When Ibby Bell's father dies in an accident in the summer of 1964, her mother deposits Ibby in New Orleans with her eccentric grandmother, Fannie, and throws in her father's urn for good measure. Fannie's rundown Victorian mansion is like no place Ibby has ever been, and Fannie - who has a tendency to end up in the local asylum every once in a while - is like no one she has ever met. Fannie's black cook, Queenie, has run Fannie's household ever since it was Fannie's household, and her daughter, Dollbaby, has big dreams and an even bigger mouth. Between them, Queenie and Dollbaby take it upon themselves to initiate Ibby into the ways of the South, both its grand traditions and its darkest secrets.
When novelist Owen Quine goes missing, his wife calls in private detective Cormoran Strike. At first, she thinks he's just gone off by himself for a few days - as he has done before - and she wants Strike to find him and bring him home.
But as Strike investigates, it becomes clear that there is more to Quine's disappearance than his wife realizes. The novelist has just completed a manuscript featuring poisonous pen-portraits of almost everyone he knows. If the novel is published, it will ruin lives - so there are a lot of people who might want to silence him.
And when Quine is found brutally murdered in bizarre circumstances, it becomes a race against time to understand the motivation of a ruthless killer, a killer unlike Strike has encountered before..
Mia and Lorrie Ann are lifelong friends: hardhearted Mia and untouchably beautiful, kind Lorrie Ann. While Mia struggles with a mother who drinks, a pregnancy at fifteen, and younger brothers she loves but can't quite be good to, Lorrie Ann is luminous, surrounded by her close-knit family, immune to the mistakes that mar her best friend's life. Then a sudden loss catapults Lorrie Ann to tragedy: things fall apart, and then fall further - and there is nothing Mia can do to help. And as good, brave fair Lorrie Ann stops being so good, Mia begins to question just who this woman is, and what that question means about them both.
When change is the only constant, the first step toward happiness is mastering the Art of Adapting...
Seven months after her husband leaves her, Lana is still reeling. Being single means she is in charge of every part of her life, but with two teenage children and a house she can barely afford on her solo salary, her new life is balancing act made even more complicated when her brother, Matt, moves in.
Matt has Asperger's syndrome, which makes social situations difficult for him and flexibility and change nearly impossible. Adding Matt's regimented routine to her already disrupted household seems like the last thing Lana needs, but her brother's unique attention to detail makes him an invaluable addition to the family - he sees things differently.
Matt sees his nephew, Byron, struggling to reconcile the part of him that is vying for popularity with the artistic side his father always stifled. He sees Abby, formerly an honors student and dedicated athlete, wasting away as she skips lunch to run laps. And most of all, he sees Lana, his once vibrant and independent sister, resigned to her role of mother and fulfilling everyone's needs except her own.
After mistakes and missteps, Lana and her family come to discover that knowing where you've come from is essential to figuring who you are and who you can grow to be.
By July 1914, the ties between Kezia Marchant and Thea Brissenden, friends since girlhood, have become strained - by Thea's passionate embrace of women's suffrage and by the imminent marriage of Kezia to Thea's brother, Tom, who runs the family farm. When Kezia and Tom wed just a month before war is declared between Britain and Germany, Thea's gift to to Kezia is a book on household management - a veiled criticism of the bride's prosaic life to come. Yet when Tom enlists to fight for his country and Thea is drawn reluctantly to the battlefield herself, the farm becomes Kezia's responsibility. Each must find a way to endure the ensuing cataclysm and turmoil.
As Tom marches to the front lines and Kezia battles to keep her ordered life from unraveling, they hide their despair in letters and cards filled with stories woven to bring comfort. Even Tom's fellow soldiers in the trenches enter and find solace in the dream world of Kezia's mouth-watering, albeit imaginary, meals. But will well-intended lies and self-deception be of any use when they come face-to-face with the enemy?
Madeline is a force to be reckoned with. She's funny, biting, and passionate; she remembers everything and forgives no one. Her ex-husband and his yogi new wife have moved into her beloved beachside community, and their daughter is in the same kindergarten class as Madeline's youngest. (How is this possible?) And to top it all off, Madeline's teenage daughter seems to be choosing Madeline's ex-husband over her. (How.Is.This.Possible?)
Celeste is the kind of beautiful woman who makes the world stop and stare. While she may seem a bit flustered at times, who wouldn't be, with those rambunctious twins? Now that the boys are starting school, Celeste and her husband look set to become the king and queen of the school parent body. but royalty often comes at a price, and Celeste is grappling with with how much more she is willing to pay.
For the Posts, a two-week trip to the Balearic island of Mallorca with their family and friends is a celebration: Franny and Jim are observing their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, and their daughter, Sylvia, has just graduated from high school. The sunlit island, its mountains and beaches, its tapas and tennis courts, also assure an escape from the tensions simmering at home in Manhattan. It promises nothing short of perfection.
But the problems of home are not so easily left behind: Sylvia's brother, Bobby, brings the older girlfriend his mother has never liked, and Franny's best friend, Charles, and his husband have their own problems to work out while simultaneously playing peace keepers for the Posts. Over the course of the vacation, secrets come to light, old and new humiliations are experienced, childhood rivalries resurface, and ancient wounds are exacerbated.
Its the mid-1960s, and the City is a hulking shell of itself. Bohemians, crooks, and snarling anti-Communists have their run of the place, but if Nathan Canada has his way, all this decline and decadence will soon be nothing but a distant memory. His New City Project will paper over the grit and the grime, making the City safe for the rich. According to Canada and his influential allies, the project is the City's last best hope - but according to everyone else in town, it's a death knell.
So when the Project's cache of explosives goes missing, everyone is a suspect, and police detective Torsten Grip finds himself up against a ticking clock and a wall of silence. Meanwhile, journalist Frank Frings - the last honest man in the City - sets out to find his friend's grandson, who has gotten himself involved with Kollectiv 61, a radical group that Grip believes holds the key to the investigation. And in the middle of it all is Canada's enforcer Phil Dorman, whose job it is to ensure that the City's corruption and chaos remain at a boil - but never more than that.
Emily Shepard is a homeless teen living in an igloo made of ice and trash bags filled with frozen leaves. Half a year earlier, a nuclear plant in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom had experienced a cataclysmic meltdown, and both of Emily's parents were killed. Devastatingly, her father was in charge of the plant, and the meltdown may have been his fault. Was he drunk when it happened? Thousands of people are forced to flee their homes in the Kingdom; rivers and forests are destroyed; and Emily feels certain that as the daughter of the most hated man in America, she is in danger. So instead of following the social workers and her classmates after the meltdown, Emily takes off on her own for Burlington, where she survives by stealing, sometimes sleeping on the floor of a drug dealer's apartment, and inventing a new identity for herself - an identity inspired by her favorite poet, Emily Dickenson. When Emily befriends a young homeless boy named Cameron, she protects him with a ferocity she didn't know she had. But she still can't outrun her past, can't escape her grief, can't hide forever - and so she comes up with the only plan that she can.
When novelist Owen Quine goes missing, his wife calls in private detective Cormoran Strike. At first, she thinks he's just gone off by himself for a few days - as he has done before - and she wants Strike to find him and bring him home.
But as Strike investigates, it becomes clear that there is more to Quine's disappearance than his wife realizes. The novelist has just completed a manuscript featuring poisonous pen-portraits of almost everyone he knows. If the novel is published, it will ruin lives - so there are a lot of people who might want to silence him.
And when Quine is found brutally murdered in bizarre circumstances, it becomes a race against time to understand the motivation of a ruthless killer, a killer unlike Strike has encountered before..
Mia and Lorrie Ann are lifelong friends: hardhearted Mia and untouchably beautiful, kind Lorrie Ann. While Mia struggles with a mother who drinks, a pregnancy at fifteen, and younger brothers she loves but can't quite be good to, Lorrie Ann is luminous, surrounded by her close-knit family, immune to the mistakes that mar her best friend's life. Then a sudden loss catapults Lorrie Ann to tragedy: things fall apart, and then fall further - and there is nothing Mia can do to help. And as good, brave fair Lorrie Ann stops being so good, Mia begins to question just who this woman is, and what that question means about them both.
When change is the only constant, the first step toward happiness is mastering the Art of Adapting...
Seven months after her husband leaves her, Lana is still reeling. Being single means she is in charge of every part of her life, but with two teenage children and a house she can barely afford on her solo salary, her new life is balancing act made even more complicated when her brother, Matt, moves in.
Matt has Asperger's syndrome, which makes social situations difficult for him and flexibility and change nearly impossible. Adding Matt's regimented routine to her already disrupted household seems like the last thing Lana needs, but her brother's unique attention to detail makes him an invaluable addition to the family - he sees things differently.
Matt sees his nephew, Byron, struggling to reconcile the part of him that is vying for popularity with the artistic side his father always stifled. He sees Abby, formerly an honors student and dedicated athlete, wasting away as she skips lunch to run laps. And most of all, he sees Lana, his once vibrant and independent sister, resigned to her role of mother and fulfilling everyone's needs except her own.
After mistakes and missteps, Lana and her family come to discover that knowing where you've come from is essential to figuring who you are and who you can grow to be.
As Tom marches to the front lines and Kezia battles to keep her ordered life from unraveling, they hide their despair in letters and cards filled with stories woven to bring comfort. Even Tom's fellow soldiers in the trenches enter and find solace in the dream world of Kezia's mouth-watering, albeit imaginary, meals. But will well-intended lies and self-deception be of any use when they come face-to-face with the enemy?
Madeline is a force to be reckoned with. She's funny, biting, and passionate; she remembers everything and forgives no one. Her ex-husband and his yogi new wife have moved into her beloved beachside community, and their daughter is in the same kindergarten class as Madeline's youngest. (How is this possible?) And to top it all off, Madeline's teenage daughter seems to be choosing Madeline's ex-husband over her. (How.Is.This.Possible?)
Celeste is the kind of beautiful woman who makes the world stop and stare. While she may seem a bit flustered at times, who wouldn't be, with those rambunctious twins? Now that the boys are starting school, Celeste and her husband look set to become the king and queen of the school parent body. but royalty often comes at a price, and Celeste is grappling with with how much more she is willing to pay.
For the Posts, a two-week trip to the Balearic island of Mallorca with their family and friends is a celebration: Franny and Jim are observing their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, and their daughter, Sylvia, has just graduated from high school. The sunlit island, its mountains and beaches, its tapas and tennis courts, also assure an escape from the tensions simmering at home in Manhattan. It promises nothing short of perfection.
But the problems of home are not so easily left behind: Sylvia's brother, Bobby, brings the older girlfriend his mother has never liked, and Franny's best friend, Charles, and his husband have their own problems to work out while simultaneously playing peace keepers for the Posts. Over the course of the vacation, secrets come to light, old and new humiliations are experienced, childhood rivalries resurface, and ancient wounds are exacerbated.
Its the mid-1960s, and the City is a hulking shell of itself. Bohemians, crooks, and snarling anti-Communists have their run of the place, but if Nathan Canada has his way, all this decline and decadence will soon be nothing but a distant memory. His New City Project will paper over the grit and the grime, making the City safe for the rich. According to Canada and his influential allies, the project is the City's last best hope - but according to everyone else in town, it's a death knell.
So when the Project's cache of explosives goes missing, everyone is a suspect, and police detective Torsten Grip finds himself up against a ticking clock and a wall of silence. Meanwhile, journalist Frank Frings - the last honest man in the City - sets out to find his friend's grandson, who has gotten himself involved with Kollectiv 61, a radical group that Grip believes holds the key to the investigation. And in the middle of it all is Canada's enforcer Phil Dorman, whose job it is to ensure that the City's corruption and chaos remain at a boil - but never more than that.
Emily Shepard is a homeless teen living in an igloo made of ice and trash bags filled with frozen leaves. Half a year earlier, a nuclear plant in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom had experienced a cataclysmic meltdown, and both of Emily's parents were killed. Devastatingly, her father was in charge of the plant, and the meltdown may have been his fault. Was he drunk when it happened? Thousands of people are forced to flee their homes in the Kingdom; rivers and forests are destroyed; and Emily feels certain that as the daughter of the most hated man in America, she is in danger. So instead of following the social workers and her classmates after the meltdown, Emily takes off on her own for Burlington, where she survives by stealing, sometimes sleeping on the floor of a drug dealer's apartment, and inventing a new identity for herself - an identity inspired by her favorite poet, Emily Dickenson. When Emily befriends a young homeless boy named Cameron, she protects him with a ferocity she didn't know she had. But she still can't outrun her past, can't escape her grief, can't hide forever - and so she comes up with the only plan that she can.
More, more, more....
Absolutely Almost, by Lisa Graff
Accidental Apprentice, by Vikas Swarup
Bared to You, by Sylvia Day
Black Country, by Alex Grecian
Book of Life, by Deborah Harkness
The Competition, by Marcia Clark
Confessions of Francis Godwin, by Robert Hellenga
Crystal City Lights, by Holly Moulder
The Death Cure, by James Dashner
Dragons Love Tacos, by Adam Rubin
The Elite, by Kiera Cass
Endangered, by Jean Love Cush
Entwined With You, by Sylvia Day
Escape From Mr. Lemoncello's Library, by Chris Grabenstein
Everything I Never Told You, by Celeste Ng
Gathering Blue, by Lois Lowry
God is an Astronaut, by Alyson Foster
Goodnight Goodnight Construction Sight, by Sherri Duske Rinker
Hard Luck, by Jeff Kinney
The Heist, by Daniel Silva
Hollow City, by Ransom Riggs
House of Hades, by Rick Riordan
House of Small Shadows, by Adam L.G. Nevell
How to Babysit a Grandma, by Jean Reagan
How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky, by Lydia Netzer
I Even Funnier, by James Patterson
I Funny, by James Patterson
Journey, by Aaron Becker
Last Night at the Blue Angel, by Rebecca Rotert
A Library Book for Bear, by Bonny Becker
A Long Walk to Water, by Linda Sue Park
Looking For Alaska, by John Green
The Maze Runner, by James Dashner
The Messenger, by Lois Lowry
Mockingbird Next Door, by Marja Mills
My New Friend is SO Fun, by Mo Willems
Night Searchers, by Marcia Muller
The One, by Kiera Cass
On a Clear Day, by Debbie Macomber
Perfect Life, by Danielle Steel
Pete the Cat and his Magic Sunglasses, by James Dean
The Raven Boys, by Maggie Stiefvater
Reflected in You, by Sylvia Day
Ruin and Rising, by Leigh Bardugo
Rush Revere and the First Patriots, by Rush Limbaugh
Scorch Trials, by James Dashner
Shadow and Bone, by Leigh Bardugo
Siege and Storm, by Leigh Bardugo
The Selection, by Kiera Cass
Sight Unseen, by Iris Johansen
Sniffer Dogs, by Nancy Castaldo
The Son, by Lois Lowry
Thirteen Reasons Why, by Jay Asher
The Visitors, by Sally Beauman
War of the Roses: Stormbird, by Conn Iggulden
Wayfaring Stranger, by James Lee Burke
We Were Liars, by E. Lockhart
Wildwood Creek, by Lisa Wingate
Wonder, by R.J. Palacio
