The Land of Forgotten Girls Erin Entrada Kelly 978-0-06-223864-1 Greenwillow Books Review by Angie Kay Dilmore Erin Entrada Kelly’s second middle grade novel, The Land of Forgotten Girls, will not be easily forgotten by her readers. Once again, Kelly plows into the heart of a twelve year old protagonist […]
Blackbird Fly Erin Entrada Kelly Greenwillow Books ISBN 978-0-06-223861-0 In Erin Entrada Kelly’s debut novel, Apple Yengko is a typical American adolescent. Except that she is Filipino. And she is ranked number three on the mean boys’ Dog Log, a hypothetical list of the ten ugliest girls at Chapel […]
Evening Stars Susan Mallery Harlequin/Mira ISBN: 978-0-7738-1613-8 Nina Wentworth lives on Blackberry Island, a small community off the coast of Washington. She’s a thirty-year-old nurse in a pediatrician’s office, but her dream is to be a doctor. That’s only the beginning of the sacrifices she has made as primary caretaker […]
Synchronized Breathing Tara Ellison The Writer’s Coffee Shop 978-1-61213-189-4 After discovering nude photos her husband had taken of himself on his computer, Scarlett Spencer realizes her marriage is over. Deciding to divorce is the easy part. Navigating through the lengthy divorce process proves harder, messier, and more expensive than she […]
The Fault in Our Stars John Green Dutton Books ISBN: 978-0-525-47881-2 The world is not a wish-granting factory. Sixteen year old Hazel Lancaster has a rare form of cancer. Terminal. But her doctors have recently discovered that she responds positively to a new drug. It will slow the progression of […]
Lydia’s Party Margaret Hawkins Penguin Group/Viking ISBN 978-0-670-01576-4 Lydia teaches art at a small local college. She lives in a house in a suburb of Chicago with her ex-husband. And she hosts a party for her closest girlfriends every January. The party has evolved over the years and has become […]
The Care and Handling of Roses with Thorns Margaret Dilloway Berkley Books/Penguin ISBN: 978-0-399-15775-2 Galilee Garner breeds roses. She teaches high school biology at St. Mark’s, a small private Catholic high school. And she spends every other night at a dialysis center while she awaits a third kidney transplant. Gal […]
Prisoner 88 Leah Pileggi Charlesbridge Publishing ISBN: 978-1-58089-560-6 In 1885, a ten-year-old boy named James Oscar Baker was convicted of manslaughter and placed in the Idaho Penitentiary. Author Leah Pileggi wondered what it must have been like for James, a mere child, surrounded by convicts in the difficult world of […]
Out of the Shadow of Leprosy: The Carville Letters and Stories of the Landry Family Claire Manes University Press of Mississippi ISBN: 978-161703-776-4 Few people these days give much thought to leprosy. True, it’s a rare disease – only 150-250 documented new cases in the U.S. each year. It’s very […]
Rules of Summer Joanna Philbin Poppy, an imprint of Little, Brown, and Company 978-0-316-21205-2 In Joanna Philbin’s recently released YA novel, Rory McShane desperately wants to escape her childish needy mother for the summer. She goes to live with and work for wealthy Larry and Lucy Rule and their family […]
On this day, December 3, in 1857, Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, Imperial Russia (modern
Ukraine, then a part of Poland). While he settled in England and wrote in English, he always considered himself a Pole. Heart of Darkness, one of the most famous of his 20 novels (which explores colonialism and the attitudes regarding what constitutes a barbarian versus civilized society) is considered one of the best English novels of the 20th century, as is his novel Lord Jim, which chronicles a crew’s abandonment of its disabled ship. Conrad died in England in 1924 at age 66.