Thursday, October 12, 2017
The Blog Has Moved!
This blog has moved! Please read about great books at our new website: https://sclsnj.org/read-listen-view/recommendations/
Friday, October 6, 2017
Artemis by Andy Weir
Jazz doesn’t want much from life. She wants an apartment with a bathroom and a real bed instead of the coffin-like structure she currently sleeps in. She wants to somehow make things right with her dad after the major screw up she made as a stupid teenager. But she needs to make money to make her dreams come true. She has a legitimate job, and her lucrative sideline as a smuggler, but it’s not enough. When a job with an amazing payday comes her way, even though it is dangerous and extremely illegal, she leaps at the opportunity. Now she just has to figure out how to pull this job off without getting caught and deported to Earth. Yes, Earth. Jazz lives on Artemis, the first city on the moon, and she loves her home, she’s never known any other, and she’ll do everything she can to protect it and stay there!
Of course there is a lot of science in this book, just like there was in the author’s bestselling first book The Martian, but there are no potatoes and the heist takes center stage here. It reminded me of the heist movies like The Italian Job but on the moon which lends its own special quirks to the action. It was great to see such a diverse cast of characters and that Artemis is set to Kenyan time with all passenger, goods and tourist transport leaving out of Nairobi.
Jazz is a criminal with a strict moral code and I certainly hope that this book is only the beginning of her story. Place your holds now -- this book comes out November 14th!
Unraveling Oliver by Liz Nugent
Oliver Ryan writes extremely popular children’s books and his wife Alice illustrates them. They seem to have the perfect relationship until he is arrested for beating her so badly she lies in a coma and the doctors are doubtful she will ever awaken. Oliver had never hurt Alice before. This book is the story of why he suddenly became so horrifically violent.
Told from the perspectives of many characters including Oliver who is as bewildered by his violence as anyone else, the story of Oliver, for it is his story that drives him to this act, is slowly unraveled as each person tells what they know. Altogether a complete picture of the man that no one truly knew is revealed.
This book won the Irish Book Award’s Crime Novel of the Year and it deserved it. I didn’t like Oliver, even when I learned about the awful childhood he endured, but I still felt some sympathy for him when I looked at his life as a whole...but then I didn’t again. I’m sure any reader will go back and forth as they learn more and more of his life. This is a great book on audio since each of the different characters that lend their perspectives to the story has a different reader. And they all have great Irish accents to really put you in the place and immerse you in the story. This one will stay with you for a long while.
Dirty Dancing at Devil’s Leap by Julie Ann Long
Avalon Harwood is having a really bad day. Rather than deal with life at the moment she flees to her safe place. Home. Her childhood home in Hellcat Canyon, California. She knows she should be managing her startup tech company with her brilliant boyfriend but he can handle the responsibility for a while, especially since he’s the one she can’t deal with at the moment. Soon after she arrives home she finds out that the mansion down the road (next door but still far) is going up for auction the following morning. She was only in that house once and she has mostly fond memories of Mac Coltrane, the boy who spent his summers there until he broke her heart into a million pieces. So, naturally she goes to the auction the next morning and outbids all the competition. She’s thrilled that the property comes with the groundskeeper for the rest of the year until she meets the groundskeeper, who also happens to be the man she outbid: Mac Coltrane.
This is a romance so you know these two are going to get together at the end, but it’s such a fun time. There are always misunderstandings in romances that drive me nuts because most of the time if the two characters just had a conversation the next two hundred pages of hurt feelings wouldn’t be necessary. In this book the misunderstanding happened a decade or so ago when they were teenagers so they are trying to heal old wounds as well as get to know each other once again. The knowledge they have of each other from the past works well to ramp up the banter and practical jokes the two play on each other as Avalon tries to get the house ready to resell and Mac does his best to convince her to sell it to him.
I really enjoyed the chemistry between these two and if you’re looking for a contemporary romance this is a really fun one. This is the third in the series so there is more to like where this one came from!
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