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Tag: staff pick

--Staff Picks

“The Facemaker: A Visionary Surgeon’s Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I” by Lindsey Fitzharris

1914 saw the start of a new type of war, where technological advances in weaponry reshaped the battlefield into an unforeseen nightmare. The Great War is cited as the first modern, mechanized war, its impact reverberating far beyond the toll of almost ten million soldiers lost. Another twenty-one million who survived would be irrevocably changed […]

--Staff Picks

“The Spare Man” by Mary Robinette Kowal

Tesla Crane is an engineering genius and famous heiress who is traveling with her new spouse and service dog Gimlet on a luxury cruise spaceship headed to Mars.  She is reveling in her anonymity when a body turns up and her husband is taken into custody as suspect #1.  Tesla is willing to do whatever […]

--Staff Picks

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands

Known for her humorous comic strips Hark! A Vagrant! and children’s books likes The Princess and the Pony, Kate Beaton has released her first full length graphic memoir. Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands follows Beaton’s time working in the Canadian oil sands after graduating college. Like many East Coast Canadians, she heads out […]

--Staff Picks

Lessons in Chemistry

“Set in 1960s California, this blockbuster debut is the hilarious, idiosyncratic and uplifting story of a female scientist whose career is constantly derailed by the idea that a woman’s place is in the home, only to find herself starring as the host of America’s most beloved TV cooking show.” Elizabeth Zott is first and foremost […]

--Staff Picks General

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

Carrie Soto is Back

In the last of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s loosely connected “famous women” series we follow Carrie Soto, the greatest tennis player the world has ever seen. She holds numerous records including 20 Grand Slam titles – that is until 1994 when powerhouse player Nicki Chan breaks that record. Now, at the age of 37, Carrie decides […]