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Reviews

Reviews

by Robert Kurson - Adventure, History, Nonfiction

Finding and identifying a pirate ship is the hardest thing to do under the sea. But two men --- John Chatterton and John Mattera --- are willing to risk everything to find the Golden Fleece, the ship of the infamous pirate Joseph Bannister. Soon, however, they realize that cutting-edge technology and a willingness to lose everything aren’t enough to track down Bannister’s ship. They must travel the globe in search of historic documents and accounts of the great pirate’s exploits, face down dangerous rivals, and battle the tides of nations, governments and experts.

by Annie Barrows - Fiction, Historical Fiction

In the summer of 1938, Layla Beck’s father, a United States senator, cuts off her allowance and demands that she find employment on the Federal Writers’ Project, a New Deal jobs program. Within days, Layla has been assigned to cover the history of the remote mill town of Macedonia, West Virginia. But once she secures a room in the home of the unconventional Romeyn family, she is drawn into their complex world and soon discovers that the truth of the town is entangled in the thorny past of the Romeyn dynasty.

by Judy Blume - Fiction

Judy Blume takes us back to the 1950s and introduces us to the town of Elizabeth, New Jersey, where she herself grew up. Here she imagines and weaves together a vivid portrait of three generations of families, friends and strangers, whose lives are profoundly changed during one winter. At the center of an extraordinary cast of characters are 15-year-old Miri Ammerman and her spirited single mother, Rusty. Their warm and resonant stories are set against the backdrop of a real-life tragedy that struck the town when a series of airplanes fell from the sky, leaving the community reeling.

by Sophie McKenzie - Fiction, Psychological Suspense, Psychological Thriller, Suspense, Thriller

Livy arrives at her best friend Julia's flat for a lunch date only to find her dead. Though all the evidence supports it, Livy cannot accept the official ruling of suicide. The suspicious circumstances cause Livy to dig further, and she is suddenly forced to confront a horrifying possibility: that Julia was murdered, by the same man who killed Livy's sister, Kara, 18 years ago. When Livy finally faces her sister's killer, and he traps her with one horrible, impossible choice, she must finally decide: Is she strong enough to trust herself?

by Sally Mann - Memoir, Nonfiction, Photography

In HOLD STILL, a unique interplay of narrative and image, Sally Mann's preoccupation with family, race, mortality and the storied landscape of the American South are revealed as almost genetically predetermined, written into her DNA by the family history that precedes her. In lyrical prose and startlingly revealing photographs, she crafts a totally original form of personal history that has the page-turning drama of a great novel but is firmly rooted in the fertile soil of her own life.

by David McCullough - History, Nonfiction

On a winter day in 1903, in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, two unknown brothers from Ohio changed history. But it would take the world some time to believe what had happened: the age of flight had begun, with the first heavier-than-air, powered machine carrying a pilot. Who were these men, and how was it that they achieved what they did? David McCullough, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, tells the surprising, profoundly American story of Wilbur and Orville Wright.

by Jon Krakauer - Nonfiction, True Crime

Jon Krakauer chronicles the searing experiences of several women in Missoula --- the nights when they were raped; their fear and self-doubt in the aftermath; the way they were treated by the police, prosecutors and defense attorneys; the public vilification and private anguish; their bravery in pushing forward and what it cost them. Krakauer’s dispassionate, carefully documented account of what these ladies endured cuts through the abstract ideological debate about campus rape.

by Ann Packer - Fiction

Bill Blair finds the land by accident, three wooded acres in a rustic community south of San Francisco, and buys the property on a whim. In Penny Greenway he finds a suitable wife, and they marry and have four kids. Thirty years later, the three oldest Blair children, now adults and still living near the family home, are disrupted by the return of the youngest, whose sudden presence and all-too-familiar troubles force a reckoning with who they are, separately and together, and set off a struggle over the family’s future.

by Keija Parssinen - Fiction, Psychological Suspense, Psychological Thriller, Suspense, Thriller

Mercy Louis, the star of the championship girls’ basketball team, seems destined for greatness, but the road out of town is riddled with obstacles. At the periphery of her world floats team manager Illa Stark, who is spellbound by Mercy’s beauty and talent. But a note discovered in Mercy’s gym locker reveals that her life may not be as perfect as it appears. The last day of school brings the disturbing discovery, and as summer unfolds and the police investigate, every girl becomes a suspect.

by Mary Louise Kelly - Fiction, Suspense, Thriller

In a split second, everything Caroline Cashion has known is proved to be a lie. A single bullet is found lodged at the base of her skull. Caroline is stunned. She has never been shot. Then, over the course of one awful evening, she learns the truth: that she was adopted when she was three years old after her real parents were murdered. She was wounded too, a gunshot to the neck. Surgeons had stitched up the traumatized little girl, with the bullet still there. Now, Caroline has to find the truth of her past.