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Book reviews by library staff and guest contributors
Perla's two superpowers are making people love her and roaring like a lion. She is a little, scruffy dog, but her powers are mighty. She makes the Rico family fall in love with her at the shelter even though they were hoping to find a guard dog. Then she learns to roar like a lion to demonstrate what an excellent guardian she will make.
When Becky Cooper first heard the story as a student at Harvard, it seemed both unbelievable but still entirely feasible: in early January 1969, a Harvard professor killed a female archeology grad student after she threatened to expose their affair. After she failed to show for her general exams, she was discovered in her apartment with red ochre and necklaces arranged ritualistically over her bloodied, naked body. Harvard smothered the investigation, the murder remained unsolved, and the professor was still teaching in the same department, fully tenured.
Take a regency romance, add a touch of faerie magic and some mystery and you get the delightfully charming Half a Soul by Olivia Atwater.
Booklist puts out many different top 10 lists. If sports are your cup of tea, then check out the following titles:
Every month there are new titles purchased for the Too Good to Miss collections at our libraries. If you're not familiar with TGTM (as we call it here in library-world), it's a special collection of popular books that are truly too good to miss. Some are new and popular titles, others are older titles that might not have had as much media attention as a bestseller or celebrity book club selection but are still great reads that deserve another look.
In a battle between the blustering north wind and the warm shining sun, who do you think would win? Would anyone win? In this Aesop's fable, re-imagined by author/illustrator Philip Stead, three sisters go out in their patched-up coats—colored yellow, blue, and red—to take a walk before the weather changes. At first, the sun shines sweetly upon them, but then the grouchy north wind takes over, blowing cold, harsh air across the sisters' path and the whole world! Will the north wind manage to turn the sisters' coats to rags after all? Or will the sun's rays prevail?
Sometimes I'm looking for a book that works as a total escape for me and that's just what I got with Stephen Hunter's WWII thriller.
Basil's War introduces British special agent Basil St. Florian who spends his off time drinking and sleeping with film stars and his work time being sent into Nazi-occupied France on secret missions during WWII. If all that sounds a bit flashy? It is. Basil's newest assignment is to enter occupied France and gain access to a manuscript kept in the archives in a Paris that swarms with the German military.
Yes, you read that correctly. This novel is narrated by a typewriter. And it is everything I wanted and needed. Also, did you know that books are despised by typewriters because they are attention hogs?!? Makes sense.
Some people in my family believe in aliens and UFO's. I am not one of them. But after reading Dalmartian, I might just change my mind.
As a person who loves seeing the return of all our plant and animal pals when the weather gets warm again, I was happy to find the late April Pulley Sayre's In Between among the picture books at Central Library. Filled with beautiful close-up photographs of all kinds of plants (some native to Wisconsin!) and animals—from grey hairstreak butterflies to baby squirrels to sleepy gulls—Sayre tells a gentle poem-like story of different kinds of in-betweenness, illustrating each one with a perfectly apt creature portrait.
