Staff Picks

This book is a surprising mix of sweet and steamy romance.

 

Publisher's description:

Stella Lane thinks math is the only thing that unites the universe. She comes up with algorithms to predict customer purchases--a job that has given her more money than she knows what to do with, and way less experience in the dating department than the average thirty-year-old. It doesn't help that Stella has Asperger's and French kissing reminds her of a shark getting its teeth cleaned by pilot fish. Her conclusion: she needs lots of practice--with a professional. Which is why she hires escort Michael Phan. The Vietnamese and Swedish stunner can't afford to turn down Stella's offer, and agrees to help her check off all the boxes on her lesson plan--from foreplay to more-than-missionary position.... Before long, Stella not only learns to appreciate his kisses, but crave all of the other things he's making her feel. Their no-nonsense partnership starts making a strange kind of sense. And the pattern that emerges will convince Stella that love is the best kind of logic.

 

This book left me searching the depths of my subconscious for the shape of my soul--cat? phoenix? naked mole rat? I still haven't found it. But the narrative voice smoothly evolves from the perspective of a young girl to that of a young woman, and this main character, Ari, is so engaging that she distracts you from her horrific backstory. I was more than happy to float alongside her seahorse self through a story that evolved the ways I look at myself, at others, and at love.

 

Publisher's description: Follows one woman from her tumultuous childhood through the 1960's sexual revolution and drug culture.

 

Last year, Colorado author Vauhini Vara's debut novel The Immortal King Rao captivated readers and became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Hear her speak this Friday at JLF Colorado, then don't miss her haunting new story collection coming next week. Publisher's Weekly gives it a starred review, saying, "Vara invigorates with emotional insights, whimsy, and a precision with language. It’s a remarkable achievement."

 

Publisher's description:

Pushing intimacy to its limits in prose of unearthly beauty, Vauhini Vara explores the nature of being a child, parent, friend, sibling, neighbor, or lover, and the relationships between self and others. A young girl reads the encyclopedia to her elderly neighbor, who is descending into dementia. A pair of teenagers seek intimacy as phone-sex operators. A competitive sibling tries to rise above the drunken mess of her own life to become a loving aunt. One sister consumes the ashes of another. And, in the title story, an experimental artist takes on his most ambitious project yet: constructing a life-size ark according to the Bible's specifications. In a world defined by estrangement, where is communion to be found? The characters in This Is Salvaged, unmoored in turbulence, are searching fervently for meaning, through one another.

 

A tender memoir of the author's life growing up in an apocalyptic doomsday cult based in the mountains of the Angeles National Forest. Experiencing a contradictory existence, Michelle begins to question the relationship between man and nature as she knows it thanks to her mastery of the local flora.

 

Publisher description:

A moving, heartbreaking, and inspiring true story of the author's escape from an apocalyptic cult--and the deep understanding of the natural world that helped her find freedom.

My family prepared me for the end of the world, but I know how to survive on what the earth yields. Michelle Dowd grew up on a mountain in the Angeles National Forest, born into an ultra-religious cult--the Field, as members called it--run by her grandfather, who believed that his chosen followers must prepare themselves to survive doomsday. Bound by the group's patriarchal rules and literal interpretation of the Bible, Michelle and her siblings lived a life of deprivation, isolated from Outsiders and starved for both love and food. She was forced to learn the skills necessary to battle hunger, thirst, and cold; she learned to trust animals more than humans; and most important, she learned how to survive by foraging for what she needed. And as Michelle got older, she realized she had the strength to break free. Focus on what will sustain, not satiate you, she would tell herself. Use everything. Waste nothing. Get to know the intricacies of the land like the intricacies of your body. And so she did. With haunting and stark language, and illustrations of edible plants and their uses opening each chapter, Forager is a fierce and empowering coming-of-age story and a timely meditation on the ways in which harnessing nature's gifts can lead to our freedom.

Find Forager in our online catalog

Comyns' writing is utterly unique and so good, and fortunately, much of her work has recently been rediscovered and republished. Our Spoons Came from Woolworths is quirky, sharp-witted, and darkly funny, all with a fairytale ending. I want to read everything she has written.

 

Publisher's description: I told Helen my story and she went home and cried" begins Our Spoons Came from Woolworths. But Barbara Comyns's beguiling novel is far from maudlin, despite the ostensibly harrowing ordeals its heroine endures. Sophia is twenty-one when she marries fellow artist Charles, and she seems to have nearly as much affection for her pet newt as she does for her husband. Her housekeeping knowledge is lacking (everything she cooks tastes of soap) and she attributes her morning sickness to a bad batch of strawberries. England is in the middle of the Great Depression, and in any case, the money Sophia earns at her occasional modeling gigs are not enough to make up for her husband's lack of interest in keeping the heat on. Predictably, the marriage begins to falter; not so predictably, Sophia's optimistic guilelessness is the very thing responsible for turning her life around

 

If you enjoy Shakespeare and plays, this book is for you! M. L. Rio's book If We Were Villains is an intriguing mystery surrounding a group of students/actors at the Dellecher Shakespeare Conservatory, and explores what happens when roles and power dynamics are switched. Following the character Oliver Marks, the reader is given a story of tragic events that turns the group upside down alongside his perspective ten years later. Unlike many other books, chapters are structured alike to a play, and the characters often use lines from scenes that mirror their real world problems. This book's unique characteristics and plot definitely makes it worth reading!  

- Altea, twelfth-grade teen volunteer 

Publisher's description: 

Entreated to tell his side of the story to a detective who put him in prison a decade earlier for a murder he may not have committed, Oliver describes his past as a Shakespearean actor whose rivalry with a castmate escalated in dangerous ways. 

Find If We Were Villains in the library's online catalog. 

A contemporary novel that sticks with you. Treads the line between comedy and horror. 

 

Publisher's description:

The story of a woman on the run from catastrophe, searching for love, home, healing, a swimming pool, and perhaps someone who can stop the bleeding from her head.