Staff Picks - Page 8 of 9

The Map to Everywhere is the fantastic first book in a new middle grade fantasy series by husband and wife team, Carrie Ryan and John Parke Davis. Fin lives in the magical Khaznot Quay where he suffers from being forgettable. It’s not just that he doesn’t stand out; people truly forget him seconds after talking… Read More

When was the last time you were on a plane that was hijacked?  Luckily, most of us can answer “never”.  The airline industry has instituted security standards that make it almost impossible for hijackers to be successful.  What many people may not realize is that hijacking planes in the late 1960s and 1970s was a… Read More

Lady Emily Ashton has been a widow for longer than she had known her husband Philip - and she has only been in mourning for a year.  We begin the story from Emily’s point of view and know Phillip only from her account.  Emily freely admits she made no effort to know her husband before… Read More

Lucy Knisley, author, illustrator, and adventure seeker, is now in her late twenties and has a lot to write about. Her memoir, Relish: My Life in the Kitchen, focuses on her adolescent years when all she wanted was to find a way to mix her two passions, drawing and cooking, to create something that would… Read More

I’ve never read anything quite like it. – Michael Chabon The above quote, in regards to David Mitchell’s epic saga Cloud Atlas, is really the best way to sum it up. It is a journey that is nothing like anything else you will ever read -- the story crosses time and space everywhere from a… Read More

Georgie McCool is a successful sitcom writer.  She has a great husband (Neal) and two children (Alice and Noomi) who are both precocious and adorable. From the outside, Georgie’s got everything all together.  Behind the scenes, she’s living something that every working parent faces: work conflicting with home life.  Over the holiday season, Georgie abandons… Read More

In this middle grade mystery, twelve-year-old Milo lives with his adoptive parents at the Greenglass House, an inn primarily populated by smugglers. Guests do not usually come during winter vacation so Milo and his parents are surprised when a guest appears…and then another and another! Pretty soon, the inn is housing a handful of guests,… Read More

An interesting phenomenon over the last decade has been the proliferation of well-written and interesting Nonfiction books. One of the theories about this relates to the dying field of journalism. As newspapers go out of business and less and less journalists can make a living working in journalism, they are using their skills to write… Read More

Few debut novels garner as much buzz as Lauren Owen’s The Quick has been getting. Released by Random House in June, the novel has gotten praise from Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus, Booklist, O, The New York Times, and many others. Tana French (In the Woods) and Kate Atkinson (Case Histories) both blurbed the book. All of… Read More

At the start of Jo Knowles’ See You at Harry’s, 12-year-old Fern’s summer is unfolding in a predictable way as she helps out at the family diner and hangs out with her best friend.  Readers are lolled into her comfortable routine, although there are definitely some incidences that make this more than a simple and… Read More