STAFF RECOMMENDATIONS
Nancy’s Picks
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
Marie Laure lives with her father in Paris within walking distance of the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of the locks (there are thousands of locks in the museum). When she is six, she goes blind, and her father builds her a model of their neighborhood, every house, every manhole, so she can memorize it with her fingers and navigate the real streets with her feet and cane. When the Germans occupy Paris, father and daughter flee to Saint-Malo on the Brittany coast, where Marie-Laure’s agoraphobic great uncle lives in a tall, narrow house by the sea wall. In another world in Germany, an orphan boy, Werner, grows up with his younger sister, Jutta, both enchanted by a crude radio Werner finds. He becomes a master at building and fixing radios, a talent that wins him a place at an elite and brutal military academy and, ultimately, makes him a highly specialized tracker of the Resistance. Werner travels through the heart of Hitler Youth to the far-flung outskirts of Russia, and finally into Saint-Malo, where his path converges with Marie-Laure. Doerr’s gorgeous combination of soaring imagination with observation is electric. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing,All the Light We Cannot See is his most ambitious and dazzling work.
Delicious! by Ruth Reichl
Billie Breslin has traveled far from her California home to take a job at Delicious, the most iconic food magazine in New York and, thus, the world. When the publication is summarily shut down, the colorful staff, who have become an extended family for Billie, must pick up their lives and move on. Not Billie, though. She is offered a new job: staying behind in the magazine’s deserted downtown mansion offices to uphold the “Delicious Guarantee”-a public relations hotline for complaints and recipe inquiries-until further notice. What she doesn’t know is that this boring, lonely job will be the portal to a life-changing discovery.
Delicious! carries the reader to the colorful world of downtown New York restaurateurs and artisanal purveyors, and from the lively food shop in Little Italy where Billie works on weekends to a hidden room in the magazine’s library where she discovers the letters of Lulu Swan, a plucky twelve-year-old, who wrote to the legendary chef James Beard during World War II. Lulu’s letters lead Billie to a deeper understanding of history (and the history of food), but most important, Lulu’s courage in the face of loss inspires Billie to come to terms with her own issues-the panic attacks that occur every time she even thinks about cooking, the truth about the big sister she adored, and her ability to open her heart to love.
Maria’s Picks for Young Adults
If you liked Divergent, Legend and Infernal Devices Series, you’ll like Scarlet Book by Marissa Meyer – the Gregory Maguire of Teen Fiction!
If you liked Under the Never Sky, you’ll enjoy Let the Sky Fall by Shannon Messenger
Maria’s Recommended Juvenile Fiction
If you liked Liar & Spy, and Moon Over Manifest, then you’ll enjoy The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate.
If you liked Percy Jackson & the Olympians, and I am #4, you’ll enjoy The Colossus Rises: Seven Wonders Book #1 by Peter Lerangis.
Curses! Foiled again: Foiled Book #2 by Jane Yolen – if you liked The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There, Anya’s Ghost andThe Last Dragon
If you enjoyed reading Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Calvin & Hobbes and Vordax series,then you’ll like Timmy Failure by Stephen Pastis
Ken’s Picks