I love a story with an unreliable narrator and the unnamed, disgraced professor in By Blood by Ellen Ullman is as unreliable as they come. The stage is set in the early 1970’s San Francisco. The Zodiac killer is on the loose, Patty Hearst is toting a gun, and our narrator is inserting himself in [...]
Birds of a Lesser Paradise is a book of short stories that is as heartwarming as it is heartbreaking. In my favorite story of the bunch “Housewifely Arts” a woman drives for hours with her small son to a zoo to see a parrot her mother once owned. Her mother is dead and the bird [...]
One of my favorite authors is Irvine Welsh and he has just come out with a prequel to his classic work Trainspotting. The prequel, Skagboys, is just as good and explains how Rent Boy, Spud, Sick Boy and some of the others became hooked on heroin in the first place. I have read so many [...]
I read a great review in the NYT Book Review on Shout Her Lovely Name by Natalie Serber. They described it as a book of short stories about the relationships between mothers and daughters. That description is what initially drew me in, but after about the third story I realized it’s really more about how [...]
One of my coworkers gave The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb 5 stars on Goodreads, so I thought that I would pick it up and give it a try. This book was a lot longer than I was expecting. It was a challenge, but I made it through all 20 audio discs, which [...]
Imagine being a 17 year boy in a small town in Wisconsin that the town wants to forget along with it’s past history of Nazis. That is the life the lead character in Draw the Dark, Christian Cage, has been living since he was 3 years old. Christian his whole life dreams of his parents [...]
If you like your vampires to be mean killer monsters and not romantic figures pining away for relationships with humans, 13 Bullets by David Wellington is for you. Forget any of the classic defensive weapons that you might think will protect you-daylight, crucifixes, etc-none of this will work on Wellington’s vampires. If they have fed [...]
If you have ever wondered how Vito Corleone became the Godfather, read Ed Falco’s The Family Corleone which is the prequel to Mario Puzo’s classic story. Falco’s story also details how Vito’s oldest son, Sonny, becomes a part of the family business (against his father’s wishes). Sonny as a teenager is the exact same character [...]
If you start reading The Dummy Line by Bobby Cole you will not be able to stop thinking about it until you are done. In this novel Jake Crosby loves that his nine year old daughter Katy is just as into hunting as he is and knows to savor it-who knows if she’ll still be [...]
The Last Guardian is the eighth book that Eoin Colfer has written in the Artemis Fowl series that can be found in the Young Adult collection at TCPL. Artemis’ nemesis the pixie Opal Koboi is up to more than her usual mischief as she has disabled the fairy world and wreaking havoc on Artemis’ family [...]