Twelve New Items in the Lake County Library System

 Before I go to Sleep

Nicole Kidman and Colin Firth deliver riveting performances in this tense thriller based on the best-selling novel that features a shocking twist ending you will never see coming. - Amazon Description

 Boyhood

Filmed over 12 years with the same cast, Richard Linklater's Boyhood is a groundbreaking story of growing up as seen through the eyes of a boy named Mason, who ages from 6-18 years old on screen. Starring Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette as Mason's parents. - Amazon Description

Calvary

 After he is threatened during a confession, a good-natured priest must battle the dark forces closing in around him. -IMDB Description

Earth to Echo

 After receiving a bizarre series of encrypted messages, a group of kids embark on an adventure with an alien who needs their help. -IMDB Description

Elsa and Fred

 ELSA AND FRED is the story of two people who, at the end of the road, discover that it's never too late to love. After losing his wife, Fred (Christopher Plumer) feels disturbed, confused and alone, so his daughter (Marcia Gay Harden) helps move him into a small apartment where he meets Elsa (Shirley Maclaine). From that moment on, everything changes. Elsa bursts into Fred s life like a whirlwind, determined to teach him that the time he has left to live be it more or less is precious and that he should enjoy it as he pleases.- Amazon Description

Free Birds

 Two turkeys from opposite sides of the tracks must put aside their differences and team up to travel back in time to change the course of history - and get turkey off the holiday menu for good.

Ida

 Anna, a young novitiate nun in 1960s Poland, is on the verge of taking her vows when she discovers a dark family secret dating back to the years of the Nazi occupation. -IMDB Description

Jeff Dunham: All Over the Map

 In this documentary/stand-up special, Jeff takes his friends in the suitcase all around the world, performing in places such as Iceland, Norway, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, London, and Israel.-IMDB Description

No Good Deed

 An unstable escaped convict terrorizes a woman who is alone with her two children.

Pride

 U.K. gay activists work to help miners during their lengthy strike of the National Union of Mineworkers in the summer of 1984.-IMDB Description

Rio 2

It's a jungle out there for Blu, Jewel and their three kids after they're hurtled from Rio de Janeiro to the wilds of the Amazon. As Blu tries to fit in, he goes beak-to-beak with the vengeful Nigel, and meets his father-in-law.  - IMDB Description

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

 When a kingpin threatens New York City, a group of mutated turtle warriors must emerge from the shadows to protect their home.- IMDB Description

 

All these items can be placed on hold here.

 

 

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

A few years ago, while putting away books in the library I came across this book. I stood in the aisle and read the first few pages. I was interested but was in the middle of a good size book. 
Recently, I read the book. It was one of those books that you don't want to put down. I really enjoyed it. There were laugh out loud moments and some crying. I highly recommened reading it, if you haven't already.

Amazon.com Review

Jacob Jankowski says: "I am ninety. Or ninety-three. One or the other." At the beginning of Water for Elephants, he is living out his days in a nursing home, hating every second of it. His life wasn't always like this, however, because Jacob ran away and joined the circus when he was twenty-one. It wasn't a romantic, carefree decision, to be sure. His parents were killed in an auto accident one week before he was to sit for his veterinary medicine exams at Cornell. He buried his parents, learned that they left him nothing because they had mortgaged everything to pay his tuition, returned to school, went to the exams, and didn't write a single word. He walked out without completing the test and wound up on a circus train. The circus he joins, in Depression-era America, is second-rate at best. With Ringling Brothers as the standard, Benzini Brothers is far down the scale and pale by comparison. Water for Elephants is the story of Jacob's life with this circus. Sara Gruen spares no detail in chronicling the squalid, filthy, brutish circumstances in which he finds himself. The animals are mangy, underfed or fed rotten food, and abused. Jacob, once it becomes known that he has veterinary skills, is put in charge of the "menagerie" and all its ills. Uncle Al, the circus impresario, is a self-serving, venal creep who slaps people around because he can. August, the animal trainer, is a certified paranoid schizophrenic whose occasional flights into madness and brutality often have Jacob as their object. Jacob is the only person in the book who has a handle on a moral compass and as his reward he spends most of the novel beaten, broken, concussed, bleeding, swollen and hungover. He is the self-appointed Protector of the Downtrodden, and... he falls in love with Marlena, crazy August's wife. Not his best idea.
The most interesting aspect of the book is all the circus lore that Gruen has so carefully researched. She has all the right vocabulary: grifters, roustabouts, workers, cooch tent, rubes, First of May, what the band plays when there's trouble, Jamaican ginger paralysis, life on a circus train, set-up and take-down, being run out of town by the "revenooers" or the cops, and losing all your hooch. There is one glorious passage about Marlena and Rosie, the bull elephant, that truly evokes the magic a circus can create. It is easy to see Marlena's and Rosie's pink sequins under the Big Top and to imagine their perfect choreography as they perform unbelievable stunts. The crowd loves it--and so will the reader. The ending is absolutely ludicrous and really quite lovely. --Valerie Ryan --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

 

Water for Elephants the movie starring Reese Witherspoon, Robert Pattinson, and Christoph Waltz is scheduled to be released April 15, 2011!

New Harry Potter Trailer

I can't wait!!!