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Category: –Staff Picks

--Staff Picks General

Spencer

“Spencer is a 2021 historical psychological drama film directed by Pablo Larraín from a screenplay by Steven Knight. The The marriage of Princess Diana and Prince Charles has long since grown cold. Though rumors of affairs and a divorce abound, peace is ordained for the Christmas festivities at the Queen’s Sandringham Estate. There’s eating and […]

--Staff Picks General

Sophie Go’s Lonely Hearts Club by Roselle Lim

Sophie Go is finally out of her parents’ home and ready to start her career as a professional matchmaker. However, she faces one major problem, despite her natural matchmaking skill and ability, she did not quite graduate from matchmaking school. She forges ahead, moving into a swanky apartment complex in Toronto and begins networking and […]

--Booklists --Staff Picks General

2022 releases your HPL staff loved!

Just because you missed them last year doesn’t mean we don’t still recommend them-check out this list of 2022 releases that staff loved! Click on the cover image to be brought to our catalog where you can request these titles. Delilah Green swore she would never go back to Bright Falls—nothing is there for her […]

--Staff Picks General

The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher

Kara, aka Carrot, finds herself divorced and penniless at thirty. Rather than go home to her mom where the relationship is tense, she goes to live with her Uncle Earl at his beloved small-town Museum of Wonders, a collection of weird items and taxidermied animals curated over many years. That’s when a portal opens up […]

--Staff Picks

“Stick Season” by Noah Kahan

In case you didn’t know, stick season is the time in New England between fall and winter. With that in mind, Noah Kahan’s “Stick Season” really puts you in that place of feeling like you’re just leaving autumn, but anticipating the cold days and piles of snow. If you’re facing the upcoming cold months and […]

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Blackmail and Bibingka by Mia P. Manansala

This third installment of Manansala’s culinary cozy mystery series, Tita Rosie’s Kitchen, takes place during the winter holidays in Shady Palms as they prepare for Christmas Eve and the community Winter Bash. Lila’s good-for-nothing cousin Ronnie returns to town after a mysterious 15-year disappearance, and he brings a new cast of characters, and a whole […]

--Staff Picks General

“Love & Vermin” by Will McPhail

Will McPhail is an artist with a distinctly expressive style that will keep you engaged and laughing with every drawing.  In his first graphic novel, In, he explored one man’s journey to connect with his fellow humans.  Love & Vermin is a collection of his comics, some previously published in The New Yorker, which can […]

--Staff Picks

The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi

This action-packed and very current novel begins in the midst of the COVID-19 lockdown in New York City. Jamie Gray, a Ph.D. dropout, is fired by their entitled tech CEO and, desperate, ends up delivering food as a contracted driver for the same app company that fired them. One fateful delivery later to a college […]

--Staff Picks

All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders

A witch child who can talk to birds? Science whiz smart enough to build an AI computer in his bedroom? These two tweens, Patricia and Laurence form a trauma bond through their one commonality—they are both misfits, bullied at school, and to different degrees, at home. During one of her parentally forbidden romps through the […]

--Staff Picks

Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay

“The lives of the Barretts, a normal suburban New England family, are torn apart when fourteen-year-old Marjorie begins to display signs of acute schizophrenia. To her parents’ despair, the doctors are unable to stop Marjorie’s bizarre outbursts and subsequent descent into madness. As their home devolves into a house of horrors, they reluctantly turn to […]