The Walking Dead

The Walking Dead
Adult Graphic Novels-Main level - WAL

This graphic novel is about police officer Rick Grimes who gets shot during a traffic stop. He awakens to find himself in an empty hospital and a world full of zombies. The plot follows his journey to find his family, help other survivors, and simply stay alive. The black and white illustrations add to the creepy feeling of the book and left me thinking of the classic movie “Night of the Living Dead.”

Like many good zombie stories, this one is just as much about how people react during time of crisis as it is about the reanimated corpses. The drama among the living is powerful and can be just as scary as the zombies. I greatly enjoyed the AMC television version that aired during the fall and finally got around to reading the graphic novel. It did not disappoint. Both the graphic novels and the TV series are highly recommended! However, due to graphic content I would recommend this graphic novel for mature readers.

You may also like:

Night of the Living Dead - DVD Collection- Main Level - SCIFI HORROR NIG

The Walking Dead. Season One - DVD Collection- Main Level - TV WAL

If I Stay

If I Stay by Gayle Forman
Teen Zone Fiction Main Level - Forman

Mia is a 17-year-old cello player. She plans to go to Julliard after high school. She has a wonderful boyfriend. She loves her family, and genuinely enjoys being with them. These are her reasons for living.

You see, Mia and her family were in a car accident. She is the lone survivor, in a coma in the hospital. Her body is pretty messed up: collapsed lung, spleen removed surgically, brain contusions, and more. Mia knows this because she watches her body and the people around her in the hospital in an out-of-body experience. These are her reasons for dying.

The story is told from her wandering "soul" self. She has to decide if life is worth fighting for. If she stays, what will her life be like? If she goes, what will death be like?

This is a heart-wrenching story. Mia's best friend, her boy friend, and her surviving extended family gather around her - all reasons to stay. In addition to the play-by-play from the soul self, we learn about what Mia's life was like before the accident: how she met her boyfriend, how her parents met and how they raised their children, how Mia's brother Teddy was more like her own child than her brother because they were so close. All of these details make us root for her to stay.

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

The Particular Sadness of Lemoncake

“The Particular Sadness of Lemoncake” is the story of Rose Edelstein and how, on her ninth birthday, she discovers she has the gift to taste what the person preparing the food she’s eating was feeling. Unfortunately, she discovers this on a day when her mother is making her a lemon cake for her birthday and Rose can taste the sadness and loneliness that her mother is feeling. From there it’s a coming-of-age story about Rose and her special gift as well as a story about a nuclear family: A father who is absent, a mother who is unsatisfied with the life she has chosen, and a brother who is struggling with his own unique talent.
Bender’s writing is superb and, as always, reminds the reader what magic writers do with words. Though the story is told in the vein of magical realism, don’t let this genre prevent you from giving it a try. At its heart it is a novel about discovery of self and what it means to be part of the world and part of a family, dysfunction and all.

Other books by Aimee Bender (which I also highly recommend):

An Invisible Sign of my Own(Now a movie starring Jessica Alba!)

Willful Creatures: Stories

The Girl in the Flammable Skirt: Stories

Room by Emma Donoghue

I actually didn't want this harrowing and amazing book to end. Briefly, Room the story of a young woman who was kidnapped and put into a small room in the back yard of her captor's house. Her son Jack was born in captivity and narrates the whole story as he sees it. All he knows is the room and the television. He believes what's on television is not real. Eventually they escape and surprisingly perhaps things become more difficult for both Ma and Jack. His personality is so intriguing as he starts experiencing the world outside of the confines of the 11' by 11' shed he calls room as is his desire to return their as if it's a womb. Ma's reaction is continually surprising. Michal Friedman's reading of Jack's voice is superb with all of his grammmatical quirks. Ma's voice is kind of flat sometimes but caring, frustrated, angry and tired at others There is a larger cast that adds to the audio experience.

These Things Hidden

These Things Hidden by Heather Gudenkauf
Adult New Book Display—Main Level—Gudenkauf


“These Things Hidden” is about four women, Charm, Claire, Allison Glenn, Brynn Glenn and the little boy they all have in common: five year old Joshua. The story follows 21 year old Allison as she is released from prison five years early after committing a heinous crime that will horrify and sadden you. Allison must adapt to life in her hometown of Linden Falls, Iowa. Linden Falls, Iowa is full of colorful characters but even the drug addicts look down on Allison and her crime, a crime that is no longer a secret. Brynn, Allison’s younger sister, wrestles with the emotions of the night that changed everyone’s lives and reconciling with her sister for what she has done to the family, a family that is now broken and cold. Gudenkauf has weaved a mystery that is not fully revealed until the last pages. She skillfully lets you think you know the whole story until finally the deep, dark secret is revealed. Though the story possesses many dark secrets and sad stories, Joshua and his mother give the reader warmth and hope that even in tragedy a miracle can happen. A real page turner that will keep you up all night finishing it, any fan of Jodi Picoult will be pleased.

Her Royal Spyness

Her Royal Spyness

by Rhys Bowen
Adult Mysteries - Main Level - Bowen

Lady Victoria Georgiana Charlotte Eugenie is 34th in line for the throne. Thanks to her deceased father's gambling habits, she's also completely broke. In a fit for independence, she leaves her brother and his wife's Scotland estate and heads to London. She wants to make it on her own and live a little, rather than succomb to marrying a horrible man she does not love.

Once in London, Georgie realizes that she must find a way to make a living. She tries a few different jobs under the cover of a fake name. She can't let Her Royal Highness find out she's - gasp! - working as a commoner! HRH has other plans for Georgie, including spying on the prince to see how serious he is about a married American woman who seems to have taken his fancy.

Georgie agrees. Suddenly, several "accidents" seem to happen to her! A Frenchman is found dead in her bathtub and she and her brother are suspects (the Frenchman was the benefactor in her father's gamble for their Scottish estate). Georgie falls off of a boat, dodges a poisoned sugar cube, and falls down a flight of stairs. Could these events be connected? Georgie must find out what is going on. And she does!

This is a cute little mystery that is a quick read. Recommended for anyone who likes cozy mysteries, chick lit, and female sleuths.

The Blue Jay’s Dance

The Blue Jay’s Dance by Louise Erdrich
Adult Non-fiction – Upper Level – 813.54 E

In this book, Erdrich, author of several novels focusing on Native Americans and prairie life, writes about the first year of her daughter’s life. Although she says the baby in the book is a composite of all three of her daughters, in the book it sounds like she is writing about the youngest of her three daughters. It’s poetic and reflective, honest about the difficulty of parenting a baby while at the same time stunningly beautiful. It doesn’t hurt that Erdrich lives in a cabin in the woods, and the baby’s stages are mixed in with large doses of the natural life outside their window and the woods through which they walk. She writes, as an example of the tough times, of how easy suicide seems after weeks of sleepless nights – only her self is so absorbed in the baby that she feels that she has no self of her own left to kill. On the plus side, she writes about breastfeeding, how many great romantic writers’ deep inarticulate longings were really for that feeling of unity and transcendence that nursing a baby brings. Despite the poetry and deep thoughts, the book is slim enough to get through easily, an important consideration for sleep-deprived new parents. The saddest part for me was knowing that the happy blended family described in this book fell apart just a few years later, giving the already fleeting pleasures of a baby and the changing of the seasons an even more ephemeral feeling.

Cinderella Ate My Daughter

Cinderella Ate My Daughter by Peggy Orenstein
New Book Shelves – Upper Level – 305.23 O

Why is pink the only color for girls these days? And why are girls of preschool age suddenly obsessed with Disney Princesses, in all their sparkly but bland glory? Journalist Orenstein sets out to investigate these questions in this fast-reading book which nevertheless has some good scholarly underpinnings. Many of the ideas are not new – the fine line, for example, between telling girls that they are pretty and that they need to be pretty. But Orenstein’s exploration gets everything nicely together in one place, and her personal explorations are entertaining. She talks to Disney executives and visits the American Girl store in Manhattan, noting the dichotomy between the affordable glitz of the Disney and the hugely expensive old-fashioned simplicity of American Girls. She visits the Toy Fair and talks with toy marketers who make everything in pink, and say they are just “honoring play patterns”. She visits child beauty pageants and talks to parents there. She reads unsanitized fairy tales to her daughter and watches for nightmares. The chapter “From Wholesome to Whoresome” examines the sad fate of former tween stars, following which she looks at the on-line culture and teens’ place in it. Parents of girls of all ages, she finds, will pay almost anything for the illusions of innocence and protection that are marketed in varying aspects to girls of all ages. Although many of the major arguments were familiar, I did learn some new and interesting if troubling facts: Kindergarten girls when asked to write a sentence in which they pretend to be something limit themselves to one of four choices: princess, fairy, ballerina or butterfly, where boys’ choices are much more varied. Toy choices, we know, seem quite hard-wired to gender, even across species, but there is nothing else but mate selection that is as tied to gender. I was really disturbed to read that recent studies asking teens and college girls about their sexual feelings have gotten answered with how the girls think they look to others. And while I knew that “tweens” as an age group was a recent invention of marketers to create a new market, I hadn’t realized that toddlerhood started the same way a century ago. There are more problems and pitfalls pointed out here than hard-and-fast solutions. I still hope for balance for my daughter and for other girls, for the confidence to be themselves, embracing aspects both traditionally feminine and masculine, and yet still to fit in well enough not be. This is well worth reading for parents and anyone else interested in modern girls.

Before I Fall

Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver
Teen Zone New Fiction- Main Level– OLIVER

Sam Kingston appears to have it all. She is popular, has great friends and the perfect boyfriend. She is excited for Cupid Day at school; after all the more roses you receive the more popular you are. Once the school day is done Sam hangs out with her three best friends. The girls are preparing for a big party and Sam is ready for an unforgettable night with her boyfriend. Little did neither she nor anyone else know that tonight things will forever change. The last thing that Sam expects is that she will die. The last moment she remembers is hearing screeching noises and shattering glass. Then Sam suddenly wakes up and realizes it is Cupid Day all over again. She actually relives Cupid Day seven times. At first she thought being dead had its advantages because what else could happen that would make the situation worse? Each time that Sam relives Cupid Day she learns something new and she realizes what needs to be done before she can move on. Before I Fall is a moving story about a young women who realized how she needs to change and become a better person in order to move on.