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Cover ArtOh, Top Story from the Front Desk series by Kelly Yang is so good! It's like the perfect mix of funny, heartwarming, and dealing with real stuff. If you loved Front Desk, you'll totally love this one, too. The main character, Mia Tang, is super relatable and inspiring. She’s super smart and works so hard, and she always stands up for what’s right, even when it’s hard. What makes Top Story even cooler is how it talks about big things like racism, fighting for justice, and learning how to speak up for yourself, but it still feels like an adventure. You really root for Mia the whole time!
 
Publisher's description:
Mia Tang is at the top of her game. She's spending winter break with Mom, Lupe, Jason, and Hank in San Francisco's Chinatown! Rich with history and hilarious aunties and uncles, it's the place to find a great story--one she hopes to publish while attending journalism camp at the Tribune. But this trip has as many bumps as the hills of San Francisco . . .
 
01/04/2025
Boulder Library
Cover ArtA long engrossing read. Steeped in the unspoken trauma of an Irish family, with each chapter switching between these complicated characters' narratives.  The book's pace is ingenious as the chapters get progressively shorter until the tension feels explosive   A deep rather than feel good read.
 
Publisher's description:
The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie's once-lucrative car business is going under--but rather than face the music, he's spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife Imelda is selling off her jewelry on eBay, while their teenage daughter Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge-drink her way through her final exams. And twelve-year-old PJ is putting the final touches to his grand plan to run away from home. Where did it all go wrong? A patch of ice on the tarmac, a casual favor to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil--can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life? And if the story has already been written--is there still time to find a happy ending?
 
Cover ArtA beautiful novel about dealing with mental illness in a way we care for all the characters. An engaging love story that was hard to put down.
 
Publisher's description:
Martha Friel just turned forty. Once, she worked at Vogue and planned to write a novel. Now, she creates internet content. She used to live in a pied-à-terre in Paris. Now she lives in a gated community in Oxford, the only person she knows without a PhD, a baby or both, in a house she hates but cannot bear to leave. But she must leave, now that her husband Patrick--the kind who cooks, throws her birthday parties, who loves her and has only ever wanted her to be happy--has just moved out. And she has nowhere to go except her childhood home: a bohemian (dilapidated) townhouse in a romantic (rundown) part of London--to live with her mother, a minorly important sculptor (and major drinker) and her father, a famous poet (though unpublished) and try to survive without the devoted, potty-mouthed sister who made all the chaos bearable back then, and is now too busy or too fed up to deal with her. But maybe, by starting over, Martha will get to write a better ending for herself--and she'll find out that she's not quite finished after all.
 
Find Sorrow and Bliss in our online catalog
Cover ArtI adored this book! Each character's voice is so distinct, there is excellent character development, and I laughed out loud continuously. While this is a hilarious book, there is also a serious and sweet side to it, so saddle up for an entertaining ride! The sequel, Guncle Abroad, just came out too!
 
Publisher’s description:

When Patrick, or Gay Uncle Patrick (GUP) for short, takes on the role of primary guardian for his young niece and nephew, he sets “Guncle Rules,” but soon learn that parenting isn’t solved with treats or jokes as his eyes are opened to a new sense of responsibility.

Find The Guncle in our online catalog

 
Cover ArtThis coming of age novel weaves together the stories of three young men in a powerful narrative. We travel to different time periods when each of the characters is at the cusp of becoming a man. In 1968, there is the raw emotion from the journal of the young Marine, William, stationed in the bush in Vietnam; In 1979, the impact on Vincent working a construction site with two Vietnam vets; and in 2016, the ability of Vincent's son to deal with life's unpredictability. An emotional book that is hard to put down.
 
Publisher's description: 
In 1979, Vincent Bianco has just graduated high school. His only desire: collect a little beer money and enjoy his final summer before college. So he lands a job as a laborer on a construction crew. Working alongside two Vietnam vets, one suffering from PTSD, Vincent gets the education of a lifetime. Now forty years later, with his own son leaving for college, the lessons of that summer--Vincent's last taste of innocence and first taste of real life--dramatically unfold in a novel about breaking away, shaping a life, and seeking one's own destiny.
 
Cover ArtLove Songs is an unapologetically Black, feminist (womanist) novel; it is also an American novel. Ailey Pearl Garfield is a scholar, a feminist, a survivor of childhood sexual trauma, an historian, a girl, is of Indigenous, white, and Black heritage, and has impeccable home training. Spending the majority of this book's 879 pages with her is so delightful. And, though I cried several times during this book, I also cried because it was over. This gift of a book is pedagogical. It helped me to see the flaws in racial assumptions that I didn't even know I possessed. I can't wait to read this one again.
 
Publisher's description: To come to terms with who she is and what she wants, Ailey, the daughter of an accomplished doctor and a strict schoolteacher, embarks on a journey through her family's past, helping her embrace her full heritage, which is the story of the Black experience in itself.
 
Cover ArtSome tense, racist moments in this story of a factory town and its inhabitants. We are reminded that no matter the race or the economic status, all families struggle and love endures. It was also a deep dive into seasons in small-town Ohio, beautifully described.
 
Publisher's description:
Set in failing small town in central Ohio, [this novel] asks how one manages, in an America of increasing division, to find a sense of family and community. [It focuses] on the members of three families: the Baileys, a white family who have put down deep roots in the community; the Marwats, an immigrant family that owns the town's largest employer; and the Shaws, especially young Anthony, an outsider whose very presence gently shakes the town's understanding of itself.
 
Cover Art
As an award-winning journalist for an online magazine, British Nigerian author Adegoke experienced the #MeToo movement firsthand. Her new novel complicates the initially simple narrative, interrogating the ethics of the movement and the potential weaponization of anonymous internet accusations.
 
Publisher's description:

Recommended by The New York Times - Vogue - People - NPR - Cosmopolitan - Rolling Stone - Publishers Weekly - The Sunday Times - and many more!

In this sensational, page-turning debut novel, a high-profile female journalist's world is upended when her fiancé's name turns up in a viral social media post--a nuanced, daring, and timely exploration of the real-world impact of online life, from award-winning journalist and internationally bestselling author Yomi Adegoke.

Ola Olajide, a celebrated journalist at Womxxxn magazine, is set to marry the love of her life in one month's time. Young, beautiful, and successful--she and her fiancé Michael are considered the "couple goals" of their social network and seem to have it all. That is, until one morning when they both wake up to the same message: "Oh my god, have you seen The List?"

It began as a crowdsourced collection of names and somehow morphed into an anonymous account posting allegations on social media. Ola would usually be the first to support such a list--she'd retweet it, call for the men to be fired, write article after article. Except this time, Michael's name is on it.

Compulsively readable, wildly entertaining, and filled with sharp social insight, The List is a piercing and dazzlingly clear-sighted debut about secrets, lies, and the internet. Perfect for fans of Such a Fun Age, Luster, and My Dark Vanessa, this is a searing portrait of these modern times and our morally complicated online culture.

Find The List in our online catalog.

Cover ArtLast 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.
 
Cover ArtComyns' 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
 
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