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Tag: staff pick

--Staff Picks General

Pruning Made Easy: A Gardener’s Visual Guide to When and How to Prune Everything, from Flowers to Trees by Lewis Hill

This classic guide gives detailed explanations and illustrations in the care of trees and shrubs. It offers specific advice for pruning many different species, and also provides clear guidance for pruning at various life stages and for for different purposes. Some examples: pruning to rejuvenate an older plant, or to create a barrier. There is […]

--Staff Picks

“Small Miracles” by Olivia Atwater

Gadriel, the fallen angel of petty temptations, has never agreed with the point system of Sin and Virtue that decides a human’s fate after they die.  Why should eating chocolate cost you a ½ point of Sin?  Despite this, she stays out of the way and tries not to catch the notice of other angelic […]

--Staff Picks

“Milk Street Cookish” by Christopher Kimball

Recent changes in my personal schedule gifted me a fresh start – an opportunity to get back into the habit of cooking regularly! I am really enjoying this change and hope to keep things interesting by trying a variety of recipes, but also need to keep it simple and quick. As with many people, I […]

--Staff Picks

Truly, Madly, Deeply by Alexandria Bellefleur

Truly Livingston is a romance author and hopeless romantic. She believes in happily ever afters. And then…she walks in on her fiance cheating on her. Not only that, her parents, whom she believed to be in the perfect marriage, have announced they are separating. She is devastated, angry, and lost AND she was just invited […]

--Staff Picks

“The Innocents” by Jack Clayton

“The Innocents” (1961), directed by Jack Clayton and starring Deborah Kerr just a few years after she filmed “An Affair to Remember” and “The King and I”, is a creepy, dark ghost movie-cum-psychological thriller well worth a peek (during the daytime, with a friend in the room). Based on Henry James’ iconic ghost story The […]

--Staff Picks

“The Ballad of Jacquotte Delahaye” by Briony Cameron

During the Golden Age of Piracy, Jacquotte Delahaye, the daughter of a French father and Haitian mother, is forced to flee her life as a shipwright in Santo Domingo when her father is assassinated. Unfortunately, the ship she escapes on is captured by pirates. She and a fellow refugee named Teresa are made indentured servants […]

--Staff Picks

Polite Society [DVD]

Ria Khan wants nothing more than to become a famous stuntwoman, so she puts all of her prodigious determination and energy into making a name for herself online.  She is bullied at school and discouraged by her parents for this dream, so she relies heavily on her older sister Lena.  Lena has dropped out of […]

--Staff Picks

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

Barbara Kingsolver employs her exceptional talent for character development and world-building for the eponymous Damon “Demon Copperhead” Fields, set in Appalachia from the 1990s to today, in her retelling of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield. For readers of the Dickens tale, it is fun exercise to compare the new and the old versions of the classic […]

--Staff Picks Teens

The Reappearance of Rachel Price

In Holly Jackson’s latest young adult mystery, Bel Price’s family is the focus of a new documentary being filmed based on the disappearance of her mother, Rachel Price. Rachel Price disappeared 16 years ago without a trace. Her car was found on the side of the road, running, with the heat on and the doors […]

--Staff Picks

“Wren Martin Ruins It All” By Amanda DeWitt

There are two things that Wren Martin hates more than anything: The Valentine’s Day Dance at Rapture High, and his Student Council Vice President, Leo Reyes. When Wren becomes Student Council President (by a technicality, but that’s not important) he’s determined to make the school better by doing away with the Dance and using the […]