Sisterhood everlasting - Ann Brashares

Sisterhood everlasting: a novel - Brashares, Ann

Summary: Having lost touch with each other over the years, Carmen, Lena, and Bridget are surprised when they receive plane tickets to travel to Australia for a reunion with Tibby, but after tragedy strikes their lives are changed forever.



Booklist Reviews
Brashares' bestselling YA series, the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, follows four fiercely devoted best friends who shared a pair of near-magical jeans ("According to our mythology, they had the power to keep us together when we were apart"). In the new installment, the pants have been lost for 10 years, and the sisters, now in their late twenties and separated by time zones, struggle to maintain their close bonds. A reunion in Greece creates an opportunity to reconnect, but three of the friends arrive to find that their beloved fourth has drowned in a possible suicide. Most of the novel focuses on the central characters as they try to return to life in the wake of the tragedy, and the transitions between viewpoints are occasionally disjointed. But, like Francesca Lia Block, who has followed the lead heroine of her watershed YA novel, Weetzie Bat (1989), into her forties, Brashares nimbly ages her characters, nicely capturing late-twentysomething concerns about marriage, motherhood, and careers as well as love's enduring power to mend the ruptures of grief. Copyright 2011 Booklist Reviews.

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The devotion of suspect X - Keigo Higashino

The devotion of suspect X - Higashino, Keigo

Summary: Yasuko Hanaoka thought she had escaped her abusive ex-husband Togashi. When he shows up one day, the situation quickly escalates and Togashi ends up dead. Yasuko's next-door-neighbor Ishigami offers his help, not only disposing of the body, but plotting the cover-up as well.



Booklist Reviews
One of Japan's best-selling crime novelists makes his American debut in an atmospheric thriller about a desperate woman, Yasuko, who, craving a peacefull life with her daughter, Misato, kills her abusive lout of an ex-husband. The next-door neighbor, Ishigami, helps hide the body and improvises a cover-up. When the body is eventually found, however, determined investigator Kusanagi, with the help of Dr. Yukawa, a physicist who knew Ishigami in college, senses that something is amiss with Yasuko's story. A cat-and-mouse, Dostoevsky-like investigation ensues. Higashino explores just how far a relationship built on a terrible event can last. Suggest to readers familiar with Natsuo Kirino (Real World, 2008), another Japanese master of psychological crime fiction, and Karin Fossum, whose Norway-set thrillers are also drenched in psychological terror. Copyright 2011 Booklist Reviews.

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The ridge - Michael Koryta

The ridge - Koryta, Michael


Summary: For years, a lighthouse at the top of a hill called Blade Ridge has lit up the surrounding woods. But when the lighthouse keeper is found dead, strange things begin happening to the people and animals in the area.



Staff Review:
Really scary thriller. Another completely unique read from Mr. Koryta

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Ariel: the restored edition - Sylvia Plath

Ariel: the restored edition - Plath, Sylvia

Summary: Seeking to restore the selection and arrangement originally intended by Plath at the time of her death, this edition of her final works features a facsimile of her complete working drafts of the title poem provided to offer insight into her creative process.



Booklist Reviews
Plath and her indelible writings have been subjected to a veritable hurricane of commentary. The storm seems to be subsiding, and although it does leave devastation in its wake--the unfair vilification of poet Ted Hughes, Plath's husband, the father of their two children and the holder of the copyright to Plath's writing--it has also kept Plath's work in the public eye, and it has inspired the publication of this treasure: the original manuscript for Plath's masterpiece, Ariel. As Frieda Hughes, a poet and an artist, explains in her set-the-record-straight foreword, her mother left behind a manuscript of 40 poems ordered by a table of contents as well as around 30 more poems written in what Frieda calls the "Ariel voice." When Ted Hughes published Ariel, he replaced and rearranged poems, editorial decisions that have been harshly criticized. Now, finally, readers can see Plath's actual manuscript in this handsome facsimile, which provides a missing piece in the Plath annals and proves that there's nothing like going to the source. ((Reviewed October 15, 2004)) Copyright 2004 Booklist Reviews.


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Memories of my melancholy whores - Garcia Marquez, Gabriel

Summary: Having decided to celebrate his ninetieth birthday by spending the night with a young virgin, an old man falls deeply in love for the first time in his life when he spots the girl at a local brothel. 250,000 first printing. - (Baker & Taylor)



Booklist Reviews
/*Starred Review*/ The Colombian master storyteller's latest novel is grounded in the steamy atmosphere and gamey politics of his native country; at the same time, in the universality of its theme, it transcends the peculiar traits of his bougainvillea-filled homeland. Composed with the metaphorical lyricism of a parable but without that narrative form's usual moralizing intent, Garcia Marquez's novel briefly but piquantly captures a single year toward the end of a long string of years in the life of a nonagenarian who, ironically, given the length of his tenure on the planet, proves himself still capable of undergoing a significant life alteration. The unnamed protagonist, an unmarried man, is a columnist for the local newspaper, but until this point in time, he has never written anything of lasting value. This memoir, this recollection of the past year, is to be his literary legacy. "The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin," he boldly--and, perhaps, in a delusion of potency--declares. It is soon revealed--sadly--that he has never loved, that his sexual gratification has always been bought and paid for. What his brazen plan to celebrate this milestone birthday comes to entail is a confrontation with a heretofore unrealized aspect of his "inner self"--namely, that sex without love is an empty house in which to dwell. Garcia Marquez's beautiful, poignant story both avoids sentimentality and escapes salaciousness. ((Reviewed August 2005)) Copyright 2005 Booklist Reviews.


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The best advice I ever got - Katie Couric

The best advice I ever got: lessons from extraordinary lives - Couric, Katie

Summary: In this collection, CBS News anchor Couric calls upon leaders and visionaries in the fields of politics, entertainment, sports, philanthropy, the arts, and business, all of whom share heartfelt insights about success and fulfillment. Includes contributions by Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton, Chelsea Handler, Malcolm Gladwell, Steve Martin, Helen Mirren, and dozens of others.

Kirkus Reviews
Award-winning anchor of the CBS Evening News compiles insights and advice from influential public figures for any stage of life.

What do Beyonce and General David Petraeus have in common? They're among the more than 100 entertainers, entrepreneurs, political figures and journalists doling out words of wisdom in Couric's collection. In an easy-to-read format, the author assembles an array of advice from successful people, and her tone is casual and upbeat. Divided into different themes, such as courage, hard work and contribution, the book veers between the humorous and the poignant. Finance expert Suze Orman describes her struggles as a waitress, and late war hero Edmund N. Carpenter II shares his approach to life in a candid essay he wrote in 1938 at the tender age of 17. Couric seamlessly weaves in the lessons she has learned along the way, sharing anecdotes from her own life, which has not been without hardship. She opens up about her husband's early death from cancer and the sexist attitudes she faced as the first woman to solo-anchor a major newscast. Most of the advice found here isn't earth-shattering—Bill Cosby says he was his own worst enemy, Larry King suggests readers "learn how to listen"—but it comes from people who have excelled with talent, luck and lots of hard work. The author's profits will be donated to Scholarship America, an organization that helps students go to college.

Readers looking to browse for a little inspiration can also help a worthy cause.


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Everyone loves you when you're dead - Neil Strauss

Everyone loves you when you're dead: journeys into fame and madness - Strauss, Neil

Summary: The author collects the most revealing moments from his celebrity interviews, including Tom Cruise's thoughts on Scientology, Snoop Dogg on record companies and baby diapers, and Eric Clapton's thoughts on the death of Kurt Cobain.


Kirkus Reviews
Veteran pop-culture journalist Strauss (Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life, 2009, etc.) offers an eclectic collection of interviews with the "artists, celebrities, and crazy people of the world."

By his own count, the author has conducted some 3,000 interviews with the famous, not-so-famous, used-to-be-famous and ought-to-be-famous denizens of popular culture. Here he brings together the best of these interviews in loosely and at times bizarrely connected chapters. All the well-knowns are here, including Madonna, Lady Gaga, David Bowie, The Who, Kenny G, Led Zeppelin, Puffy Combs and Bo Diddley. The author also includes many lesser-known artists, such as the master mandolin player Johnny Staats, who still drives a UPS truck, and the pioneering electronic-music artist Patrick Miller, who was taken early by drugs—as are too many of the subjects here. Known or unknown, they all have something to say. The subject is not always clear, as Strauss often introduces an interview, drops it and returns to it many pages later, but that is part of the fun of his anarchic presentation. Bruce Springsteen is typically modest, noting that one of the main motivations of his music is "to try to be useful." Chuck Berry is open, funny and scatological. Johnny Cash and Loretta Lynn are achingly poignant as they speak of death and courage. Motley Crue gets arrested. And so it goes with hundreds of other interviews. In a concluding tribute to the late critic Paul Nelson, Strauss wonders if such obsession with pop culture is worth it. He concludes that it is, if only to allow us to reflect on our own faults and follies and on what we have and think we want.

Gonzo interviewing at its best.
Copyright Kirkus 2011 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved.

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The last days of Ptolemy Grey - Walter Mosley

The last days of Ptolemy Grey - Mosley, Walter

Summary: Ptolemy Grey is a 91-year-old man, suffering from dementia and living as a recluse in his Los Angeles apartment. Then Robyn Small, a 17-year-old family friend, appears and helps clean up his apartment and straighten out his life. A reinvigorated Ptolemy volunteers for an experimental medical program that restores his mind, and he uses his last days--shortened now by the medical experiment--to delve into the mystery of the recent drive-by shooting death of his great-nephew, Reggie.

Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* Ptolemy Grey is a 91-year-old African American living alone in violent South Central L.A. Frail and suffering from dementia, largely forgotten by his extended family, he can't remember to eat, his mind "scattered over nearly a hundred years." He relives events marked by racism, lynching, poverty, and longing for his long-dead wife. His great-grand nephew, Reggie, takes him to the grocery store and prompts him to eat. When Reggie is killed in a drive-by shooting, Ptolemy's days appear to be numbered. But Robyn, a beautiful, resourceful 17-year-old, steps in. As she sees to Ptolemy's needs, she awakens his desire for the lucidity he once had, and he meets a doctor who offers him a chance for several months of mental clarity before almost certain death. Mosley's dramatic departure from his Easy Rawlins and Leonid McGill crime novels appears to be a very personal one, a deeply thoughtful, provocative, and often beautiful meditation on aging, memory, family, loss, and love. Ptolemy and Robynare truly indelible characters. Mosley's story is ultimately life affirming, and his writing is by turns gritty and sublime. Baby boomers caring for aged parents, or thinking about their own mortality, will line up for The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey. Mosley's fans of any age will also embrace it, and every library will be better for adding it. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: A return to top form for Mosley, who has slumped a bit since ending his Easy Rawlins series. An aggressive marketing campaign and a poignant autobiographical connection (Mosley helped care for a relative with dementia) will draw deserved attention to a very fine novel.

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Adrift on the Nile - Najib Mahfuz

Adrift on the Nile - Mahfuz, Najib

Summary: For the thousands of devoted readers of Naguib Mahfouz's The Cairo Trilogy, Adrift on the Nile--first published in Arabic in 1966--will be an exciting and dramatic change of pace. In elegant and economic prose, Mahfouz creates--out of the simplest of plots--a telling commentary on human nature. It is the late sixties, and for the group of friends who meet night after night on a houseboat moored along the banks of the Nile, life is not what it used to be. Nasser has ushered in an age of enormous social change; responsibility is the watchword, and there is no time for the frivolous or the absurd. In this serious world, the theory of "art for art's sake" has been usurped by the concepts of committed theater, social realism, and art with a message for the people. These middle-aged and middle-class sons and daughters of the old bourgeoisie are left high and dry, to gather beneath the moonlight, smoking and chatting, hoping to re-create the cozy and enchanted world they so dearly miss. Their witty sallies are as inconsequential as the midges that weave around the lamp. They wistfully hark back to the High Middle Ages of the Mamluk sultans. Their constant companion is the pipe, filled with kif or hashish, whose heady smoke provides oblivion from their existential terror and despair. But one night, art and reality collide--with unforeseen consequences. At once thrilling and deeply serious, Adrift on the Nile is a tale that exposes the crisis of man--and artist--in modern times.

Library Journal Reviews
In Nobel Prize winner Mahfouz's newly translated work, a houseboat on the Nile is a nightly diversion for a small circle of friends. Careers in the arts, business, law, and civil service are forgotten as the waterpipe makes its rounds, the intoxicating kif erasing all sense of responsibility. Anis, the ``master of ceremonies,'' tends the pipe and drifts in his narcotic dreams while the others extol the absurdity of addiction. Their tranquility ends, however, when Samara, a young journalist, comes to study the group. She is the grain of seriousness that irritates them in their escapist shell, and around her swirls a nightly dispute over purpose, duty, love, and morality. A car accident crystallizes the argument, shattering the group as each confronts inescapable responsibility. The houseboat is a consistent metaphor in Mahfouz's writing, the vessel of escape in a complex and changing society. Adrift on the Nile skillfully dissects this metaphor but sacrifices the rich narrative and vibrant life that mark his other works.-- Paul E. Hutchison, Bellefonte, Pa. Copyright 1993 Cahners Business Information.


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Arabian sands - Wilfred Thesiger

Arabian sands - Thesiger, Wilfred

Summary: Arabian Sands is Wilfred Thesiger's record of his extraordinary journey through the parched Empty Quarter of Arabia. Educated at Eton and Oxford, Thesiger was repulsed by the softness and rigidity of Western life--the machines, the calling cards, the meticulously aligned streets. In the spirit of T. E. Lawrence, he set out to explore the deserts of Arabia, traveling among peoples who had never seen a European and considered it their duty to kill Christian infidels. His now-classic account is invaluable to understanding the modern Middle East. - (Penguin Putnam)

Reviews
"Following worthily in the tradition of Burton, Lawrence, Philby and Thomas, [Arabian Sands] is, very likely, the book about Arabia to end all books about Arabia."
-The Daily Telegraph, London

"The narrative is vividly written, with a thousand little anecdotes and touches which bring back to any who have seen these countries every scene with the colour of real life."
-The Sunday Times, London


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All Souls - Michael Patrick MacDonald

All Souls: a family story from Southie - MacDonald, Michael Patrick

Summary: The author recounts growing up in a poor Irish neighborhood, and remembers the four brothers he lost to violence - (Baker & Taylor)




Kirkus Reviews
An incendiary, moving book that startles on nearly every page. The notorious anti-busing riots of 1974 forever altered the insular working-class Irish community of South Boston, branding it indelibly as a dangerous, racist enclave. Anti-violence activist MacDonald grew up there and lost four out of eight siblings to violence in those dark times; his debut assesses both his family history, and related secret tales of class strife, bigotry, corruption, and vanished lives. MacDonald utilizes the classically Irish viewpoint of the stoic child to re-create a harsh arena of a 1970s ghetto and urban poverty. His single Ma felt blessed when a local politician secured her entrance to the majority-Irish Old Colony project, the best place in the world''; once there, the MacDonalds had to prove their mettle against delinquents with shotguns, thus acquiring the patina of craziness necessary for survival. At first, the nuances of color seemed minor against a vividly rendered backdrop of economic difficulty and the depraved mainstreaming of hard drugs and street crime. Then came the riots; MacDonald s surefooted (neither hardened nor sentimental) narrative takes us through the years of malaise and violence that followed, as politically connected gangsters, such as the notorious Whitey Bulger, expanded the area s drug trade while violently enforcing a macho myth of silent Southie unity, itself built on the long-burnished notion that the white community was somehow different from such similarly working-class, embattled black areas as Roxbury. This explication of how such phenomena of white class-consciousness encouraged the wholesale deterioration of his neighborhood and contributed to the demise of some 250 young people is a devastating cultural indictment. MacDonald s nimble prose and detailed recall of grim times long past make for luminous reading; his hard-won conception of how ghettoized poverty spawns localized violence, and the dignity he brings to lives snuffed out in chaos, gives All Souls a moral urgency usually lacking in current memoir or crime prose. A remarkable work. (Author tour) Copyright 1999 Kirkus Reviews

Ingri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire's book of Greek myths - Ingri D'Aulaire

Ingri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire's book of Greek myths - D'Aulaire, Ingri

Summary: An introduction to the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece. - (Baker & Taylor)




Reviews
"For any child fortunate enough to have this generous book...the kings and heroes of ancient legend will remain forever matter-of-fact; the pictures interpret the text literally and are full of detail and witty observation."--Horn Book.

"The drawings...are excellent and excitingly evocative."--The New York Times.


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Lockdown - Walter Dean Myers

Lockdown - Myers, Walter Dean

Summary: Teenage Reese, serving time at a juvenile detention facility, gets a lesson in making it through hard times from an unlikely friend with a harrowing past.



Booklist Reviews
Myers takes readers inside the walls of a juvenile corrections facility in this gritty novel. Fourteen-year-old Reese is in the second year of his sentence for stealing prescription pads and selling them to a neighborhood dealer. He fears that his life is headed in a direction that will inevitably lead him "upstate," to the kind of prison you don't leave. His determination to claw his way out of the downward spiral is tested when he stands up to defend a weaker boy, and the resulting recriminations only seem to reinforce the impossibility of escaping a hopeless future. Reese's first-person narration rings with authenticity as he confronts the limits of his ability to describe his feelings, struggling to maintain faith in himself; Myers' storytelling skills ensure that the messages he offers are never heavy-handed. The question of how to escape the cycle of violence and crime plaguing inner-city youth is treated with a resolution that suggests hope, but doesn't guarantee it. A thoughtful book that could resonate with teens on a dangerous path. Copyright 2009 Booklist Reviews.


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Paris Trout - Pete Dexter

Paris Trout - Dexter, Peter

Publishers Weekly Reviews
An expertly crafted and bleakly fascinating tale of social conflict and madness in the deep South, this novel centers on the eponymous Paris Trout, owner of a general store and other property in Cotton Point, Ga., during the years just after World War II. A cunning, violent man, with deep roots in the community, Trout has become an economic predator of the town's poor blacks by running a loan service for them out of the safe in his store's back room. The tensions between Trout and the blacks reaches a critical point when Trout, along with a strong-arm goon, murders an 11-year-old black girl and badly injures a black woman while collecting a debt. Into the vortex of this storm are drawn a number of other characters, highlighting the racial and social divisions of Cotton Point: lawyer and gentleman Harry Seagraves, who is repelled by the case; Paris's wife Hannah, brutalized by her husband and in powerful psychological bondage to him; and Carl Bonner, a young, idealistic lawyer who seesaws between his past in the town and his recently acquired sense of being an outsider in its circumscribed society. Trout's murder trial forces Cotton Point to face some dark truths, while setting in motion a chain of events that lead to a crescendo of violence. Dexter (Deadwood, God's Pocket) is a deft and economical storyteller and a cruel but observant chronicler of deep South customs and characters, with something of a Faulknerian feeling for the bullying violence that can lay at the heart of an inbred small town. (June) Copyright 1988 Cahners Business Information.

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The professor and the madman - Simon Winchester

The professor and the madman: a tale of murder, insanity, and the making of the Oxford English Dictionary - Winchester, Simon

Summary: Describes how more than ten thousand definitions were submitted for the first Oxford English Dictionary from Dr. W. C. Minor, an American Civil War criminal whose life of genius and insanity make this true story both fascinating and unique. BOMC. - (Baker & Taylor)


Booklist Reviews
Distinguished journalist Winchester tells a marvelous, true story that few readers will have heard about. His narrative is based on official government files locked away for more than a century. As everyone knows, the Oxford English Dictionary is an essential library reference tool. The 12-volume OED took more than 70 years to produce, and one of its most distinguishing features is the copious quotations from published works to illustrate every shade of word usage. By the late 1890s the huge project was nearly half done, and the editor at the time, Professor James Murray, felt the need to meet and personally thank Dr. William Minor, with whom he had been in lengthy contact and who had contributed a lion's share of the quotations. As it turned out, Dr. Minor was an American surgeon who many years before had been found not guilty of murder by reason of insanity but had been incarcerated in an English asylum ever since. The tale of their affiliation and friendship reads like a creatively conceived novel. ((Reviewed August 1998)) Copyright 2000 Booklist Reviews


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Dancing with butterflies: a novel - Reyna Grande

Dancing with butterflies: a novel - Grande, Reyna


Summary: Chronicles the story of four women in Los Angeles bound together in friendship by their Mexican roots and their love of Folklorico dance. - (Baker & Taylor)



Booklist Reviews
"Mexican-born Grande focuses on a subculture in the Latino community to explore universal themes in this worthy follow-up to her award-winning debut novel, Across a Hundred Mountains (2006). Folklórico, a dance that emphasizes the local culture of different regions of Mexico, is the focus around which the stories of four L.A. women and their losses are intertwined. Yesería, who founded Grupo Folklorico Alegría, takes desperate measures to regain her ability and appearance after arthritis curtails her performing. Elena, an Alegría member who codirects a folklórico group at the high school where she teaches, is so immobilized by grief after her baby is stillborn that she ends both her marriage and her dancing. Her younger sister and fellow dancer, Adriana, still angry over childhood events, increasingly allows her lesser self to lapse into destructive behavior. Soledad, a skilled seamstress who makes the group's costumes, has her hopes for the future dashed by the man she loves. Yet the strength of folklórico prevails, as the novel celebrates the sheer exhilaration and physicality of dance and the sustenance of female bonding." Copyright 2009 Booklist Reviews.

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The silent land - Joyce Graham

The silent land - Graham, Joyce

Summary: Buried under a flash avalanche while skiing, young married couple Jake and Zoe miraculously dig their way out only to discover themselves alone in an eerily silent, evacuated region and unable to contact the outside world.



Staff Review:
This book kept me guessing. Is it a survival novel? Is it a horror story? Is it a ghost story? It's definitely a love story, and it really pulls you in. (From Stephen King's summer reading list.)

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Mermaid: a twist on the classic tale - Carolyn Turgeon

Mermaid: a twist on the classic tale - Turgeon, Carolyn

Summary: Princess Margrethe has been hidden away while her kingdom is at war. One gloomy, windswept morning, as she stands in a convent garden overlooking the icy sea, she witnesses a miracle: a glittering mermaid emerging from the waves, a nearly drowned man in her arms. By the time Margrethe reaches the shore, the mermaid has disappeared in to the sea. As Margrethe nurses the handsome stranger back to health, she learns that not only is he a prince, he is also the son of her father's greatest rival. Sure that the mermaid brought this man to her for a reason, Margrethe devises a plan to bring peace to her kingdom. Meanwhile, the mermaid princess Lenia longs to return to the human man she carried to safety. She is willing to trade her home, her voice, and even her health for legs and a chance to win his heart.--From back cover.

Booklist Reviews
Turgeon refashions Hans Christian Andersen's beloved classic, The Little Mermaid, into something altogether darker and more foreboding. When two women from two decidedly different worlds fall for the same prince, what else can ensue but heartache and misery? After rescuing a human from the sea, mermaid Princess Lenia falls hard for Prince Christopher, even agreeing to give up her beautiful voice and to endure the constant pain caused by her new legs in order to pursue him on dry land. Meanwhile, Princess Margrethe has also set her sights on the handsome prince in hopes of uniting their two warring kingdoms. With Lenia's life on the line and war looming on the horizon, the prince's choice is bound to have catastrophic consequences. More robust than a fractured fairy tale, Turgeon's brooding retelling gives voice to both women, fleshing out an essentially tragic tale of destiny and desire. Not exactly a cozy bedtime story, but guaranteed to keep you guessing who—if anyone—will live happily ever after. Copyright 2011 Booklist Reviews.


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The tiger's wife - Tea Obreht

The tiger's wife - Obreht, Tea

Summary: Struggling to understand why his beloved grandfather left his family to die alone in a field hospital far from home, a young doctor in a war-torn Balkan country takes over her grandfather's search for a mythical ageless vagabond while referring to a worn copy of Rudyard Kipling's "The Jungle Book."



Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* Not even Obreht's place on the New Yorker's current "20 under 40" list of exceptional writers will prepare readers for the transporting richness and surprise of this gripping novel of legends and loss in a broken land. Drawing on the former Yugoslavia's fabled past and recent bloodshed, Belgrade-born Obreht portrays two besieged doctors. Natalia is on an ill-advised "good will" medical mission at an orphanage on what is suddenly the "other side," now that war has broken out, when she learns that her grandfather, a distinguished doctor forced out of his practice by ethnic divides, has died far from home. She is beset by memories, particularly of her grandfather taking her to the zoo to see the tigers. We learn the source of his fascination in mesmerizing flashbacks, meeting the village butcher, the deaf-mute Muslim woman he married, and a tiger who escaped the city zoo after it was bombed by the Germans. Of equal mythic mystery is the story of the "deathless man." Moments of breathtaking magic, wildness, and beauty are paired with chilling episodes in which superstition overrides reason; fear and hatred smother compassion; and inexplicable horror rules. Every word, every scene, every thought is blazingly alive in this many-faceted, spellbinding, and rending novel of death, succor, and remembrance. Copyright 2011 Booklist Reviews.

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Simply from scratch - Alicia Bessette

Simply from scratch - Bessette, Alicia

Summary: After she joins a baking contest to try to shake off the lingering grief from her husband's death, Zell Carmichael Roy befriends her nine-year-old next-door neighbor, a motherless girl who joins Zell's quest for dessert-competition glory.



Kirkus Reviews
In this nicely wrought debut, a young widow emerges from her grief thanks to the intrusion of a nine-year-old neighbor and an unwinnable cooking contest.

As the novel opens, Rose-Ellen, Zell to her friends, nearly burns down her house. Attempting to enter the Polly Pinch Desserts That Warm the Soul Baking Contest (a satire of the perky Rachael Ray), Zell doesn't notice there's a wrapped present in her preheating oven. The present was left over a year ago by her late husband Nick in a favorite hiding place from the noncooking Zell, and now it is a cindered mess, left unopened and thrown in the attic. The fire serves as a happy catalyst—she begins to reconnect with old friends whom she's pushed away, and she meets her new neighbor Ingrid, the little girl whose misdelivered Polly Pinch magazine inspired Zell's attempt at baking. It's not the baking that interests either of them—Zell wants the $20,000 cash prize to donate to a Hurricane Katrina relief fund—Nick, who worked for their small-town Massachusetts newspaper, was killed in a freak accident while photographing the rebuilding in New Orleans—while Ingrid is obsessed with Polly Pinch because the motherless girl is convinced Polly is her real mom. Zell goes along with this (though she admits, if the redheaded, freckled Polly Pinch were African-American, she would look an awful lot like Ingrid), but the wild story alienates Ingrid at school, and so she and Zell bond and begin baking together. While Ingrid's hunky dad is busy with law school, Zell, her beloved greyhound Ahab and Ingrid spend countless hours in the kitchen creating perfectly inedible desserts. In a story about loneliness, the two are a perfect fit, both attempting in their own ways to re-create connections to their missing loved ones. Then the unthinkable happens—they finally make something good enough to get in the runoffs and are invited on the show, where Ingrid can finally meet her "mother."

Quietly charming, with a dash of romance.
Copyright Kirkus 2010 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved.

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Robopocalypse: a novel - Daniel H. Wilson

Robopocalypse: a novel - Wilson, Daniel H.

Summary: A tale set in the near future finds the world thrown into chaos by rebelling artificial intelligences under the leadership of a murderous technology called Archos that kills its creator and takes over the global network, triggering an unprecedented united front among all human cultures. By the author of How to Build a Robot Army. 150,000 first printing. - (Baker & Taylor)


Staff Review:
A really scary thriller, this sci-fi chiller is set in the aftermath of a robot uprising. (From Stephen King's summer reading list)

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A game of thrones - George R.R. Martin

A game of thrones - Martin, George R.R.

Summary: A tale of court intrigues in the land of Seven Kingdoms, a country blessed by golden summers that go on for years, and cursed by cruel winters that can last a generation.




Kirkus Reviews
~ After a long silence (Portraits of his Children, stories, 1987), the author of the cult The Armageddon Rag (1983) returns with the first of a fantasy series entitled, insipidly enough, A Song of Ice and Fire. In the Seven Kingdoms, where the unpredictable seasons may last decades, three powerful families allied themselves in order to smash the ruling Targaryens and depose their mad king, Rhaegar. Robert Baratheon claimed the throne and took to wife Tywin Lannister's daughter, Cersei; Ned Stark returned north to gloomy Winterfell with its massive, ancient Wall that keeps wildings and unspeakable creatures from invading. Some years later, Robert, now drunk and grossly fat, asks Ned to come south and help him govern; reluctantly, since he mistrusts the treacherous Lannisters, Ned complies. Honorable Ned soon finds himself caught up in a whirl of plots, espionage, whispers, and double-dealing and learns to his horror that the royal heir, Joffrey, isn't Robert's son at all but, rather, the product of an incestuous union between the Queen and her brother Jaime--he murdered Rhaegar despite the latter's surrender. Ned attempts to bargain with Cersei and steels himself to tell Robert--but too late. Swiftly the Lannisters murder the King, consign Ned to a dungeon, and prepare to seize the throne, opposed only by the remaining Starks and Baratheons. On the mainland, meanwhile, the brutal and stupid Viserys Targaryen sells his sister Dany to a barbarian horse-warrior in return for a promise of armies to help him reconquer the Seven Kingdoms. A vast, rich saga, with splendid characters and an intricate plot flawlessly articulated against a backdrop of real depth and texture. Still, after 672 dense pages, were you expecting a satisfying resolution? You won't get it: Be prepared for a lengthy series with an indefinitely deferred conclusion. Copyright 1999 Kirkus Reviews


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Work song - Ivan Doig

Work song - Doig, Ivan

Summary: In 1919, itinerant schoolteacher Morrie Morgan journeys to Butte in the hopes of making his fortune in copper mining but finds instead a rich assortment of local characters before an encounter with a former student leads to a violent union uprising.



Booklist Reviews
Doig's fictional forays into Montana history have long been distinguished by the author's ability to make compelling human drama out of the small-canvas concerns of everyday people. He did it with a one-room school in the outstanding Whistling Season (2006), and he does it again here with seemingly even more mundane subjects: the on-the-job tribulations of a librarian and the composition of a work song to inspire the beleaguered miners in Butte, Montana, in the early twentieth century. The librarian, the charismatic, quasi–con man Morrie Morris, returns from his stint as a teacher in Whistling Season; this time he lands in Butte eager to fill his pockets with some of the cash that's pouring from the city's copper mines but winds up working in the library instead. That leads to some clandestine songwriting, as the local miners attempt to create a suitably moving ditty to drive the troops in what looks like an upcoming strike. As usual, Doig incorporates plenty of large-canvas history into his mix of romance and human drama—the role of the Wobblies in confronting the West's implacable industrialists; the particulars of coal mining; and even the Black Sox scandal in the 1919 World Series—and, also as usual, he tiptoes ever so carefully on the literary ledge that separates warm, character-driven drama from sentimental melodrama. He nearly loses his footing a time or two here, unlike in the perfectly balanced Whistling Season, but on the whole, this is an engaging, leisurely paced look at labor, libraries, and love in a roughneck mining town. Copyright 2010 Booklist Reviews.

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The whistling season - Ivan Doig

The whistling season - Doig, Ivan

Summary: Hired as a housekeeper to work on the early 1900s Montana homestead of widower Oliver Milliron, the irreverent and perpetually whistling Rose and her font-of-knowledge brother, Morris, endeavor to educate the widower's reluctant sons while witnessing local efforts on a massive irrigation project. 60,000 first printing. - (Baker & Taylor)

Booklist Reviews
/*Starred Review*/ Doig's latest foray through Montana history begins in the late 1950s, with Superintendent of Public Instruction Paul Milliron on the verge of announcing the closure of the state's one-room schools, seen as hopelessly out of date in the age of Sputnik. But quickly the narrative takes us back to Paul's pivotal seventh-grade year, 1910, when he was a student in one of those one-room schools, and two landmark events took place: the Milliron family acquired a housekeeper, and Halley's comet came to Montana. Throughout his long career, Doig has been at his best when chronicling the passing of a season in the lives of a Montana family, usually farmers at around the turn of the century. It's no surprise, then, that this is his best novel since the marvelous English Creek (1985). As in all of his books, he digs the details of his historical moments from the dirt in which they thrived. We see Paul, his father, and his two younger brothers struggling to make a life on their dryland farm in the wake of their mother's death, and we feel their shock when they lay eyes on their new housekeeper, a recent widow who looks nothing like the "great-bosomed creature shrouded in gray" they had come to expect. The saga of how this stranger from Minneapolis and her brother (soon to become the new teacher) change lives in unexpected ways has all the charm of old-school storytelling, from Dickens to Laura Ingalls Wilder. Doig's antique narrative voice, which sometimes jars, feels right at home here, coming from the mouth of the young Paul, who is eagerly learning Latin as he tries to make sense of his ever-enlarging world. An entrancing new chapter in the literature of the West. ((Reviewed December 15, 2005)) Copyright 2005 Booklist Reviews.


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The memory palace - Mira Bartok

The memory palace - Bartok, Mira


Summary: A gorgeous memoir about the 17 year estrangement of the author and her homeless schizophrenic mother, and their reunion.



Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* Bartók's mother, Norma Herr, was a pianist who suffered from schizophrenia and was homeless for much of her life. When Bartók was a child, her unpredictable mother tried to jump out of a second-floor window. After enduring years of painful uncertainty, Bartók and her sister made the difficult decision to cut off all ties to their mother, with only a post office address as a tenuous connection. They changed their names, too, and had unpublished telephone numbers and addresses. Only after Bartók suffered a debilitating brain injury in an automobile accident and discovered her mother's stored artifacts were she and her mother able to re-connect. After the accident, Bartók covered her computer with Post-it notes of "things I can't remember anymore," yet memories of her childhood fill these pages as images come flooding back and she tries valiantly to make sense of them within a contemporary context that bridges the past and the present. By the time mother and daughter meet again, some 17 years later in 2006, her mother is dying from cancer. Poignant, powerful, disturbing, and exceedingly well-written, this is an unforgettable memoir of loss and recovery, love and forgiveness. Copyright 2010 Booklist Reviews.

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Small island - Andrea Levy

Small Island - Levy, Andrea

A novel of the immigrant experience brings together the lives of four very different people--Hortense Joseph, a recent arrival in London from Jamaica; her husband Gilbert, a war veteran who finds himself as a black man in Britain to be a second-class citizen; Queenie, Gilbert's white landlady; and her husband, Bernard, a fellow veteran of World War II. Winner of the 2004 Orange Prize for Fiction. Original. 25,000 first printing. - (Baker & Taylor)


Kirkus Reviews
The winner of the 2004 Whitbread Book of the Year Award and the 2004 Orange Prize-the first writer to win both for the same novel-draws on her Jamaican background in the alluring story of two couples, one Jamaican and one English, whose paths cross in WWII-era England.The Jamaican Gilbert Joseph volunteers for the Royal Air Force, but life in England isn't what he expected, with its tasteless boiled food and insidious racism. After the war, he returns to Jamaica but still hopes to study law in England, and when Hortense, a Jamaican teacher, offers him the money to travel to England if he'll marry her, he agrees-only to discover, back in England, that he cannot study law and the best job he can find is as a postal-truck driver. When Hortense joins him six months later, she is not only shocked by his threadbare fifth-floor room but offended by the prejudice she encounters and discouraged when her Jamaican teacher's credential is rejected. In the story of the adjustments these bright, well-educated and dignified immigrants must make, Gilbert's earthiness offers a delicious counterpoint to Hortense's prideful ambition. Other voices include that of the Josephs' white landlady, Queenie Bligh, the daughter of a provincial butcher, and of her husband Bernard, an older bank clerk in India with the RAF. Queenie meets Gilbert during the war, when he once brings her wandering father-in-law back to her home. The father-in-law, shell-shocked in WWI, is killed by an MP during a brawl at the movies caused when Gilbert refuses to follow the "rules" that segregate the theater racially. When her husband Bernard doesn't come home to their big London house after the war, Queenie takes in lodgers, including Gilbert and Hortense. The growing tensions among the three-and the disruption when Bernard returns at last-bring a spellbinding story to a surprising, heart-rending climax.An enthralling tour de force that animates a chapter in the history of empire. This is Levy's fourth novel, but first U.S. publication. Copyright Kirkus 2005 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved.


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Bull Canyon - Mary Lin Pardey

Bull Canyon: a boatbuilder, a writer and other wildlife - Pardey, Mary Lin

Summary: Lin Pardey and her husband Larry are internationally famous for their sailing adventures. But in 1980 -- fresh from an eleven years-long sailing journey, where they forged the early years of their marriage on high seas and in exotic locales -- they came to California looking for a good spot to build a boat, test Lin s skills as a writer and taste the apparent security life ashore could offer. Nestled in a rocky outcropping of winding, sparsely populated dirt roads, 60 miles from the sea and 50 miles from Los Angeles, Bull Canyon would seem an unlikely place for boat-building. But when Lin and Larry set eyes on the abandoned stone cottage at the top of a rutted, dusty lane, it was love at first sight. The house was certainly a fixer-upper, but there was plenty of room to build a boat, not to mention peace, quiet, and an abundance of natural beauty. They knew they'd come home. Bull Canyon would bring them joy, victories and failures but also packrats in the pantries, flooding rains that would make Noah himself cower, the occasional cougar, and an oddball collection of neighbors as ready to assist these hapless appearing newcomers as they were to gossip or occasionally cause trouble. It would be a life lived close to the land, coaxing vegetables out of acrid soil, living side-by-side with wildlife of all types, navigating dangerous roads to simply get to the nearest grocery store, no piped in water, no electricity, no phones not even a proper address to receive mail. Their marriage would be tested, too, working side-by-side, 24/7. Life in the canyon would prove daunting, gritty, and dangerous, and a tougher bargain in the end than what they'd signed up for. But as tough as life could be there, Bull Canyon was, indeed, the place where dreams could come true. It was here that Lin and Larry tapped into the affirming core of their marriage, accomplished back-breaking physical feats (moving enormous boulders and pouring tons of hot lead, among others), and grew to love the magical yet difficult environment. In the tradition of Under the Tuscan Sun and A Year in Provence, Pardey takes readers on a voyage landlocked, but a voyage nonetheless of the heart, sharing candidly and with great humor the four years she and her determined husband spent in Bull Canyon. From the Thanksgiving when they had to hang the turkey from a ceiling hook to keep it safe from invading animals, to their constant companion, Dog (who is actually a cat), to Lin's run-in with a couple of drunk hunters, to Larry's careful coaxing of rough-sawn timber into the beautiful boat, Taleisin, their story, related in the warm, personal voice of the fireside storyteller, is a funny, tender, and engrossing tale. Bull Canyon is the story of two dreamers and schemers who have taken life by the horns and bring the reader along for the wild and joyous ride.

Staff Review:
A nonfiction set in the 1980's, this is the story of a time gone by now. No phones, no electricity, no running water, Lin and Larry create an idyllic world in a little canyon north of Los Angeles. A lovely book.

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A short walk in the Hindu Kush - Eric Newby

A short walk in the Hindu Kush - Newby, Eric


Summary: Recounts the author's exploration of the Hindu Kush Mountains in the northeastern Afghanistan province of Nuristan - (Baker & Taylor)



Book News
First published in 1958, this is one of the first and perhaps the most widely known of celebrated English travel writer Eric Newby's many works. After some years working in the fashion industry, Newby and a companion decided to go mountain climbing in the Hindu Kush of Afghanistan, despite having almost nothing in the way of climbing experience. They gained what little experience they had going on short climbs in Wales, also described here, prior to the narrative of their trek in Afghanistan. Evelyn Waugh penned the brief preface. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)


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Journey to the east - Herman Hesse

Journey to the east - Hesse, Herman

Summary: In simple, mesmerizing prose, Hermann Hesse tells of a journey both geographic and spiritual. H.H., a German choirmaster, is invited on an expedition with the League, a secret society whose members include Paul Klee, Mozart, and Albertus Magnus. The participants traverse both space and time, encountering Noah’s Ark in Zurich and Don Quixote at Bremgarten. The pilgrims’ ultimate destination is the East, the “Home of the Light,” where they expect to find spiritual renewal. Yet the harmony that ruled at the outset of the trip soon degenerates into open conflict. Each traveler finds the rest of the group intolerable and heads off in his own direction, with H.H. bitterly blaming the others for the failure of the journey. It is only long after the trip, while poring over records in the League archives, that H.H. discovers his own role in the dissolution of the group, and the ominous significance of the journey itself.

Kirkus Reviews
The story is really an inconsequential element of this dissertation. The author's membership in an organization called The League has been rescinded and he is seeking reentry. A loss of faith and vision is responsible for the subtle ostracism from the League and corresponds to the loss of a raison d'etre on the part of the erstwhile member. Coming across Leo, a member who had accompanied the League on the journey - an integral part of their lives - Hesse realizes that the journey which he had imagined terminated was going on all around him. The lack of faith had blinded his perception of it. Through a mortification of his ego, he is again accepted into the League. This mystical structure, the League, represents the spiritual community through which one gains happiness. Isolation, our common denominator, will never germinate into the fruits of a full life. One must join the brotherhood of man in their faith - not necessarily in God, or science - more appropriately, in their faith in each other. Only through involvement with others in a common vision can the solitude of a man be comforted and controlled. The vision while it is collective and, therefore, anonymous, still preserves the unique and precious design of the individual. Membership in the League will give meaning to his personal predispositions as well as comfort his isolation. This novel, written several years after Steppenwolf, has a market among intellectuals and college students.


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Birds of America - Lorrie Moore

Birds of America - Moore, Lorrie

Summary: A long-awaited collection of stories--twelve in all--by one of the most exciting writers at work today, the acclaimed author of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? and Self-Help. Stories remarkable in their range, emotional force, and dark laughter, and in the sheer beauty and power of their language.



Booklist Reviews
Moore's wit works its magic best in her short stories. Her novels, including Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (1994), are tenderly ironic, but her stories are breathtakingly funny, acutely observant, and unexpectedly poignant. Take "Willing," for instance, a tale about Sidra, a self-described "minor movie star once nominated for a major award," who has left Hollywood to sulk in a Days Inn in Chicago. Very little happens. She visits her boring parents, refuses to let the maids in to clean, and has an affair with a thoroughly inappropriate man, but the Dorothy Parker^-like dialogue, Sidra's caustic self-analysis, and such evocative details as a plant "dried to a brown crunch" all coalesce into a richly empathic tale. Ardor and its absence often occupy Moore, and she is adept at cracking the code of difficult relationships. We're all strange birds, Moore--who reads like Ann Beattie's younger, midwestern sister--seems to be saying in these fresh, quirky, and honest stories, and that's fine, as long as you have a good heart. ((Reviewed August 1998)) Copyright 2000 Booklist Reviews


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Haroun and the sea of stories - Salman Rushdie

Haroun and the sea of stories - Rushdie, Salman


Summary: Abandoned by his wife, professional storyteller Shah of Blah suffers further insult when he loses his gift for gab, and his courageous son sets out to restore his former talents - (Baker & Taylor)




Publishers Weekly Reviews
Following the unprecedented controversy generated by The Satanic Verses , Rushdie offers as eloquent a defense of art as any Renaissance treatise. Supposedly begun as a bedtime story for Rushdie's son, Haroun concerns a supremely talented storyteller named Rashid whose wife is lured away by the same saturnine neighbor who poisons Rashid's son Haroun's thoughts. ``What's the use of stories that aren't even true?'' Haroun demands, parroting the neighbor and thus unintentionally paralyzing Rashid's imagination. The clocks freeze: time literally stops when the ability to narrate its passing is lost. Repentant, Haroun quests through a fantastic realm in order to restore his father's gift for storytelling. Saturated with the hyperreal color of such classic fantasies as the Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland , Rushdie's fabulous landscape operates by P2C2Es (Processes Too Complicated To Explain), features a court where all the attendant Pages are numbered, and unfurls a riotous display of verbal pranks (one defiant character chants ``You can chop suey, but / You can't chop me!''; elsewhere, from another character: `` `Gogogol,' he gurgled. `` `Kafkafka,' he coughed''). But although the pyrotechnics here are entertaining in and of themselves, the irresistible force of the novel rests in Rushdie's wholehearted embrace of the fable--its form as well as its significance. It's almost as if Rushdie has invented a new form, the meta-fable. Rather than retreating under the famous death threats, Rushdie reiterates the importance of literature, stressing not just the good of stories ``that aren't even true'' but persuading us that these stories convey the truth. As Haroun realizes, ``He knew what he knew: that the real world was full of magic, so magical worlds could easily be real.'' (Jan.) Copyright 1990 Cahners Business Information.

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I'm down: a memoir - Mishna Wolff

I'm down: a memoir - Wolff, Mishna

Summary: Traces the author's experiences of growing up with a white father who believed himself to be African-American, describing how his efforts to indoctrinate his daughter into black culture caused her to be rejected by her black and white peers.



Kirkus Reviews
A humorist and former model recalls growing up gifted and white in a poor, predominantly black neighborhood.In the early 1970s, Wolff and her parents, all Caucasian, moved back to her father's childhood neighborhood, Rainier Valley in south Seattle. The neighborhood had changed from white to black, and her father decided that the family should be black too. "He strutted around with a short perm, a Cosby-esque sweater, gold chains, and a Kangol," writes the author, "telling jokes like Redd Fox and giving advice like Jesse Jackson." Wolff's mother soon tired of the project and divorced her father. At age seven or eight, Wolff says, she was terrible at acting black, and she became a source of constant irritation and disappointment to her father. She could not dance, sing or even jump rope, and she displayed weakness in a tough neighborhood. Just as she discovered she was good at something black—rapid-fire insults along the lines of "Your mama's so fat…" or "You're so ugly…"—her mother transferred her to a school for gifted children (all of them white and rich). So started Wolff's perilous journey of self-identity. The blackness of her neighborhood only made her feel out of place at school, and the whiteness of her school only alienated her from her father and the black woman he married, to the point where she moved out to live with her mother. By age 12 she was a mess, suffering from insomnia, migraines and a deep anxiety that she would always be poor and never have "a lucrative anesthesia practice like all my friends." Over time, Wolff found some balance. Even her father, in a lovingly told final episode, gave her what she most wanted—his acceptance.Deftly and hilariously delineates the American drama of race and class for one little girl.Agent: Erin Hosier/Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Copyright Kirkus 2009 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved.

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