Recommended Summer Reading for 2013

It's almost the beginning of summer, even though it really feels like it already is summer outside. With the start of our Summer Reading Program, (Please stop by and pick up some reading logs for the whole family, or you can print them directly off the website, if that works better for you.), I wanted to give you a heads up on the books that have shown up on recommended summer reading lists all over the United States. Give one of these a try! Happy Reading!

Maya's Notebook 

by Isabel Allende     FIC ALLENDE (also in large print and in audiobook)

After the death of her beloved grandfather, nineteen-year-old Maya Vidal, turning to drugs, alcohol, and petty crimes, becomes trapped in a war between assassins, the police, the FBI, and Interpol, until her grandmother helps her escape to a remote island off the coast of Chile where she tries to make sense of her life.

Ladies' Night

by Mary Kay Andrews    FIC ANDREWS (also in audiobook) 

Cut off from her palatial home and checking account after an act of post-divorce rage forces her to move in with her widowed mother and attend court-mandated group therapy, rising media star Grace Stanton bonds with three fellow patients who she helps plot respective pursuits of justice and closure.

                                                                                              
 Lexicon

by Max Barry        FIC BARRY  (coming soon)

At an exclusive school somewhere outside of Arlington, Virginia, students aren’t taught history, geography, or mathematics—at least not in the usual ways. Instead, they are taught to persuade. Here the art of coercion has been raised to a science. Students harness the hidden power of language to manipulate the mind and learn to break down individuals by psychographic markers in order to take control of their thoughts. The very best will graduate as “poets:" adept wielders of language who belong to a nameless organization that is as influential as it is secretive. As the two narratives converge (Emily Ruff and Wil Jamieson), the shocking work of the poets is fully revealed, the body count rises, and the world crashes toward a Tower of Babel event which would leave all language meaningless. 

I'll Be Seeing You

by Suzanne Hayes and Loretta Nyhan          FIC HAYES

Two women forge a friendship during World War II through their letters to each other, allowing them to survive the loneliness and uncertainty of waiting on the home front and giving them the courage to face the battles raging in their very own backyards.

Bad Monkey

by Carl Hiaasen       FIC HIAASEN   (also in large print and in audiobook)

Andrew Yancy, late of the Miami Police, soon-to-be-late of the Key West Police, has a human arm in his freezer. There is a logical explanation for that, but not for how and why it parted from its owner. Yancy thinks the boating-accident/shark-luncheon explanation is full of holes, and if he can prove murder, his commander might relieve him of Health Inspector duties, aka Roach Patrol. But first Yancy will negotiate an ever-surprising course of events, from the Keys to Miami to a Bahamian out island, with a crew of equally ever-surprising characters, including: the twitchy widow of the frozen arm; an avariciously idiotic real estate developer; a voodoo witch whose lovers are blinded-unto-death by her particularly peculiar charms; Yancy's new love, a kinky medical examiner; and the eponymous Bad Monkey.

NOS4A2

by Joe Hill            FIC HILL   (also in large print)

Victoria McQueen has a secret gift for finding things: a misplaced bracelet, a missing photograph, answers to unanswerable questions. On her Raleigh Tuff Burner bike, she makes her way to a rickety covered bridge that, within moments, takes her wherever she needs to go, whether it's across Massachusetts or across the country. Charles Talent Manx has a way with children. He likes to take them for rides in his 1938 Rolls-Royce Wraith with the NOS4A2 vanity plate. With his old car, he can slip right out of the everyday world, and onto the hidden roads that transport them to an astonishing--and terrifying--playground of amusements he calls "Christmasland." Then, one day, Vic goes looking for trouble--and finds Manx. That was a lifetime ago. Now Vic, the only kid to ever escape Manx's unmitigated evil, is all grown up and desperate to forget. But Charlie Manx never stopped thinking about Victoria McQueen. He's on the road again and he's picked up a new passenger: Vic's own son.

And the Mountains Echoed

by Khaled Hosseini        FIC HOSSEINI  (also in audiobook)

Afghanistan, 1952. Abdullah and his sister Pari live with their father and step-mother in the small village of Shadbagh. Their father, Saboor, is constantly in search of work and they struggle together through poverty and brutal winters. To Adbullah, Pari, as beautiful and sweet-natured as the fairy for which she was named, is everything.

Joyland

by Stephen King     FIC KING

Set in a small-town North Carolina amusement park in 1973, Joyland tells the story of the summer in which college student Devin Jones comes to work as a carny and confronts the legacy of a vicious murder, the fate of a dying child, and the ways both will change his life forever.

                     Red Sparrow

by Jason Matthews     FIC MATTHEWS

Drafted against her will to serve the regime of Vladimir Putin as an intelligence seductress, Dominika Egorova engages in a charged effort of deception and tradecraft with first-tour CIA officer Nathaniel Nash before a forbidden attraction threatens their careers.

The Son

by Philipp Meyer       FIC MEYER    (also in large print and on audiobook)

Comanche Indian captive Eli McCullough must carve a place for himself in a world in which he does not fully belong -- a journey of adventure, tragedy, hardship, grit, and luck that reverberates in the lives of his progeny.

                The Yellow Birds

by Kevin Powers      FIC POWERS     (also on audiobook)

In the midst of a bloody battle in the Iraq War, two soldiers, bound together since basic training, do everything to protect each other from both outside enemies and the internal struggles that come from constant danger.

Big Brother

by Lionel Shriver     LP FIC SHRIVER  (only in large print)

"When Pandora picks up her older brother Edison at her local Iowa airport, she literally doesn't recognize him. In the four years since the siblings last saw one another, the once slim, hip New York jazz pianist has gained hundreds of pounds. What happened? And it's not just the weight. After his brother-in-law has more than overstayed his welcome, Pandora's husband, Fletcher, delivers an ultimatum: it's him or me. Putting her marriage and her adopted family on the line, Pandora chooses her brother--who without her support in losing weight, will surely eat himself into an early grave."

One Last Thing Before I Go

by Jonathan Tropper     FIC TROPPER

Silver has begun to accept that life isn't going to turn out as he expected. The ex-wife he's remained friends with is about to marry a terrific guy Silver can't quite bring himself to hate. And his Princeton-bound teenage daughter has just confided in him that she's pregnant—because he's the one she cares least about letting down. As the wedding looms and the pregnancy sinks in, this broken family struggles, bonds, and wrestles with each member's individual anxieties. Lives begin anew, change radically, or, in Silver's case—as he discovers that he could die at any moment without an operation he refuses to have—may be about to end in an instant.

The Silver Star

by Jeanette Walls       FIC WALLS   (also on audiobook)

Two motherless sisters--Bean and Liz--are shuttled to Virginia, where their Uncle Tinsley lives in the decaying mansion that's been in their family for generations. When school starts in the fall, Bean easily adjusts and makes friends, and Liz becomes increasingly withdrawn. Then something happens to Liz and Bean is left to challenge the injustice of the adult world.

Beautiful Ruins

by Jess Walter         FIC WALTER

A novel that spans fifty years. The Italian housekeeper and his long-lost American starlet; the producer who once brought them together, and his assistant. A glittering world filled with unforgettable characters.

The Blood of Heaven

by Kent Wascom      FIC WASCOM

"The Blood of Heaven is the story of Angel Woolsack, a preacher's son, who flees the hardscrabble life of his itinerant father, falls in with a charismatic highwayman, then settles with his adopted brothers on the rough frontier of West Florida, where American settlers are carving their place out of lands held by the Spaniards and the French. The novel moves from the bordellos of Natchez, where Angel meets his love Red Kate to the Mississippi River plantations, where the brutal system of slave labor is creating fantastic wealth along with terrible suffering, and finally to the back rooms of New Orleans among schemers, dreamers, and would-be revolutionaries plotting to break away from the young United States and create a new country under the leadership of the renegade founding father Aaron Burr."

                A Hundred Summers

by Beatriz Williams     FIC WILLIAMS

Returning to an idyllic Rhode Island oceanfront community for the summer of 1938, New York socialite Lily Dane is devastated by the appearance of her newly married ex-fiance and her former best friend.