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!
Thursday, September 28, 2017
The Witchfinder’s Sister by Beth Underdown
Alice is forced to return to the village of Manningtree after her husband is killed in a work accident in London in the early 17th century. Her mother recently passed but she was once close with her younger brother, Matthew Hopkins, but hasn’t seen him in five years and is a little nervous since she will be reliant on him for her wellbeing. Alice has reason to be concerned. Matthew is now an associate of the powerful and influential in the village and has started writing down interview transcripts and evidence gathered at the homes of unpopular women in the village accused of the murder of livestock and people through witchcraft. Alice is stunned to discover not only her brother’s methods but how far his reach has extended. When she is forced to help him gather evidence Alice knows that even being the witchfinder’s brother is not enough to protect her from the growing madness in the countryside.
Alice is the narrator of the story which works well because she has background on the town and Matthew but is ignorant of his life and his community standing in the past few years. She tries to see the young boy she knew in the man she relies upon, but as the mistreatment and atrocities he condones pile up she finds herself growing more concerned for those she cares about and herself.
Matthew Hopkins was a real person whose interrogations resulted in the jailing and hanging deaths of many, many women. Even though the novel is loosely based on what little we know about Hopkins’s life, the author took some liberties including adding a great gasp right at the end. Anyone who has an interest in the Salem Witch Trials (Hopkins’s methods were used in America as well) or the hardships faced by women dependant on relatives in past centuries will want to read Alice’s story.
Friday, September 22, 2017
The Gargoyle Hunters by John Freeman Gill
It’s 1974 in New York City and the city is falling apart. Really! There are pieces crumbling and falling off of buildings compelling young Griffin Watts, thirteen years old, to start wearing a batting helmet as he walks to and from school. Griffin and his family all lived together in a brownstone until his mom and dad separated. Now he lives with his mom, sister and a bunch of boarders, hard luck cases, that his mom seems to collect. Griffin misses his dad so finds him in his warehouse/loft in TriBeCa, some weird section of the city where the streets make no sense but people swear is coming back. There he learns about his dad’s love (read: obsession) with the architecture of the city, especially its gargoyles. Griffin is thrilled to help his dad and friends on their late night expeditions to save the city’s history before it is demolished even though he’s pretty sure it’s not all totally legal. It is exciting.
Griffin learns a lot about the architecture of the city (which as readers we do too) but also a lot about life. He begins to understand the broken relationship between his parents and all the ways his parents aren’t so great at being parents. He also forms and loses friendships and grows into the man he will become. Over every aspect of his life there is always his relationship with his father.
Since the author is coming to talk about his book at the LVSC fundraiser in October I felt I should read it and took out the book and audiobook. I’m glad this event encouraged me to pick this one up because I really enjoyed it. I was skeptical about the audiobook because it is read by the author which can either be a good thing, or a disaster. In this case it was an extremely pleasant surprise. New York City comes to life through the author’s penned and voiced words. His characters are fully formed people ready to walk off the page and down the street. I felt like the author was Griffin telling me his story and I have a funny feeling the author wrote a lot of himself into young Griffin.
Pick this one up and walk the city in the 70s; it was really fun remembering how awful it was compared to what, for example, Times Square is now!
Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate
On a stormy night back in 1936 on a shantyboat docked in the Mississippi near Memphis, the five Foss children await the return of their parents. Their mom is pregnant with twins and the midwife urged their father to bring her to the hospital; these births are beyond the midwife’s capabilities to deliver. Soonafter the children are forcibly taken from the boat to the Tennessee Children's Home Society with promises that they will be reunited with their parents soon. It is an awful place where the children suffer abuses at the hands of the adults and fellow residents. It is also where the Foss children are given new names and after some time new families.
In the present day Avery Stafford returns home to South Carolina to help her father, the senator, who is recovering from treatment. She loved her legal job in the capitol but finds herself being groomed for a senate seat she isn’t sure she wants and engaged to a man she isn’t sure she wants either. A chance encounter at a nursing home causes Avery to dig into her family’s past uncovering secrets the well placed Stafford clan may wish to keep silent.
This book will tug at your heartstrings, especially when you realize that the Tennessee Children's Home Society was a real place. Children were taken from their parents, separated from their siblings, and parents who did manage to track their children to the Home were unable to get them back, with dubious legalities as the excuse.
If you enjoyed The Orphan Train where the past met the present you’ll really enjoy this story.
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