All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders
Childhood friends Patricia Delfine and Laurence Armstead
didn't expect to see each other again, after parting ways under mysterious
circumstances during middle school. After all, the development of magical
powers and the invention of a two-second time machine could hardly fail to
alarm one's peers and families.
But now they're both adults, living in the hipster mecca San
Francisco, and the planet is falling apart around them. Laurence is an
engineering genius who's working with a group that aims to avert catastrophic
breakdown through technological intervention. Patricia is a graduate of
Eltisley Maze, the hidden academy for the world's magically gifted, and works
with a small band of other magicians to secretly repair the world's
every-growing ailments. Little do they realize that something bigger than
either of them, something begun years ago in their youth, is determined to
bring them together--to either save the world, or plunge it into a new dark
ages.
A deeply magical, darkly funny examination of life, love,
and the apocalypse. –Amazon Description
Be Frank with Me by Julia Claiborne Johnson
A sparkling talent makes her fiction debut with this
infectious novel that combines the charming pluck of Eloise, the poignant
psychological quirks of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and
the page-turning spirit of Where’d You Go, Bernadette.
Reclusive literary legend M. M. “Mimi” Banning has been
holed up in her Bel Air mansion for years. But after falling prey to a Bernie
Madoff-style ponzi scheme, she’s flat broke. Now Mimi must write a new book for
the first time in decades, and to ensure the timely delivery of her manuscript,
her New York publisher sends an assistant to monitor her progress. The prickly
Mimi reluctantly complies—with a few stipulations: No Ivy-Leaguers or English
majors. Must drive, cook, tidy. Computer whiz. Good with kids. Quiet, discreet,
sane.
When Alice Whitley arrives at the Banning mansion, she’s put
to work right away—as a full-time companion to Frank, the writer’s eccentric
nine-year-old, a boy with the wit of Noel Coward, the wardrobe of a 1930s movie
star, and very little in common with his fellow fourth-graders.
As she slowly gets to know Frank, Alice becomes consumed
with finding out who Frank’s father is, how his gorgeous “piano teacher and
itinerant male role model” Xander fits into the Banning family equation—and
whether Mimi will ever finish that book.
Full of heart and countless “only-in-Hollywood” moments, Be
Frank with Me is a captivating and unconventional story of an unusual mother
and son, and the intrepid young woman who finds herself irresistibly pulled
into their unforgettable world. –Amazon Description
Black Rabbit Hall by Eve Chase
For fans of Kate Morton and Sarah Waters, here’s a magnetic
debut novel of wrenching family secrets, forbidden love, and heartbreaking loss
housed within the grand gothic manor of Black Rabbit Hall.
Ghosts are everywhere, not just the ghost of Momma in the
woods, but ghosts of us too, what we used to be like in those long summers . .
.
Amber Alton knows that the hours pass differently at Black
Rabbit Hall, her London family’s country estate, where no two clocks read the
same. Summers there are perfect, timeless. Not much ever happens. Until, of
course, it does.
More than three decades later, Lorna is determined to be
married within the grand, ivy-covered walls of Pencraw Hall, known as Black
Rabbit Hall among the locals. But as she’s drawn deeper into the overgrown
grounds, half-buried memories of her mother begin to surface and Lorna soon
finds herself ensnared within the manor’s labyrinthine history, overcome with
an insatiable need for answers about her own past and that of the once-happy
family whose memory still haunts the estate.
Stunning and atmospheric, this debut novel is a thrilling
spiral into the hearts of two women separated by decades but inescapably linked
by the dark and tangled secrets of Black Rabbit Hall. – Amazon Description
Burning Midnight by Will McIntosh
Sully is a sphere dealer at a flea market. It doesn’t pay
much—Alex Holliday’s stores have muscled out most of the independent
sellers—but it helps him and his mom make the rent.
No one knows where the brilliant-colored spheres came from.
One day they were just there, hidden all over the earth like huge gemstones.
Burn a pair and they make you a little better: an inch taller, skilled at math,
better-looking. The rarer the sphere, the greater the improvement—and the more
expensive the sphere.
When Sully meets Hunter, a girl with a natural talent for
finding spheres, the two start searching together. One day they find a Gold—a
color no one has ever seen. And when Alex Holliday learns what they have, he
will go to any lengths, will use all of his wealth and power, to take it from
them.
There’s no question the Gold is priceless, but what does it
actually do? None of them is aware of it yet, but the fate of the world rests
on this little golden orb. Because all the world fights over the spheres, but
no one knows where they come from, what their powers are, or why they’re here. –Amazon
Description
It Ended Badly: 13 of the Worst Breakups in History by
Jennifer Wright
A history of heartbreak-replete with beheadings, uprisings,
creepy sex dolls, and celebrity gossip-and its disastrously bad consequences
throughout time
Spanning eras and cultures from ancient Rome to medieval
England to 1950s Hollywood, Jennifer Wright's It Ended Badly guides you through
the worst of the worst in historically bad breakups. In the throes of
heartbreak, Emperor Nero had just about everyone he ever loved-from his old
tutor to most of his friends-put to death. Oscar Wilde's lover, whom he went to
jail for, abandoned him when faced with being cut off financially from his
wealthy family and wrote several self-serving books denying the entire affair.
And poor volatile Caroline Lamb sent Lord Byron one hell of a torch letter and
enclosed a bloody lock of her own pubic hair. Your obsessive social media
stalking of your ex isn't looking so bad now, is it?
With a wry wit and considerable empathy, Wright digs deep
into the archives to bring these thirteen terrible breakups to life. She
educates, entertains, and really puts your own bad breakup conduct into
perspective. It Ended Badly is for anyone who's ever loved and lost and maybe
sent one too many ill-considered late-night emails to their ex, reminding us
that no matter how badly we've behaved, no one is as bad as Henry VIII. –Amazon
Description
The Girl in the Red Coat by Kate Hamer
Newly single mom Beth has one constant, gnawing worry: that
her dreamy eight-year-old daughter, Carmel, who has a tendency to wander off,
will one day go missing.
And then one day, it happens: On a Saturday morning thick
with fog, Beth takes Carmel to a local outdoor festival, they get separated in
the crowd, and Carmel is gone.
Shattered, Beth sets herself on the grim and lonely mission
to find her daughter, keeping on relentlessly even as the authorities tell her
that Carmel may be gone for good.
Carmel, meanwhile, is on a strange and harrowing journey of
her own—to a totally unexpected place that requires her to live by her wits,
while trying desperately to keep in her head, at all times, a vision of her
mother …
Alternating between Beth’s story and Carmel’s, and written
in gripping prose that won’t let go, The Girl in the Red Coat—like Emma
Donoghue’s Room and M. L. Stedman’s The Light Between Oceans—is an utterly
immersive story that’s impossible to put down . . . and impossible to forget. –
Amazon Description
The Life and Adventures of a Haunted Convict by Austin Reed
The earliest known prison memoir by an African American
writer—recently discovered and authenticated by a team of Yale scholars—sheds
light on the longstanding connection between race and incarceration in America.
“Remarkable . . . triumphantly defiant . . . The book’s
greatest value lies in the gap it fills: As writer and historian Edward Ball
notes, ‘the mosaic that is the history of the common man has many missing
tiles, and [Austin] Reed’s book places an important piece into that mosaic.’
”—O: The Oprah Magazine
In 2009, scholars at Yale University came across a startling
manuscript: the memoir of Austin Reed, a free black man born in the 1820s who
spent most of his early life ricocheting between forced labor in prison and
forced labor as an indentured servant. Lost for more than one hundred and fifty
years, the handwritten document is the first known prison memoir written by an
African American. Corroborated by prison records and other documentary sources,
Reed’s text gives a gripping first-person account of an antebellum Northern
life lived outside slavery that nonetheless bore, in its day-to-day details,
unsettling resemblances to that very institution.
Now, for the first time, we can hear Austin Reed’s story as
he meant to tell it. He was born to a middle-class black family in the boomtown
of Rochester, New York, but when his father died, his mother struggled to make
ends meet. Still a child, Reed was placed as an indentured servant to a nearby
family of white farmers near Rochester. He was caught attempting to set fire to
a building and sentenced to ten years at Manhattan’s brutal House of Refuge, an
early juvenile reformatory that would soon become known for beatings and forced
labor.
Seven years later, Reed found himself at New York’s infamous
Auburn State Prison. It was there that he finished writing this memoir, which
explores America’s first reformatory and first industrial prison from an
inmate’s point of view, recalling the great cruelties and kindnesses he
experienced in those places and excavating patterns of racial segregation,
exploitation, and bondage that extended beyond the boundaries of the
slaveholding South, into free New York.
Accompanied by fascinating historical documents (including a
series of poignant letters written by Reed near the end of his life), The Life
and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict is a work of uncommon beauty that tells
a story of nineteenth-century racism, violence, labor, and captivity in a
proud, defiant voice. Reed’s memoir illuminates his own life and times—as well
as ours today. –Amazon Decription
The Mystery of Hollow Places by Rebecca Podos
The Mystery of Hollow Places is a gorgeously written,
stunningly original novel of love, loss, and identity, from debut author
Rebecca Podos.
All Imogene Scott knows of her mother is the bedtime story
her father told her as a child. It’s the story of how her parents met: he, a
forensic pathologist; she, a mysterious woman who came to identify a body. A
woman who left Imogene and her father when she was a baby, a woman who was
always possessed of a powerful loneliness, a woman who many referred to as
“troubled waters.”
Now Imogene is seventeen, and her father, a famous author of
medical mysteries, has struck out in the middle of the night and hasn’t come
back. Neither Imogene’s stepmother nor the police know where he could’ve gone,
but Imogene is convinced he’s looking for her mother. And she decides it’s up
to her to put to use the skills she’s gleaned from a lifetime of reading her
father’s books to track down a woman she’s only known in stories in order to
find him and, perhaps, the answer to the question she’s carried with her for
her entire life. - Amazon Description
This is Where it Ends by Marieke Nijkamp
Everyone has a reason to fear the boy with the gun.
10:00 a.m.
The principal of Opportunity, Alabama's high school finishes
her speech, welcoming the entire student body to a new semester and encouraging
them to excel and achieve.
10:02 a.m.
The students get up to leave the auditorium for their next
class.
10:03
The auditorium doors won't open.
10:05
Someone starts shooting.
Told from four perspectives over the span of 54 harrowing
minutes, terror reigns as one student's calculated revenge turns into the
ultimate game of survival. –Amazon Description
We are the Ants by Shaun David Hutchinson
From the “author to watch” (Kirkus Reviews) of The Five
Stages of Andrew Brawley comes a brand-new novel about a teenage boy who must
decide whether or not the world is worth saving.
Henry Denton has spent years being periodically abducted by
aliens. Then the aliens give him an ultimatum: The world will end in 144 days,
and all Henry has to do to stop it is push a big red button.
Only he isn’t sure he wants to.
After all, life hasn’t been great for Henry. His mom is a
struggling waitress held together by a thin layer of cigarette smoke. His
brother is a jobless dropout who just knocked someone up. His grandmother is
slowly losing herself to Alzheimer’s. And Henry is still dealing with the grief
of his boyfriend’s suicide last year.
Wiping the slate clean sounds like a pretty good choice to
him.
But Henry is a scientist first, and facing the question
thoroughly and logically, he begins to look for pros and cons: in the bully who
is his perpetual one-night stand, in the best friend who betrayed him, in the
brilliant and mysterious boy who walked into the wrong class. Weighing the pain
and the joy that surrounds him, Henry is left with the ultimate choice: push
the button and save the planet and everyone on it…or let the world—and his
pain—be destroyed forever. – Amazon Description
All the above titles are available for checkout through Lake County Library System. Enjoy!
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