Library Journal Reviewers List Their Top 10 Books of 2013

December 14, 2013December 10, 2013 / cheshirelib / Leave a comment

Librarians rely on a lot of resources when deciding which books to purchase for their libraries. At the top of the list is Library Journal’s Book Review, which provides prepublication reviews for hundreds of books each month. When you read books for a living, so many will blur together, but every year there are standouts. Here are LJ’s picks for the best books of 2013:

Claire of the Sea Light by Edwidge Danticat (fiction). Claire Limyè Lanmè (“Claire of the Sea Light”) goes missing on her seventh birthday, soon after her destitute fisherman father makes the wrenching decision to give her away so that she can have a better life. As townsfolk search for her, painful secrets, haunting memories, and startling truths are unearthed among the community.

The Panopticon by Jenni Fagan (fiction). Anais Hendricks, 15, is in the back of a police car. She is headed for the Panopticon, a home for chronic young offenders. She can’t remember what’s happened, but across town a policewoman lies in a coma and Anais’s school uniform is covered in blood. Raised in foster care from birth, Anais has been let down by just about every adult she has ever met. Now a counter-culture outlaw, she knows that she can only rely on herself. And yet despite the parade of horrors visited upon her early life, she greets the world with the witty, fierce insight of a survivor.

Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink (non-fiction). Pulitzer Prize winner Sheri Fink’s landmark investigation of patient deaths at a New Orleans hospital ravaged by Hurricane Katrina — and her suspenseful portrayal of the quest for truth and justice.

The Searchers : The Making of an American Legend by Glenn Frankel (non-fiction). Explores the true-story-become-legend underpinning John Ford’s film, and the making of the film itself.

NOS4A2 by Joe Hill (fiction). Charles Talent Manx has a way with children. He likes to take them for rides in his 1938 Rolls-Royce Wraith with the NOS4A2 vanity plate. With his old car, he can slip right out of the everyday world, and onto the hidden roads that transport them to an astonishing–and terrifying–playground of amusements he calls “Christmasland.” Now Vic McQueen, the only kid to ever escape Manx’s unmitigated evil, is all grown up and desperate to forget. But Charlie Manx never forgot. He’s on the road again and he’s picked up a new passenger: Vic’s own son.

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra (fiction). In a rural village in December 2004 Chechnya, a failed doctor Akhmed harbors the traumatized 8-year-old daughter of a father abducted by Russian forces and treats a series of wounded rebels and refugees while exploring the shared past that binds him to the child.

How To Create the Perfect Wife by Wendy Moore (non-fiction). Go back before the Regency and the romances it still inspires. Enter the Enlightenment, but don’t assume its adherents were all enlightened as we’d understand the term. Meet Thomas Day, an 18th-century aristocrat free to study and practice Enlightenment philosophies. Watch him go to an orphanage and adopt a girl for long-term training to be his wife. Twice.

Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation by Michael Pollan (non-fiction). Pollan’s latest details his adventures exploring the four elements of food preparation: fire, water, air, and earth. In the course of his journey, he discovers that the cook occupies a special place in the world, standing squarely between nature and culture.

Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon (fiction). New York City, 2001. Fraud investigator Maxine Tarnow starts looking into the finances of a computer-security firm and its billionaire geek CEO and discovers there’s no shortage of swindlers looking to grab a piece of what’s left of the tech bubble.

The Woman Who Lost Her Soul by Bob Shacochis (fiction). When the humanitarian lawyer Tom Harrington travels to Haiti to investigate the murder of a beautiful, seductive photojournalist, he is confronted with a dangerous landscape of poverty, corruption, and voodoo.

On Our Shelves: New Young Adult Fiction

November 6, 2013November 4, 2013 / Sharon Tyler / Leave a comment

Looking for something new to read? Well, here is a sampling of the latest additions to our Young Adult collection:

Allegiant by Veronica Roth. (Divergent #3)
The faction-based society that Tris Prior once believed in is shattered–fractured by violence and power struggles and scarred by loss and betrayal. So when offered a chance to explore the world past the limits she’s known, Tris is ready. But will she be prepared to face impossible choices about courage, allegiance, sacrifice and love?

More Than This by Patrick Ness.
A boy named Seth drowns, losing his life as the pounding sea claims him. But then he wakes. He is naked, thirsty, starving. But alive. How is that possible? He remembers dying. So how is he here? And where is this place? It looks like the suburban English town where he lived as a child, before an unthinkable tragedy happened and his family moved to America. But the neighborhood around his old house is overgrown, covered in dust, and completely abandoned. What’s going on? And why is it that whenever he closes his eyes, he falls prey to vivid, agonizing memories that seem more real than the world around him? Seth begins a search for answers, hoping that he might not be alone, trapped in a crumbling, abandoned world.

Dear Life, You Suck by Scott Blagden.
Irreverent, foul-mouthed, seventeen-year-old Cricket Cherpin, living under the watchful eye of Mother Mary at a Catholic boys’ home in Maine, has such bleak prospects he is considering suicide when Wynona Bidaban steps into his world.

If You Could be Mine by Sara Farizan.
In Iran, where homosexuality is punishable by death, seventeen-year-olds Sahar and Nasrin love each other in secret until Nasrin’s parents announce their daughter’s arranged marriage and Sahar proposes a drastic solution.

Boxers by Gene Luen Yang.
In 1898 China, Little Bao has had enough of foreign missionaries and soldiers robbing peasants, and he recruits an army of Boxers to fight to free China from its oppressors.
Do not forget it’s companion book Saints.

Still reading? You might also want to check out; A Really Awesome Mess by Trish Cook and Brendan Halpin, Ghost Time by Courtney Eldridge, Revealed by P.C. Cast and Kristin Cast. (A House of Night novel), Dancer, Daughter, Traitor, Spy by Elizabeth Kiem, Earthbound by Aprilynne Pike, Frozen by Melissa de la Cruz and Michael Johnston, Paradox by A.J. Paquette, Raven Flight (the second Shadowfell novel) by Juliet Marillier, Unthinkable by Nancy Werlin (sequel to Impossible) , Compliance by Maureen McGowan. (A Dust Chronicles novel), The House of Hades by Rick Riordan (A Heroes of Olympus novel), The Chaos of Stars by Kiersten White, Still Star-Crossed by Melinda Taub, Now I’ll Tell You Everything by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, or Crown of Midnight by Sarah J. Maas (A Throne of Glass novel).

Librarians Pick The Top Ten New Books for November

November 2, 2013June 30, 2014 / Louise / Leave a comment

Every month, librarians from around the country pick the top ten new books they’d most like to share with readers. The results are published on LibraryReads.org. One of the goals of LibraryReads is to highlight the important role public libraries play in building buzz for new books and new authors. So click through to read more about what new and upcoming books librarians consider buzzworthy this month…

Bellman & Black by Diane Setterfield
Through the Evil Days by Julia Spencer-Fleming
The Death of Santini by Pat Conroy
Someone Else’s Love Story by Joshilyn Jackson
The Valley of Amazement by Amy Tan
Lies You Wanted To Hear by James Whitfield Thomson
Parasite by Mira Grant
The Raven’s Eye by Barry Maitland
Death of a Nightingale by Lene Kaaberbol and Agnete Friis
The Cartographer of No Man’s Land by P. S. Duffy

Seven Novels That Will Creep You Out

October 31, 2013September 26, 2014 / Linda / Leave a comment

Do you like the creepiness of Halloween? Do you like books that scare the dickens out of you? Here are seven novels that will creep you out.

The Terror by Dan Simmons – The men on board HMS Terror have every expectation of finding the Northwest Passage. When the expedition’s leader, Sir John Franklin, meets a terrible death, Captain Francis Crozier takes command and leads his surviving crewmen on a last, desperate attempt to flee south across the ice. But as another winter approaches, as scurvy and starvation grow more terrible, and as the Terror on the ice stalks them southward, Crozier and his men begin to fear there is no escape. A haunting, gripping story based on actual historical events.

The Demonologist by Andrew Pyper – You won’t be able to put down this spellbinding literary horror story in which a Columbia professor must use his knowledge of demonic mythology to rescue his daughter from the Underworld.

The Last Policemanby Ben H. Winters – A fascinating portrait of a pre-apocalyptic United States. The economy spirals downward while crops rot in the fields. Churches and synagogues are packed. People all over the world are walking off the job—but not Hank Palace. He’s investigating a death by hanging in a city that sees a dozen suicides every week—except this one feels suspicious, and Palace is the only cop who cares.

Your House Is On Fire, Your Children All Goneby Stefan Kiesbye – A village on the Devil‘s Moor: a place untouched by time and shrouded in superstition. There is the grand manor house whose occupants despise the villagers, the small pub whose regulars talk of revenants, the old mill no one dares to mention. This is where four young friends come of age—in an atmosphere thick with fear and suspicion. Their innocent games soon bring them face-to-face with the village‘s darkest secrets in this eerily dispassionate, astonishingly assured novel.

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters – Dr. Faraday, the son of a maid who has built a life of quiet respectability as a country physician, is called to a patient at lonely Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, the Georgian house, once impressive and handsome, is now in decline, its masonry crumbling, its gardens choked with weeds, the clock in its stable yard permanently fixed at twenty to nine. Its owners—mother, son, and daughter—are struggling to keep pace with a changing society, as well as with conflicts of their own. But are the Ayreses haunted by something more sinister than a dying way of life? Little does Dr. Faraday know how closely, and how terrifyingly, their story is about to become intimately entwined with his.

A Prayer for the Dying by Stewart O’Nan – One neighbor after another succumbs to a creeping, always fatal disease. Our sole witness to this epidemic is Jacob Hansen, sheriff, undertaker, and pastor. As the disease engulfs the town, Jacob must find a humane way to govern, as well as take care of his wife and baby daughter. And what of the tramps slipping nightly through the tinder-dry woods, the spiritualists from the city camped on the edge of town with their charismatic leader Chase? Who-will bury the dead properly, if not Jacob?

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy – An epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America’s westward expansion. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.

Spooky Chapter Books For Halloween Fun

October 29, 2013July 16, 2014 / Sharon Tyler / Leave a comment

Are you or your children getting excited for the spooky fun that comes along with the Halloween season or are you just not quite ready? Well, here are some children’s chapter books that might help you get into the Halloween spirit.

Coraline by Neil Gaiman.
Coraline ventures through a mysterious door into a world that is similar, yet disturbingly different from her own, where she must challenge a gruesome entity in order to save herself, her parents, and the souls of three others.

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman.
Nobody Owens, known to his friends as Bod, is a normal boy. He would be completely normal if he didn’t live in a sprawling graveyard, being raised and educated by ghosts, with a solitary guardian who belongs to neither the world of the living nor of the dead. There are dangers and adventures in the graveyard for a boy. But if Bod leaves the graveyard, then he will come under attack from the man Jack-who has already killed Bod’s family.

Boo!: Halloween Poems and Limericks written by Patricia Hubbell and illustrated by Jeff Spackman.
A collection of limericks and other poems about Halloween, including “Halloween Scarecrow,” “There Once Was a Witch from North Dublin,” and “Pumpkin Surprise.”

Bunnicula, and the rest of the series, by James Howe.
Though scoffed at by Harold the dog, Chester the cat tries to warn his human family that their foundling baby bunny must be a vampire.

Scary Godmother written and illustrated by Jill Thompson.
While trick-or-treating on Halloween night, Hannah Marie meets her Scary Godmother and a host of creepy creatures who make her welcome on the Fright Side on later Halloweens as well.

Zombie Kid by J. Scott Savage.
The Halloween plans of monster enthusiasts Nick, Carter, and Angelo are thrown into turmoil when a magical amulet acquired from Nick’s voodoo queen aunt turns Nick into a zombie and prompts an uproarious effort to break the curse.