Oprah's Newest Pick!

The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Ayana Mathis

Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 picked this book earlier in the month as her new pick. In a statement, Ms. Winfrey likened Ms. Mathis’s book to the fiction of Toni Morrison.  

 In 1923, fifteen-year-old Hattie Shepherd flees Georgia and settles in Philadelphia, hoping for a chance at a better life. Instead, she marries a man who will bring her nothing but disappointment and watches helplessly as her firstborn twins succumb to an illness a few pennies could have prevented.  Hattie gives birth to nine more children whom she raises with grit and mettle and not an ounce of the tenderness they crave.  She vows to prepare them for the calamitous difficulty they are sure to face in their later lives, to meet a world that will not love them, a world that will not be kind. Captured here in twelve luminous narrative threads, their lives tell the story of a mother’s monumental courage and the journey of a nation.

Teen Pick of the Week: Finale

Finale by Becca Fitzpatrick

Nora and Patch thought their troubles were behind them. Hank is gone and they should be able to put his ugly vendetta to rest. But in Hank's absence, Nora has become the unwitting head of the Nephilim and must finish what Hank began. Which ultimately mean destroying the fallen angels--destroying Patch. Nora will never let that happen, so she and Patch make a plan; lead everyone to believe they have broken up, and work the system from the inside. But the best-laid plans often go awry. Nora is put through the paces in her new role and finds herself drawn to an addictive power she never anticipated. As the battle lines are drawn, Nora and Patch must confront the differences that have always been between them and either choose to ignore them or let them destroy the love they have always fought for.

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

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Friends, Family, and Movies based on books

The Red Book by Deborah Copaken Kogan
Clover, Addison, Mia, and Jane were roommates at Harvard until their graduation in 1989. Clover, home-schooled on a commune by mixed-race parents, felt woefully out of place. Addison yearned to shed the burden of her Mayflower heritage. Mia mined the depths of her suburban ennui to enact brilliant performances on the Harvard stage. Jane, an adopted Vietnamese war orphan, made sense of her fractured world through words. Twenty years later, their lives are in free fall. Like all Harvard grads, they've kept abreast of one another via the red book, a class report published every five years, containing brief autobiographical essays by fellow alumni. But there's the story we tell the world, and then there's the real story, as these former classmates will learn during their twentieth reunion weekend, when they arrive with their families, their histories, their dashed dreams, and their secret yearnings to a relationship-changing, score-settling, unforgettable weekend.

Finding Casey by Jo-Ann Mapson
Glory Vigil, newly married and unexpectedly pregnant at forty-one, is nesting in the home she and her husband, Joseph, have just moved into in Santa Fe, a house--that unknown to them--is rumored to have a resident ghost. Their adopted daughter, Juniper, is home from college for Thanksgiving and in love for the very first time, quickly learning how a relationship changes everything. But Juniper has a tiny arrow lodged in her heart, a left-over shard from the day eight years earlier when her sister, Casey, disappeared--in a time before she ever met Glory and Joseph. When a fieldwork course takes Juniper to a pueblo only a few hours away, she finds herself right back in the past she thought she'd finally buried.

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
A postmodern visionary who is also a master of styles and genres, David Mitchell combines flat-out adventure, a Nabokovian love of puzzles, a keen eye for character, and a taste for mind-bending philosophical and scientific speculation in the tradition of Haruki Murakami, Umberto Eco, and Philip K. Dick. The result is a brillantly original fiction that reveals how disparate people connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time likes clouds across the sky.

Teen Pick of the Week: Hidden

Hidden: A House of Night Novel by P.C. Cast and Kristin Cast

At last Zoey has what she wanted, the truth is out. Neferet's evil has been exposed, and the High Council is no longer on her side--but she's far from done wreaking havoc in the vampyre world. First, a mysterious fire ravages the stables. Then, Neferet makes a devastating move that will test them all. With the seeds of distrust sown and Darkness breeding chaos at the House of Night, everyone must band together--but that's proving to be more difficult than ever before.

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

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Lost Manuscripts, "Authorities," and Attack Submarines

The Legend of Broken by Caleb Carr
Some years ago, a remarkable manuscript long rumored to exist was discovered: The Legend of Broken. It tells of a prosperous fortress city where order reigns at the point of a sword--even as scheming factions secretly vie for control of the surrounding kingdom. Meanwhile, outside the city's granite walls, an industrious tribe of exiles known as the Bane forages for sustenance in the wilds of Davon Wood.

Agenda 21 by Glenn Beck
Just a generation ago, this place was called America. Now, after the worldwide implementation of a UN-led program called Agenda 21, it's simply known as "the Republic." There is no president. There is no Congress. No Supreme Court. No freedom. There are only the Authorities. Citizens who have two primary goals in the new Republic: to create clean energy and to create new human life. Those who cannot do either are of no use to society. This bleak and barren existence is all that eighteen-year-old Emmeline has ever known. She dutifully walks her energy board daily and accepts all male pairings assigned to her by the Authorities. Like most citizens, she keeps her head down and her eyes closed. Until the day they come for her mother.

Poseidon's Arrow by Clive Cussler
It is the greatest advance in American defense technology in decades--an attack submarine capable of incredible underwater speeds. Nothing else in any other nation's naval arsenal even comes close. There is only one problem: A key element of the prototype is missing--and the man who developed it is dead. At the same time, ships have started vanishing mid-ocean, usually never to be found again, but when they are, sometimes bodies are found aboard...burned to a crisp. It is up to NUMA director Dirk Pitt and his team, aided by a beautiful NCIS agent and by Pitt's children, marine engineer Dirk and oceanographer Summer, to go on a desperate international chase to find the truth. 

Teen Pick of the Week: Burned

Burned: A Pretty Little Liars Novel by Sara Shepard

It's spring break, and the pretty little liars are trading in Rosewood for a cruise vacation. They want nothing more than to sail into the tropical sunset and leave their troubles behind for one blissful week. But where Emily, Aria, Spencer, and Hanna go, A goes, too. From scuba diving to tanning on the upper deck, A is there, soaking up their new secrets. Emily is smooching a stowaway. Aria's treasure-hunting partner is a little too interested in her booty. Spencer's going overboard trying to land a new boy. And a blast--or rather, a crash--from Hanna's past could mean rough waters ahead for everyone.

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

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NY Times Bestseller this Week: Janet Evanovich

Notorious Nineteen by Janet Evanovich is the #1 NY Times Bestseller this week!

After a slow summer of chasing low-level skips for her cousin Vinnie’s bail bonds agency, Stephanie Plum finally lands an assignment that could put her checkbook back in the black. Geoffrey Cubbin, facing trial for embezzling millions from Trenton’s premier assisted-living facility, has mysteriously vanished from the hospital after an emergency appendectomy. Now it’s on Stephanie to track down the con man. Unfortunately, Cubbin has disappeared without a trace, a witness, or his money-hungry wife. Rumors are stirring that he must have had help with the daring escape . . . or that maybe he never made it out of his room alive. Since the hospital staff’s lips seem to be tighter than the security, and it’s hard for Stephanie to blend in to assisted living, Stephanie’s Grandma Mazur goes in undercover. But when a second felon goes missing from the same hospital, Stephanie is forced into working side by side with Trenton’s hottest cop, Joe Morelli, in order to crack the case.

The real problem is, no Cubbin also means no way to pay the rent. Desperate for money—or maybe just desperate—Stephanie accepts a secondary job guarding her secretive and mouthwatering mentor Ranger from a deadly Special Forces adversary. While Stephanie is notorious for finding trouble, she may have found a little more than she bargained for this time around. Then again—a little food poisoning, some threatening notes, and a bridesmaid’s dress with an excess of taffeta never killed anyone . . . or did they? If Stephanie Plum wants to bring in a paycheck, she’ll have to remember: No guts, no glory. .

Teen Pick of the Week: Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews
My name is Greg Gaines. I am seventeen. I am the one who wrote the book. My physical appearance is unsatisfactory, and there is probably a fungus eating my brain. I'm not even sure I'm a human. Earl Jackson is the only person who is even sort of my friend. We make mediocre films together. Werner Herzog is our biggest influence. Earl is generally filled with violent rage. During my senior year, my mom forced me to become friends with a girl who had cancer. This brought about the destruction of my entire life.

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!