Staff Recommendations
Daryl M.
Pages
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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
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The Only Woman in the Room
by Benedict, Marie,
January 7, 2019
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Hedy Lamarr was one of the most beautiful people to ever grace the silver screen - but that beauty was a double edged sword. While it opened doors and made her a movie star, it was often the only thing people saw. Lamarr’s beauty was so striking that people often assumed that there was no more to the young woman they saw, but they were wrong. Lamarr was sophisticated, intelligent and gifted with a keen and creative understanding of science. In fact, she co-created a weapon that could have saved countless lives in WWII, if only the military brass of the day had been capable of seeing the... Read Full Review
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Dracul
by Stoker, Dacre,
December 27, 2018
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“For many of us, Dracula is a formative novel. A book we pick up as children or young adults and revisit as the years pass, a constant on the bookshelf, an old friend. In fact, it might be so familiar that the question of the story itself, how it came to be, hasn’t occurred to us. Yet, like Jonathan Harker’s journey in the classic novel, the events that led to publication are ripe with mystery.” Dacre Stoker and J.D. Barker state in the Author’s Note to their new novel, Dracul.What was Bram Stoker’s inspiration for writing Dracula? As the excerpt from the... Read Full Review
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The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle
by Turton, Stuart,
December 17, 2018
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Who remembers Quantum Leap? It was a television show that ran from 1989-1993 and followed Dr. Sam Beckett and his experiment in time travel, which caused him to become conscious, at the beginning of each episode, in a different body, not knowing who or where he was, or when it happened. Before the end of each episode, Sam had to correct some event in the period in which he found himself by acting as the person he inhabited. Once that was done, he would shift in time again to another person, another place, another era.Now, imagine if the creator of Quantum Leap, Donald P.... Read Full Review
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European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman
by Goss, Theodora,
November 27, 2018
Call Number: M
When we last saw the members of The Athena Club (Mary Jekyll, Diana Hyde, Beatrice Rappaccini, Catherine Moreau and Justine Frankenstein) at the end of The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, they were gathered in the parlor and had just received two letters: one from Mary’s former governess, Mina Murray; the other from Lucinda Van Helsing. Both are asking for assistance and The Athena Club decides that they must help. And so begins the new... Read Full Review