Staff Picks_0623


Showing 1 - 20 of 37  There are a total of 62 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "Avalanche dreams"
Star rating for Avalanche dreams
Description:
"In this riveting memoir, renowned mountaineer Lou Dawson shares a tumultuous coming-of-age journey, from the flatlands of Texas to the Colorado mountains, steeped in the counterculture revolution of the 1960s. Amidst the towering peaks, Lou discovers an enduring love for alpine sports: scaling cliffs, topping summits, skiing powder snow. However, as the avalanches fall and lifestyle choices veer, his pursuit of adrenaline becomes a poignant struggle...
Book cover for "The best way to bury your husband"
Star rating for The best way to bury your husband
Description:
After killing her husband-a truly terrible man, Sally finds herself leading an extremely unusual self-help group of women who have come together to heal the damage their husbands have done-and to work out a plan to get rid of the bodies and get away with it. "When Sally kills her husband with a cast-iron skillet, she's more fearful of losing her kids than of disposing of a fresh corpse. That just wouldn't be fair--not after twenty years of marriage...
Book cover for "The Briar Club"
Star rating for The Briar Club
Author:
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
"The New York Times bestselling author of The Diamond Eye and The Rose Code returns with a haunting and powerful story of female friendships and secrets in a Washington, DC, boardinghouse during the McCarthy era"-- "Washington, D.C., 1950. Everyone keeps to themselves at Briarwood House, a down-at-the-heels all-female boardinghouse in the heart of the nation's capital, where secrets hide behind white picket fences. But when the lovely, mysterious...
Book cover for "Challenger deep"
Star rating for Challenger deep
Average Rating:
3.5 stars
Description:
Caden Bosch is caught between two worlds: one as an artist on a ship heading for the deepest point on Earth and the other as a brilliant high-school student. His powerful story shares the journey of a teenage boy struggling with schizophrenia -- Publisher.
Book cover for "The Count of Monte Cristo"
Star rating for The Count of Monte Cristo
Average Rating:
3.6 stars
Description:
Overview: Alexandre Dumas's novel of justice, retribution, and self-discovery - one of the most enduringly popular adventure tales ever written - appears here in a newly revised translation. "This novel tells the story of Edmond Dantes, wrongfully imprisoned for life in the supposedly impregnable sea fortress the Chateau d'If. After a daring escape, and after unearthing a hidden treasure revealed to him by a fellow prisoner, he devotes the rest...
Book cover for "The darkness outside us"
Star rating for The darkness outside us
Series:
Average Rating:
4.2 stars
Description:
Earth's population is divided between only two existing countries which cannot manage to cooperate in any way, until a distress signal arrives from Titan's first settler and neither can afford to rescue her on their own if they act separately. Ambrose wakes up on board with successfully reaching his sister the primary thought in his mind until he notices several strange circumstances: he doesn't remember the launch, the ship's OS is voiced by his...
Book cover for "The dissonance"
Star rating for The dissonance
Description:
"In high school, the three were students of the eccentric Professor Marsh, trained in a secret system of magic known as the Dissonance, which is built around harnessing negative emotions: alienation, anger, pain. Then, twenty years ago, something happened that shattered their coven, scattering them across the country, stuck in mundane lives, alone. But now, terrifying signs and portents (not to mention a pointed Facebook invite) have summoned them...
Book cover for "Fablehaven"
Star rating for Fablehaven
Series:
Fablehaven volume 1.
Average Rating:
4.6 stars
Description:
When Kendra and Seth go to stay at their grandparents' estate in Connecticut, they discover that it is a sanctuary for magical creatures and that a battle between good and evil is looming.
Book cover for "Fight Club"
Star rating for Fight Club
Average Rating:
4.9 stars
Description:
The rise of a terrorist organization, led by a waiter who enjoys spitting in people's soup. He starts a fighting club, where men bash each other, and the club quickly gains in popularity. It becomes the springboard for a movement devoted to destruction for destruction's sake. Overview: The first rule about fight club is you don't talk about fight club. Chuck Palahniuk's outrageous and startling debut novel that exploded American literature and...
Book cover for "The four winds"
Star rating for The four winds
Average Rating:
4.2 stars
Description:
"Texas, 1921. A time of abundance. The Great War is over, the bounty of the land is plentiful, and America is on the brink of a new and optimistic era. But for Elsa Wolcott, deemed too old to marry in a time when marriage is a woman's only option, the future seems bleak. Until the night she meets Rafe Martinelli and decides to change the direction of her life. With her reputation in ruin, there is only one respectable choice: marriage to a man she...
Book cover for "Gender Queer"
Star rating for Gender Queer
Author:
Average Rating:
3.9 stars
Description:
In 2014, Maia Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, thought that a comic of reading statistics would be the last autobiographical comic e would ever write. At the time, it was the only thing e felt comfortable with strangers knowing about em. Then e created Gender Queer. Maia's intensely cathartic autobiography charts eir journey of self-identity, which includes the mortification and confusion of adolescent crushes, grappling with how to come out to...
Book cover for "Go as a river"
Star rating for Go as a river
Average Rating:
4.1 stars
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...
Book cover for "Good omens"
Star rating for Good omens
Author:
Average Rating:
4.3 stars
Description:
According to the Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter -the world's only _totally reliable_ guide to the future - the world will end on a Saturday. Next Saturday, in fact. Just after tea. Which means that Armageddon will happen on a Saturday night. There will be seas of fire, rains of fish, the moon turning to blood and the massed armies of Heaven and Hell will sort it outonce and for all. Which is a major problem for Crowley, Hell's most approachable...
Book cover for "Guards! guards!"
Star rating for Guards! guards!
Series:
Discworld volume 8.
Average Rating:
4.3 stars
Description:
Here there be dragons ... and the denizens of Ankh-Morpork wish one huge firebreather would return from whence it came. Long believed extinct, a superb specimen of draco nobilis ("noble dragon" for those who don't understand italics) has appeared in Discworld's greatest city. Not only does this unwelcome visitor have a nasty habit of charbroiling everything in its path, in rather short order it is crowned King (it is a noble dragon, after all . ....
Book cover for "The hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy"
Star rating for The hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy
Series:
Average Rating:
4.3 stars
Description:
It's an ordinary Thursday morning for Arthur Dent...until his house gets demolished. The Earth follows shortly after to make way for a new hyperspace express route, and Arthur's best friend has just announched that he's an alien. After that, things get much, much worse. With just a towel, a small yellow fish, and a book, Arthur has to navigate through a very hostile universe in the company of a gang of unreliable aliens. Luckily the fish is quite...

16. Horse

Book cover for "Horse"
Star rating for Horse
Average Rating:
4.6 stars
Description:
"A discarded painting in a junk pile, a skeleton in an attic, and the greatest racehorse in American history: from these strands, a Pulitzer Prize winner braids a sweeping story of spirit, obsession, and injustice across American history. Kentucky, 1850. Jarrett, an enslaved groom, and a bay foal forge a bond of understanding that will carry the horse to record-setting victories across the South. As the nation erupts in civil war, an itinerant young...
Book cover for "I'm mostly here to enjoy myself"
Star rating for I'm mostly here to enjoy myself
Description:
"An intimate, insightful, powerful, and endlessly pleasurable memoir of an intensely lived experience whose meaning and insight expands far beyond the personal narrative"--
Book cover for "The just city"
Star rating for The just city
Author:
Series:
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
Created as an experiment by the time-traveling goddess Pallas Athene, the Just City is a planned community, populated by over ten thousand children and a few hundred adult teachers from all eras of history, along with some handy robots from the far human future - all set down together on a Mediterranean island in the distant past. The student Simmea, born an Egyptian farmer's daughter sometime between 500 and 1000 A.D, is a brilliant child, eager...

19. Kindred

Book cover for "Kindred"
Star rating for Kindred
Average Rating:
4.2 stars
Description:
"Dana, a 1970s black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether...
Book cover for "Margo's got money troubles"
Star rating for Margo's got money troubles
Author:
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"As the child of a Hooters waitress and an ex-pro wrestler, Margo Millet's always known she'd have to make it on her own. So she enrolls at her local junior college, even though she can't imagine how she'll ever make a living. She's still figuring things out and never planned to have an affair with her English professor--and while the affair is brief, it isn't brief enough to keep her from getting pregnant. Despite everyone's advice, she decides to...