given to books that have strong appeal to adults and teenagers alike.

Check the WRL catalog for As Simple as Snow

Should you need it, by the way, the Houdini code is in here.

An exuberant orange and black tabby invites kids to guess his favorite color in this super book for babies and toddlers.

“Is it Yellow?” he asks. “Yellow is the sand on the sunny beach.”

“Is it Red? Red is the rug where I snooze by the fire.” The simple text on these double-page spreads is always accompanied by the cheery cat and another sort of animal. A mouse naps next to the cat on the red rug. Crabs scoot along yellow sand. Bats swoop through a black night sky.

The book bounces along easily, with just enough going on to generate a conversation with toddlers. Cabrera’s illustrations are big and bright, so this is a great book for storytime. And the simple conclusion is satisfying and perfect for little ones.

Check the WRL catalog for Cat’s Colors.

I have a lifetime reading project. My goal is to read one book from each fiction shelf at the Williamsburg Library. I allow myself the option of skipping a shelf if I’ve already read two books on it, but that isn’t most shelves. I’ve been at my project for over two years, and I’m still only 18 shelves in, still reading authors whose last names begin with the letter A! Since I only allot my project a small percentage of my reading time, I may never finish, but it’s a good project, and I’ll keep at it. The intent is to read authors whom I would otherwise never attempt, and this post is about one of these authors.

Jeffrey Archer is an English author who once was a Conservative Member of Parliament. He resigned that position in financial scandal. He was later investigated for insider business dealings and even served time in prison after being convicted of perjury from 2001 to 2003.

Archer’s writing style is a little old fashioned, and not something I would normally read, but he’s held popularity over the years, with a career that began with 1976′s Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less, and continues right up to 2013′s Best Kept Secret. That makes him the perfect candidate for my reading project. Archer’s plots can be melodramatic, but as I read his second book, 1979′s Kane & Abel, I found that despite my skepticism, I was sucked into the story and found it hard to put aside.

Kane & Abel is the story of two men, born on the same day in 1906, destined to cross paths and butt heads throughout their eventful lives. Wladek Koskiewicz is a Pole who rises from impoverished birth, survives both the Germans and the Russians in WWII, and eventually emigrates to America. William Lowell Kane is the scion of a Boston banking family, a prodigy who rises to the top despite family problems and bitter enemies. Both men are admirable but intensely stubborn, and over the course of the novel, they cross paths many times but never become close acquaintances. In later life, they become fierce rivals because of misunderstanding and a failure to communicate.

More happens to each of Archer’s protagonists than normally happens in the lives of a hundred men, and both are too perfect to be believed most of the time and too stubborn to be believed the rest of the time, but what happens to them is consistently interesting, and as a reader, you can’t help but play along, thinking about how you would react to each new crisis, cheering the protagonists when they overcome another obstacle, cringing when they let pride bring them to a new low. It’s enthralling stuff with a strong connection to the world, even if it is at times hokey. It’s easy to see why Archer continues to hold a spot on the fiction shelves after all these years. When you’re tired of all the artsy literary fiction with flashy style and clever ideas that just doesn’t quite connect at the gut level, pick up this old warhorse and cleanse your reading palate with a bit of classic storytelling.

If you like this story, it continues with another generation in The Prodigal Daughter. Archer turned to books that are closer to political thrillers, but his most recent series, The Clifton Chronicles, which begins with Only Time Will Tell, returns more closely to the style of Kane & Abel.

Check the WRL catalog for Kane & Abel

Charlotte shares this review:

So, I’ve been on an Eva Ibbotson kick lately, which is timely, as many of her out-of-print romances are being reissued with snazzy new covers.

A Countess Below Stairs, despite its predictable plot, might have been custom-designed for me, with its upstairs-downstairs descriptions of life in an English manor house and its heroine, a lady’s maid who is secretly a refugee Russian aristocrat. As in all good fairy tales, the heroine is impeccably good and the villainess perfectly dreadful from the moment she arrives wearing diamond-encrusted vulture feathers. But it’s a comfort read with style: Ibbotson writes delightful prose with a knack for offbeat details and character observations.

A Song for Summer was a darker novel, for all that it starts off like the Sound of Music. Good-hearted Ellen travels to Austria in the 1930s to take charge of a bunch of wild children, in this case the boarders at Hallendorf, a progressive school for the arts. In no time, she imposes order, good cooking and high standards of domestic science on the school’s neglected children and its unruly staff of anarchists and Marxists.

Meanwhile Ellen falls for the groundskeeper, a mysterious Czech-of-all-trades who is smuggling Jewish musicians out of Germany in his off hours. No one’s supposed to know that he’s the Marek Altenburg, promising young composer and conductor, a musical genius who can whip the Vienna Philharmonic into shape overnight.

Austria in the late 1930s is no time or place for Ellen and Marek to fall in love, but of course, they do. Hitler invades, and the plot becomes a melodrama of just-missed chances and too-noble sacrifices that seem destined to to leave everyone miserable. There’s enough of a mix of romanticism, irony, nostalgia, and realism that I really wasn’t sure how this one would turn out. (Hint: happily.)

Check the WRL catalog for A Song for Summer

Jeanette shares this review:

In Susan Beth Pfeffer’s Life As We Knew It, Miranda is a sophomore in high school who keeps a diary about her friends, her divorced parents, her pregnant stepmother, her classes and assignments. She is aware that there is talk in the news about the possibility of an asteroid hitting the moon, knocking it out of its orbit. All of her teachers talk about it and it’s on CNN day and night, but she doesn’t quite grasp the significance. “I guess Ms. Hammish thinks this moon thing is historical, because in history that’s what we talked about,” she writes.

When the asteroid hits, it sends the moon closer to the earth. Cell phones and cable tv no longer work, and Miranda realizes that civilization may indeed be changing. The family learns from a network station that tsunamis have caused widespread destruction along the eastern seaboard, and hundreds of thousands of people have been killed.

Miranda’s diary entries from then on describe the changing, colder climate she and her family endure, the increasing gas prices, the scarcity of food, the lack of electricity and lack of heat as the world gets colder and colder. Sick neighbors die when they can’t get to doctors. There is looting and crime. Neighbors trudge through the snow to help each other. The library stays open as long as it can, but eventually it has to close.

Life As We Knew It had me thinking about the paltry supplies my husband and I keep in case of a hurricane or ice storm. They would last a week or two. We would need to learn new skills, as Miranda does, and adopt new ways of looking at the world, in order to survive. This is a great novel for anyone twelve and older.

Check the WRL catalog for Life As We Knew It

Charlotte shares this review:

The setting is Boston, during the opening salvos of what will eventually become the American Revolution.

Octavian is a child with an emperor’s name and a mother of royal descent, raised in a household of Enlightenment scholars and natural philosophers. Accustomed to the eccentricities of their scientific pursuits, Octavian takes the oddities of his everyday life for granted. His meals, for instance, are weighed and recorded daily, as are the contents of his chamberpot. Between the courtly compliments paid to his mother and the impeccable classical education that he is acquiring, Octavian remains unaware for many years that he and his mother are both slaves.

As we read Octavian’s “manuscript testimony,” interspersed with letters, newspaper articles, and other documents, we are privy to a most unusual coming-of-age, and the disillusionment is heartbreaking to follow. Realizing that his beloved mother is only human, and flawed. Realizing, worse, that there are people who don’t see her as human at all.

The Pox Party isn’t a casual or easy read. From the iron mask-and-gag pictured on the cover, used on runaway slaves, to death by smallpox or tarring-and-feathering, the descriptions of violence are harrowing. Some of the most memorable passages are literally beyond words—just slashes of ink where Octavian has written something too painful to confront and marked it out again. And admittedly, I had to take several running jumps at the hurdle of the novel’s eighteenth-century prose style. Read this book when you have time to concentrate. Although the prose is dense and the sentences lengthy, Anderson makes every word count, and once I got used to its rhythm, the story simply took over.

Check the WRL catalog for The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Vol. 1

Memoirs of a Goldfish is a book about a little fish who lived alone in his fish bowl  happily swimming around all by himself. Then things started to be added to his fishy home, a bubbly man, plants, a cranky crab, a slime eating snail and even a pirate ship! What is a poor fish to do?

Devin Scillian and Tim Bowers have teamed up to make the book Memoirs of a Goldfish a keeper. This book is a fantastic read aloud for all ages. Anyone who has ever stood in the fish tank section at a store and thought “I need more stuff!” this book is for you.

Check the WRL catalog for Memoirs of a Goldfish.

This book is about the friends you find when you were not looking and how your life is richer for them, have fun.