Staff Picks

Finally, a rom com with a real science-Lord-of-the-Rings heroine who really does talk science in an intelligent and engaging way. If you're a perennial romance reader, this one viewpoint narrative will be a breath of fresh air...especially if you like your protagonists tall, punny, and endearing.

 

Publisher's description:

A geeky, brilliant, cosmetic chemist, Anna Ellis, to win over Craig Kimball, the man of her dreams--and her boss--starts fake dating Craig's half-brother Marco, with whom Craig is super competitive, as an experiment in attraction, until her feelings for Marco become all-too real.

 

A teenage girl living on a Midwest farming conglomerate watches helplessly as her mother saves and falls in love with a menacing crane. This futuristic take on the famous Japanese folktale explores domestic violence in all of its hideous forms and expressions and the destruction left in its wake.

 

Publisher's description:

A fifteen-year-old teenager is the backbone of her small Midwestern family, budgeting the household finances and raising her younger brother while her mother, a talented artist, weaves beautiful tapestries. For six years, it's been just the three of them--her mother has brought home guests at times, but none have ever stayed. Yet when her mother brings home a six-foot tall crane with a menacing air, the girl is powerless to prevent her mom letting the intruder into her heart, and her children's lives. Utterly enchanted and numb to his sharp edges, her mother abandons the world around her to weave the masterpiece the crane demands.

 

I absolutely ADORED this!!!! It was so sweet and cute and lovely. I loved the concept, a grandmother and granddaughter switching lives, and it was executed so well. This author, who also wrote another favorite of mine, The Flatshare, has a specific British whimsy that I just LOVE. I loved the romance and the side characters and the plot turns. I only wanted MORE. I definitely cried at the ending, because it was so touching and because it was over! That's a sign of a good book.

 

Publisher's description: After Leena and Eileen, her seventy-nine year old grandmother, decide to switch homes for two months, they each discover that love can be found in the most unlikely places.

 

A retelling of an Athabascan Indian legend that has been passed down through generations. I loved this book. It is a great inspirational survival story.

 

Publisher's description:

Based on an Athabascan Indian legend passed along from mother to daughter for many generations on the upper Yukon River in Alaska, this is the tragic and shocking story-with a surprise ending-of two elderly women abandoned by a migrating tribe that faces starvation brought on by unusually harsh Arctic weather and a shortage of fish and game. This story of survival is told with suspense by Velma Wallis, whose subject matter challenges the taboos of her past. Yet, her themes are modern-empowerment of women, the graying of America, Native American ways.

 

This book about breathing was so engaging. The author takes us on his own journey about helping himself to breathe better. He shows us the ways in which our lives can be improved by breathing properly and provides the history behind so many breathing issues. Breathing is so much more than our nose, it is the structure of our mouths, the changes that happened to our bone structure from diet, orthodontist practice. I appreciated the author's exercises about ways to improve our own breathing and have been constantly practicing to "shut my mouth" and breath through my nose.

 

Publisher's description: 

No matter what you eat, how much you exercise, how resilient your genes are, how skinny or young or wise you are, none of it matters if you're not breathing properly. There is nothing more essential to our health and wellbeing than breathing: take air in, let it out, repeat 25,000 times a day. Yet, as a species, humans have lost the ability to breathe correctly, with grave consequences. Science journalist James Nestor travels the world to figure out what went wrong with our breathing and how to fix it. Why are we the only animals with chronically crooked teeth? Why didn't our ancestors snore? Nestor seeks out answers in muddy digs of ancient burial sites, secret Soviet facilities, New Jersey choir schools, and the smoggy streets of Sao Paulo, Brazil. He tracks down men and women exploring the science behind ancient breathing practices like Pranayama, Sudarshan Kriya, and Tummo and teams up with pulmonary tinkerers to scientifically test long-held beliefs about how we breathe. Modern research is showing us that changing the ways in which we breathe can jump-start athletic performance, halt snoring, rejuvenate internal organs, mute allergies and asthma, blunt autoimmune disease, and straighten scoliotic spines. None of this should be possible, and yet it is. Drawing on thousands of years of medical texts and recent cutting-edge studies in pulmonology, psychology, biochemistry, and human physiology, Breath turns the conventional wisdom of what we thought we knew about our most basic biological function on its head. You will never breathe the same again.

 

 

A deliciously creepy horror anthology that focuses on Black experiences but has a little something spooky for everyone. This collection brought so many new authors to my attention, scared me in a ton of different ways, and reminded me how great Jordan Peele is!

 

Publisher description:
A cop begins seeing huge, blinking eyes where the headlights of cars should be that tell him who to pull over. Two freedom riders take a bus ride that leaves them stranded on a lonely road in Alabama where several unsettling somethings await them. A young girl dives into the depths of the Earth in search of the demon that killed her parents. These are just a few of the worlds of Out There Screaming, Jordan Peele's anthology of all-new horror stories by Black writers.

 

Sweet, funny, and quite spicy, this rom com from Meghan Quinn will warm your heart.

 

Publisher's description: From USA Today bestselling author and the author of the bestselling romantic comedy A Not So Meet Cute, comes a brand new hockey romance about a wayward traveler falling in love with her ex-boyfriend's half-brother. Steamy and unapologetically witty.

 

Set in the Prohibition era, follow Buddy and his friend as they save up to make fruitcake to give as gifts (even buying whisky from a bootlegger called Haha); they even send one to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Family, tradition, and memory make this story timeless and heartwarming.

 

Publisher's description:

Taking its place next to Breakfast at Tiffany's and In Cold Blood on the Modern Library bookshelf is this new and original edition of Capote's most famous short stories: "A Christmas Memory", "One Christmas", and "A Thanksgiving Memory". All three stories are distinguished by Capote's delicate interplay of childhood sensibility and recollective vision.

 

Find A Christmas Memory in our online catalog.

This was really, really good. Incredibly gripping, gritty, and captivating. I read it in about three days, which definitely helped get me out of a reading slump. Lots of great content about women, men, addiction, obsession, and more. This is a showstopping literary addition to the "unhinged millennial woman" genre, adding Nolan's name to the list of contemporary greats like Ottessa Moshfegh, Sally Rooney, and Melissa Broder.

Publisher's description: 

In the first scene of this provocative gut-punch of a novel, our unnamed narrator meets a magnetic writer named Ciaran and falls, against her better judgment, completely in his power. After a brief, all-consuming romance he abruptly rejects her, sending her into a tailspin of jealous obsession and longing. If he ever comes back to her, she resolves to hang onto him and his love at all costs, even if it destroys her.

 

Immerse yourself in the lush and rugged Colorado wilderness on a sweeping epic of love and fate. Using local history and personal narratives, Colorado author Shelly Read tells the story of a woman from the now-flooded town of Iola, CO, and follows her in her quest for truth and answers.

 

Publisher description:

Seventeen-year-old Victoria Nash runs the household on her family's peach farm in the small ranch town of Iola, Colorado--the sole surviving female in a family of troubled men. Wilson Moon is a young drifter with a mysterious past, displaced from his tribal land and determined to live as he chooses. Victoria encounters Wil by chance on a street corner, a meeting that profoundly alters both of their young lives, unknowingly igniting as much passion as danger. When tragedy strikes, Victoria leaves the only life she has ever known. She flees into the surrounding mountains where she struggles to survive in the wilderness with no clear notion of what her future will bring.

 

Find Go as a River in our online catalog