Bridal Shops and CSI

The Magic Room: A Story about the Love We Wish for Our Daughters by Jeffrey Zaslow
Thousands of women have stepped inside Becker's Bridal in Fowler, Michigan, to try on their dream dresses in the Magic Room, a special space with soft lighting, a circular pedestal, and mirrors that carry a bride's reflection into infinity. The women bring with them their most precious expectations about romance, love, fidelity, permanence, and tradition. Each bride who passes through has a story to tell--one that carried her there, to that dress, that room, that moment. Illuminating the poignant aspects of a woman's journey to the altar, The Magic Room, tells the stories of memorable women on the brink of commitment.

Mr. CSI: How a Vegas Dreamer Made a Killing in Hollywood, One Body at a Time by Anthony Zuiker
In 1990, Anthony Zuiker was just another Hollywood wannabe--a balding, overweight guy driving a tram in Las Vegas for eight bucks an hour, telling his friends about the screenplay he was writing, dreaming of fame. He'd grown up in Vegas, where his mother worked the blackjack table at a casino, while his father flitted back and forth from investment schemes that didn't seem to go anywhere. His friends figured Anthony wouldn't either. But twenty years later, Zuiker stands as the mastermind behind the most popular television show in history, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, and its spin-offs: CSI: Miami and CSI: NY. How he got there--a remarkable rise from nothing to something--is the narrative lifeblood of Mr. CSI.

Teen Pick of the Week: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith
Indiana , 1818. Moonlight falls through the dense woods that surround a one-room cabin, where a nine-year-old Abraham Lincoln kneels at his suffering mother's bedside. She's been stricken with something the old-timers call "Milk Sickness." Only later will the grieving Abe learn that his mother's fatal affliction was actually the work of a vampire. Gifted with his legendary height, strength, and skill with an ax, Abe sets out on a path of vengeance that will lead him all the way to the White House.

Click on the title to place it on hold at the Ventress Memorial Library!

Read a great teen book recently? Want to recommend it as Teen Pick of the Week? Email me!

New Fiction

Lucky Break by Esther Freud
It is their first day at Drama Arts, and the nervous students huddled in a circle are told in no uncertain terms that here, unlike at lesser drama schools, they will be taught to Act. To Be. To exist in their own world on the stage. But outside in the real world--a pitiless, alluring place in which each of them, in their most fervent dreams, hopes to flourish and excel. Nell, insecure and dumpy, wonders if she will ever be cast as anything other than the maid. She's never compete, she knows, with the multitude of confident, long-legged beauties thronging the profession--most notably Charlie, whose effortless ascendance is nothing less than she expects for herself. Meanwhile, Dan, ambitious and serious, has his sights set on the role of Hamlet, as well as on the fiery, rebellious Jemma.

Ghost Lights by Lydia Millet
An IRS bureaucrat named Hal is a man baffled by his wife's obsession with her young employer, T., and haunted by the accident that paralyzed his daughter, Casey. In a moment of drunken heroism, Hal embarks on a quest to find T. who has vanished in the jungle. On his trip to Central America, Hal embroils himself in a surreal tropical adventure, descending into strange and unpredictable terrain (and an unexpected affair with a beguiling German woman).

Something Borrowed by Emily Giffin
Rachel White is the consummate good girl. A hard-working attorney at a large Manhattan law firm and a diligent maid of honor to her charmed best friend Darcy, Rachel has always played by all the rules. Since grade school, she has watched Darcy shine, quietly accepting the sidekick role in their lopsided friendship. But that suddenly changes the night of her thirtieth birthday when Rachel finally confesses her feelings to Darcy's fiance, and is both horrified and thrilled to discover he feels the same way. As the wedding date draws near, events spiral out of control, and Rachel knows she must make a choice between her heart and conscience.

Teen Pick of the Week: Dear Bully

Dear Bully: 70 Authors Tell Their Stories edited by Megan Kelley Hall and Carrie Jones
Discover how Lauren Kate transformed the feeling of that one mean girl getting under her skin into her first novel, how Lauren Oliver learned to celebrate ambiguity in her classmates and in herself, and how R.L. Stine turned being the "funny guy" into the best defense against the bullies in his class. Today's top authors for teens come together to share their stories about bullying--as silent observers on the sidelines of high school, as victims, and as perpetrators--in a collection at turns moving and self-effacing, but always deeply personal.


Click on the title to place it on hold at the Ventress Memorial Library!

Read a great teen book recently? Want to recommend it as Teen Pick of the Week? Email me!

New Biographies!

Gabby: A Story of Courage and Hope by Gabrielle Giffords & Mark Kelly
As individuals, congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and her husband, astronaut Mark Kelly, showed Americans how optimism, an adventurous spirit, and a call to service can help change the world. As a couple, they became a national example of the healing power found in deeply shared love and courage. Their arrival in the world spotlight came under the worst of circumstances. On January 8, 2011, while meeting with her constituents in Tucson, Arizona, Gabby was the victim of an assassination attempt that left six people dead and thirteen wounded. Gabby was shot in the head; doctors called her survival "miraculous."

No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington by Condeleezza Rice
From one of the world's most admired women, this is former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State Condeleezza Rice's compelling story of eight years serving at the highest levels of government. In her position as America's chief diplomat, Rice traveled almost continuously around the globe, seeking common ground among sometimes bitter enemies, forging agreement on divisive issues, and compiling a remarkable record of achievement.

Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin
When Charles Dickens died in 1870, The Times of London successfully campaigned for his burial in Westminster Abbey, where thousands flocked to mourn the best recognized and loved man of nineteenth-century England. His books had made them laugh, shown them squalor and greed of English life and also the power of personal virtue and the strength of ordinary people--through the likes of David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Little Nell, and many more. In his last years Dickens drew adoring crowds to his public appearances, had met presidents and princes and he had amassed a fortune.

Teen Pick of the Week: The Adoration of Jenna Fox

The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E. Pearson
Seventeen-year-old Jenna has been told that is her name. She has just awoken from a year-long coma, and she's still recovering from the terrible accident that caused it. Her parents show her home movies of her life, her memories, but she has no recollection. Is she really the same girl she sees on the screen? Little by little, Jenna begins to remember. Along with the memories come questions--questions no one wants to answer for her. What really happened after the accident?

Click on the title to place it on hold at the Ventress Memorial Library!

Read a great teen book recently? Want to recommend it as Teen Pick of the Week? Email me!

Black Friday, Midwives, and Vonnegut

Soft Target by Stephen Hunter
Black Friday. America's largest shopping mall. Suburban Minneapolis. 3:00P.M.
Ten thousand people jam the aisles, the corridors, the elevators, and the escalators of America, the Mall--a giant Rubik's Cube of a structure with its own amusement park located in the spacious center atrium. Of those people, nine thousand nine hundred and eighty-eight have come to shop. The other twelve have come to kill.

Maria by Eugenia Price
Born in Charles Town, South Carolina, Mary, a skilled midwife, accompanied her first husband, British soldier David Fenwick, when his regiment fought the Spanish in Cuba. When Spain agreed to give all of Florida in exchange for the city of Havana, Mary (who will become known as Maria) and her husband were forced to relocate to the newly British garrison town of St. Augustine, Florida.

And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life by Charles J. Shields
Kurt Vonnegut remains one of the most influential, controversial, and popular novelists of the twentieth century. Millions know him as a counterculture guru, antiwar activist, and satirist of American culture. But few outside his family and friends knew the full arc of his extraordinary life.

Teen Pick of the Week: The Walking Dead

The Walking Dead: Volume 14 No Way Out by Robert Kirkman
The world we knew is gone. The world of commerce and frivolous necessity has been replaced by a world of survival and responsibility. An epidemic of apocalyptic proportions has swept the globe, causing the dead to rise and feed on the living. In a matter of months society has crumbled, no goverment, no grocery stores, no mail delivery, no cable TV. In a world ruled by the dead, we are forced to finally start living.

Want to start this series in the beginning? Check out The Walking Dead: Volume 1 Days Gone Bye.

Click on the titles to place them on hold at the Ventress Memorial Library!

Read a great teen book recently? Want to recommend it as Teen Pick of the Week? Email me!

Detectives and Saints

The Drop by Michael Connelly
Harry Bosch is facing the end of the line. He's been put on the DROP -- the Deferred Retirement Option Plan -- and given three years before he must retire from the LAPD. Seeing the end of the mission coming, Bosch wants cases more fiercely than ever, and in one morning he gets two. Relentlessly pursuing both cases, which are interwoven like the double helix of a DNA strand, Bosch makes two chilling discoveries: a sadistic killer operating unknown in the city for more than two decades, and a political conspiracy going back into the dark history of the police department.

Queen of America by Luis Alberto Urrea
After the bloody Tomochic rebellion of 1892, young Teresita Urrea, beloved healer and "Saint of Cabora," escapes with her father to Arizona. But besieged by pilgrims in desperate need of her healing powers and pursued by assassins sent by Mexican dictator Porfinrio Diaz, she has no choice but to flee the borderlands and embark on an extraordinary journey into the heart of turn-of-the-century America. Teresita's passage will take her to New York, San Francisco, and St. Louis, where she will encounter European royalty, Cuban poets, beauty queens, anxious immigrants, and grand tycoons--among them, a man who will force Teresita to finally ask herself the ultimate question: is a saint allowed to fall in love?

Click on the titles to place them on hold at the Ventress Memorial Library!