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ON OUR SHELF

THE SECRET OF RAINY

DAYS by Leslie Hooton

Growing up in Erob, Alabama, Nina "Little Bit" Barnes Enloe lived in the shadow of her imposing and harsh grandmother, Nina "Biggie" Barnes Enloe. If she wasn't being bossed around by Biggie, then the task fell to her best friend Win...who did win. At everything. Bit never seemed to share Win's lifetime supply of "lucky dust." Perhaps the only thing Bit has ever chosen for herself is her friendship with Avery, the out-of-towner who showed up on the saddest day of her life--unpretentious and decidedly un-Southern--with a funeral casserole in hand.

Bit believes she can escape her grandmother's controlling grip once and for all by moving somewhere where she is the only Nina Enloe listed: New York. Yet her world is turned upside down when an unexpected loss forces her to leave her new life in the city and return to Erob, where she must face everything--and everyone--she left behind.

THE CENTER OF

EVERYTHING by Jamie

Harrison

For Polly, the small town of Livingston, Montana, is a land charmed by raw, natural beauty and a close network of family that extends back generations. But the summer of 2002 finds Polly at a crossroads: a recent head injury has scattered her perception of the present, bringing to the surface longforgotten events.

As Polly’s many relatives arrive for a family reunion during the Fourth of July holiday, a beloved friend goes missing on the Yellowstone River. Search parties comb the river as carefully as Polly combs her mind, and over the course of one fateful week, Polly arrives at a deeper understanding of herself and her larger-than-life relatives.

FREEDOM THORN PRESS

by T.C. Weber

Fifty years after a coup replaced President Franklin D. Roosevelt with a fascist dictatorship, America is a land of hopelessness. Ben Adamson, a 19-year-old farm boy in southern Illinois, wants only to spend his time fishing and hunting. But when his dead brother demands justice for his suspicious fate, Ben and Rachel, his brother’s fiancée, are drawn into an underground revolutionary movement.

After staging a rally against the war, Ben and Rachel are arrested by the Internal Security Service, who have perfected the science of breaking people. Ben is given a choice: betray the rebels, including his best friend from childhood, or Rachel will be lobotomized. Although traumatized and addicted to a powerful drug, Ben refuses to doom anyone he cares about. Can he find a third option? Can he free Rachel and strike back at the dictatorship, while dodging the suspicions of police and rebels alike?

ON OUR SHELF

THE THOUSAND

STEPS by Helen Brain

On the brink of execution, 16 year old Ebba den Eeden is unexpectedly elevated from the bunker deep in South Africa's Table Mountain where she has lived all her life, believing--as do all the other teenagers who toil daily to make their food and power the bunker--that the world Above is uninhabitable due to a nuclear holocaust. Instead, she is heiress to a massive fortune--one that everyone wants to control.

While dealing with the machinations of the High Priest, his handsome son Hal, and the rules and regulations of a society and religion she doesn't understand, she must also try to save her three friends, still stuck in the bunker and facing execution any day.

BURIED INSTINCTS -

LOST AND FOUND by

Lynn Henson

Despite the overwhelming odds against them, Blake has managed to lead his friends to a veritable oasis in the apocalypse. Surrounded by a reasonable amount of comfort and security, there’s nothing left to do but wait for the government to get a handle on the undead crisis.

But after a couple of excursions from their home to find supplies and get a sense of the situation in their area, they learn that some of the zombies are even more dangerous than they’d assumed.

THE MARVELOUS MISFITS OF

WESTMINSTER by Andrea

Hahnfeld

What if dogs were not only man's best friend – but also his last hope? Clement is a disgraced dog show judge whose wife, Edith, left him under mysterious circumstances. When he is asked to step in as a last-minute substitute to judge at the famous Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, he learns two things: Edith is about to be killed by a shadow and it’s up to him to prevent it.

According to the Hunts, the only way to save Edith is making sure Irving, a hideous mongrel dog with special abilities, wins Best in Show.

This heart-hugging story about love, loss, and hope features memorable characters that will leave you inspired.

ON OUR SHELF

WALKING ON COWRIE

SHELLS by Nana Nkweti

In her powerful, genre-bending debut story collection, Nana Nkweti’s virtuosity is on full display as she mixes deft realism with clever inversions of genre. In the Caine Prize finalist story “It Takes a Village, Some Say,” she skewers racial prejudice and the practice of international adoption, delivering a sly tale about a teenage girl who leverages her adoptive parents to fast-track her fortunes. In “The Devil Is a Liar” a pregnant pastor’s wife struggles with the collision of Western Christianity and her mother’s traditional Cameroonian belief system as she worries about her unborn child.

In other stories, Nkweti vaults past realism, upending genre expectations in a satirical romp about a jaded PR professional trying to spin a zombie outbreak in West Africa, and in a mermaid tale about a Mami Wata who forgoes her power by remaining faithful to a fisherman she loves.

LOST, STOLEN OR STRAYED: A MOST UNRELIABLE MEMOIR

by Andrew Craft

Ruth is banged up in a bin in South London (again) and tortured by an agonizing secret. Matthew, her eldest son, is a new dad working for crazed director Norman ‘fat boy’ Schneibel at a deadly dull TV political show in New York.

At the insistence of her psychiatrist, Ruth summons Matthew to London where she reveals that in 1958, when unmarried mothers were legally labeled “moral Imbeciles”, she gave up a baby girl for adoption. The guilt has ravaged her ever since.

Through their diaries, we accompany Matthew on a wild goose chase, battling bureaucracies, half-truths and his belligerent boss, as he tries to track down his halfsister before Ruth succumbs to terminal cancer.

THE GIRL IN THE RED BOOTS: MAKING PEACE

WITH MY MOTHER by Judith

Ruskay Rabinor, PhD

She would do anything for her kids. When she learns the planet is in grave danger, can she save it to protect her descendants?

Ava Andrews puts family above all. Still grieving after her brother’s shocking murder years before, the mother of four is nervous when her husband’s new job relocates them from Arizona to Texas. And when her elderly mom has a stroke back in Phoenix, Ava plunges into a nightmare of visions revealing a dying Earth and her children fighting to survive.

Praying it isn’t too late to reverse course, the determined woman vows to invoke the change needed to ensure a safe future for her offspring. But despite her exhaustive search for answers, she can’t shake the feeling that the solution lies in her own heart.

ON OUR SHELF

THE HOUSE OF RUST

by Khadija Abdalla Bajaber

The House of Rust is an enchanting novel about a Hadrami girl in Mombasa. When her fisherman father goes missing, Aisha takes to the sea on a magical boat made of a skeleton to rescue him. She is guided by a talking scholar’s cat (and soon crows, goats, and other animals all have their say, too). On this journey Aisha meets three terrifying sea monsters. After she survives a final confrontation with Baba wa Papa, the father of all sharks, she rescues her own father, and hopes that life will return to normal. But at home, things only grow stranger.

Caught between her grandmother’s wish to safeguard her happiness with marriage and her own desire for adventure, Aisha is pushed toward a match with a sweet local boy that she doesn’t want.

JUST US

by Claudia Rankine

As everyday white supremacy becomes increasingly vocalized with no clear answers at hand, how best might we approach one another? Claudia Rankine, without telling us what to do, urges us to begin the discussions that might open pathways through this divisive and stuck moment in American history.

Just Us is an invitation to discover what it takes to stay in the room together, even and especially in breaching the silence, guilt, and violence that follow direct addresses of whiteness. Rankine’s questions disrupt the false comfort of our culture’s liminal and private spaces—the airport, the theater, the dinner party, the voting booth—where neutrality and politeness live on the surface of differing commitments, beliefs, and prejudices as our public and private lives intersect. HEIRS OF DECEITS by

Elizabeth Reinach

The novel is set in the late Victorian period in England. It concerns conflicts in attitude to social class and destitution and religion. The central character is Sir Gilbert Stanley, Tory politician and great landowner. Like many rich men, he had taken peasant mistresses in his youth, later abandoning them with no means of support. These women all died evil deaths, and the children were placed in the workhouse. Sir Gilbert longed secretly for these children and watched their progress to adulthood. Unaware he was their father, the children became absorbed into his household as servants. He favoured them, and their status became ambiguous. The outside world was horrified, and the household imploded. Murder and chaos followed.

ON OUR SHELF

2084 by David Perlstein

After its second revolution, America is nothing—and everything—to joke about. The U.S.A. is history.

In 2044, the Covenantal States of America constitutes a whiteChristian autocracy echoing George Orwell’s banned classic, 1984. Washington pushes back against armed rebels, humor ridiculing tyranny and mushrooming graffiti referencing Orwell’s novel in the form of 2084.

Sam Klein, a member of the Minyan, a clandestine group of stand-up comics, organizes a July Fourth comedy protest while his Indian-American wife Indira, a native Californian, faces deportation. The Fourth, celebrating an America made great yet again, brings unexpected fireworks.

TASTE THE WIND

by Robert Livingston

In the last years of World War II, the Japanese Imperial Army launched 9,000 balloons bombs in a last ditch effort to attack the American mainland. Each balloon carried one high explosive bomb and a number of incendiaries. In theory, these weapons would cause forest fires on the West Coast, and, if used to carry biological agents, create panic. Traveling in the easterly jet stream many of the balloons did reach the United States and detonate as planned. Many, however, simply disappeared into the forests of the northwest, armed and dangerous. This is the story of one missing balloon bomb that set off a terrifying forest fire near the CaliforniaOregon border, and of three men who were inexplicably linked by time and history to the to the resulting inferno. In a moment of truth, when the fire crowned and torched the land, and survival depended on “tasting the wind,” these men did.

OPEN BLIND EYES

by Rachel Timothy

Open Blind Eyes brings you face to face with the reality of sex trafficking in America through the true story viewpoint of a girl from a small town. Rachel was only nine years old when she was first approached by a perpetrator who was known to her as a teacher and coach. She goes into detail of the process of being groomed and how the evil of what was happening to her in the dark remained unseen by everyone around her. She describes how she coped for so many years by blocking out the memories only to have them resurface when she was an adult with a family of her own. Rachel had no idea that when she would pursue justice it would end up putting her right back in the world of trafficking. It wasn’t until her church family saw the signs and believed what she was saying that she was able to start the process of finding freedom. Rachel shows her faith and love of God during the highs and lows of her journey and she prays for each person who reads her story.

ON OUR SHELF

SWIMMING TO THE TOP

OF THE TIDE by Patricia Hanlon The Great Marsh is the largest continuous stretch of salt marsh in New England, extending from Cape Ann to New Hampshire. Patricia Hanlon and her husband built their home and raised their children alongside it. But it is not until the children are grown that they begin to swim the tidal estuary daily. Immersing herself, she experiences, with all her senses in all seasons, the vigor of a place where the two ecosystems of fresh and salt water mix, merge, and create new life.

In Swimming to the Top of the Tide, Hanlon lyrically charts her explorations, at once intimate and scientific. Noting the disruptions caused by human intervention, she bears witness to the vitality of the watersheds, their essential role in the natural world, and the responsibility of those who love them to contribute to their sustainability.

HER PERFECT BONES

by Ellery Kane

The girl’s body is curled up like a shell and almost completely buried in sand. Only her fingertips can be seen, reaching helplessly up towards an escape she will never find…

Seventeen-year-old Shelby Mayfield sits alone on a bus to Fog Harbor, California. Aside from a few items of clothing, all she has with her is twenty-two dollars, the ragdoll she’s kept since kindergarten, and the devastating secret she’s been hiding.

How long will it be before her family realizes she’s gone?

Can anyone see the fresh bruise on her cheek beneath the makeup?

Perhaps she was a fool to believe the person she is meeting in this remote little town could help her…

FORESHADOW: STORIES TO CELEBRATE THE MAGIC OF READING AND

WRITING YA by Nova Ren Suma and Emily X.R. Pan

Thirteen Short Stories from Bold New YA Voices & Writing Advice from YA Icons

Created by New York Times bestselling authors Emily X. R. Pan and Nova Ren Suma, Foreshadow is so much more than a short story collection. A trove of unforgettable fiction makes up the beating heart of this book, and the accompanying essays offer an ode to young adult literature, as well as practical advice to writers.

This unique compilation reveals and celebrates the magic of reading and writing for young adults.

ON OUR SHELF

SINGULARITY

by Jayme A. Oliveira Filho and Jayme S. Alencar

SINGULARITY is a scifi book that mixes the UNIVERSE, science, physics, adventure, love, romance, faith and religion in an inspiring story about the future of mankind and the decisions that we will make as Species to survive in a world during the 22nd Century.

PHOENIX FLAME by Sara

Holland

Maddie Morrow thought her problems were over. She saved the Inn at Havenfall--a sanctuary between magical worlds hidden deep in the mountains of Colorado--from the evil Silver Prince. Her uncle the Innkeeper is slowly recovering from a mysterious spell that has left him not quite human. And there are still a few weeks of summer left to spend with her handsome, more-than-just-a-friend Brekken, even though she can't stop thinking about Taya.

But Maddie soon realizes there's more work to be done to protect the place her family has run for centuries. She must embark on a dangerous mission to put an end to the black-market trading of magical objects and open the Inn's doors to Solaria, the once feared land of shapeshifters.

As she tries to accomplish both seemingly impossible tasks, Maddie uncovers family secrets that could change everything.

FOOL'S ERRAND by Jeffrey S. Stephens

Years after the death of his gangster father, a young man discovers a letter that sends him reluctantly defying the mob as he races to locate a hidden treasure.

It’s been six years since the untimely death of Blackie—a charming rogue who endlessly pursued “The Big Deal”—when his son discovers an enigmatic letter telling of a cache of stolen money. Feeling no choice but to pursue his father’s dream, he embarks on a search that leads from New York, to the Strip in Las Vegas, and ultimately to the south of France. Along this life-altering journey, he is confronted by the dangers of his father’s past as he unravels a decadesold mystery, while revealing other long-buried secrets as well.

Poignant and entertaining, humorous and exciting, romantic and mysterious, Fool’s Errand leads him to discover both the treasure and himself.

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In the old days, books had awful covers and marvelous content; nowadays, the opposite happens.”

— GIACOMO LEOPARDI, THOUGHTS

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