OPENING LINES:
Miss Perspicacia Tick sat in what little shelter a raggedy hedge could give her and explored the universe. She didn’t notice the rain. Witches dried out quickly.
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When Tiffany’s baby brother is taken by the Queen of the fairies she prepares a rescue armed with a skillet and the company of the Nac Mac Feegle, a bellicose race of blue fairies who have a lust for life and strong drink. Terry Pratchett offers up a novel loaded with humour, social commentary, and a strong (and interesting) female protagonist who turns out to be a witch. One in a solid series (five books so far) that sees Tiffany mature and have other harrowing, hilarious encounters with the denizens of Disc World.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Wee Free Men
GREAT LINEs:
Mrs. Klapper shifted impatiently beside him.
“Rebeck, pardon an old woman, but are you laying an egg?”
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I first discovered this book as a teenager obsessed with cemeteries- I loved the way cemeteries are a microcosm of their city/country, the myriad stories behind each stone, the melancholic romance and slight morbidity. I found that Peter Beagle loved cemeteries as much as I did, and gobbled down this first novel by our finest living fantasy writer, in which two ghosts fall in love in a cemetery while drifting toward the great forgetting of their mortal lives. It’s always dangerous to love a book so much as an impressionable teen- one’s memories sometimes don’t live up to present day tastes- but I’ve reread this title at least 3 times as an adult, in different decades, and find my fondness for it does not diminish. Laura and Michael are the two ghosts, one ready to leave behind all memories of earthly life and the other constantly grasping for those memories. Their non-ghostly friend Jonathan Rebeck is a gentle soul and failed pharmacist, who lives in a mausoleum and serves as a sort of guide and company for those on their way out of one world and into the next. Mr. Rebeck has a faithful companion in a talking raven who brings him food and news of the world and his life is fairly stable, until he meets the widowed Mrs. Klapper, and feels the siren call of the living. Beagle’s writing is imaginative, lyrical and richly creative. He combines wry humor and aching pathos, without ever becoming sentimental. Many people know Mr. Beagle for his second novel, The Last Unicorn, which deserves its own entry. It’s time to discover (or rediscover) his first novel, written when he was 19.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: A Fine and Private Place
OPENING LINES:
Everyone my age remembers where they were and what they were doing when they first heard about the contest. I was sitting in my hideout watching cartoons when the news bulletin broke in on my video feed, announcing that James Halliday had died during the night.
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Get ready to get your nerd on! In particular get ready to get your 1980s pop culture, comic book, gaming nerd on. In Ready Player One Cline has given readers of a certain age (mid-30s to mid-40s) a completely satisfying, indulgent piece of nostalgia that is really fun to read. Here’s the premise. In a future time, the real world is suffering crippling energy crises and mass poverty. But the simulated world of the OASIS has evolved to be fully immersive and for many has become an alternative to living in the real world. When the creator of the OASIS dies without heirs, he designs a game to be completed in the OASIS and the winner will inherit everything. They stand not only to become wealthy beyond imagining, but the future of the OASIS will be in their hands. The nostalgia comes in because the game is based on challenges and riddles that revolve around the 1980s. Family Ties, D&D, Blade Runner, PacMan, and literally hundreds of other pop culture references are made. But there is more to the book than just these juicy tidbits. The underlying story is about the competition between independent players like the protagonist Wade and the corporate behemoths lining up resources to defeat them. And as much as it’s a David and Goliath story, it is also a story about the distinctions between living in the real and the virtual world. What do relationships, successes, and safety mean in the OASIS and how do they compare with the physical places you eat and sleep? These are real questions for me, and the topics of many discussions I have with others of my generation. This book was a really fun addition to the conversation.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Ready Player One
OPENING LINE:
It wasn’t a very likely place for disappearances, at least at first glance.
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The year is 1945, World War II has ended. Claire Beauchamp and her husband are on holiday in Scotland. Having served as a combat nurse in the British army, she needs the rest. But then one day when she touches one of the standing stones in an ancient stone circle she is transported back in time to the year 1743, just before the Jacobite Rebellion. There she encounters an English officer who looks like her husband but does not act like him. And then she meets Jaimie Fraser who will change her entire life. With one action scene after another, this book is hard to put down! It made me glad that this is just the first book in a great series!
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Outlander
OPENING LINES:
I have to. I’ve been fighting it all night. I’m going to lose. My battle is as futile as a woman feeling the first pangs of labor and deciding it’s an inconvenient time to give birth. Nature wins out. It always does.
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This book, the first in the “Women of the Otherworld” series, takes a new angle on the werewolf underworld. Elena Michaels is a journalist and the only female werewolf in the entire world. She struggles and fights her inner demons and she wants to be normal at all cost. However the wolf in her and her love for her maker brings her back to what she has left behind and what she has tried to forget. The author describes the emotions so vividly that you feel their joy and pain, you sympathize with the characters. But the book also has a bit of humor. It was refreshing to see a woman as the lead. I was fascinated by how the author was able to maintain an entire pack of male werewolves yet Elena was powerful enough to be respected by other members of her pack. The plot had some gaps that had to be filled in as I continued reading. And there is still some of the history about her makers left to be answered later in the series. This book leaves you wanting more. I can’t wait to see what happens next.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Bitten
GREAT LINE:
They knew very little of the ways of the wicked world – indeed, there was no one now living in all the realm who had any actual experience in dealing with dragons and their tricks.
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You may find this book in the Children’s section, but don’t let that deter you, even if you lack a smaller one to help you read it aloud. This is a wonderfully comic tale. When an evil dragon, one Chrysophylax (or Goldguard in the Vulgar) descends on the peaceful village of Ham, Farmer Giles, who once used a blunderbuss to see off a marauding giant, is called upon to save things. Fortunately, he has a magic sword, a gift from the King (something about a giant), to aid him. Soon enough, his sword manages to bring the dragon to ground. As everybody knows, if you catch a dragon surely you ought to hold it for ransom. But when it comes to negotiating with such a wily serpent, real troubles are bound to begin. Readers with a bit of Latin and Greek will discover a whole other level of comedy.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Farmer Giles of Ham
OPENING LINES:
I first saw Hundreds Hall when I was ten years old. It was the summer after the war, and the Ayreses still had most of their money then, were still big people in the district.
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A fellow staff member recommended this book to me, and I am glad she did. The Little Stranger is a suspenseful edge-of-the-seat tale about a haunted house. Sarah Waters is a great storyteller. Her plots are riveting, but never at the expense of her lushly descriptive prose. The Little Stranger reaches a level of psychological depth that isn’t for the faintest of heart. It didn’t just scare me – it creepy-crawled its fingers into my brain and unsettled me for a long time afterward. When I reached the middle of this book, I could not stop reading (even though it was four o’clock in the morning and I had work the next day)! If you enjoy a good haunted house story, be sure to check out this book!
Check the BPL catalog for this title: The Little Stranger
OPENING LINES:
Nine months Landman’s been flopping at the Hotel Zamenhof without any of his fellow residents managing to get themselves murdered. Now somebody has put a bullet in the brain of the occupant of 208, a yid who was calling himself Emanuel Lasker.
In the Yiddish Policemen’s Union Chabon has created an alternate history of post WWII Jews resettled to Alaska. Readers step into this alternate place 60 years later as the district of Sitka is preparing for reversion and the Jews who populate the book are preparing for the unknown next steps in their individual and communal lives. The primary story teller is Meyer Landsman, a sad sack police detective working one of the last homicides before reversion. As the case proceeds the story grows larger to encompass not just the building where the murder took place and where Landsman lives but the local community, then the larger political and religious framework of the District and finally the global geopolitics of America and the Middle East. It is a nice blend of speculative and detective fiction with plenty of politics and sociology thrown in. And the fictional community of Sitka Jews has a language that was entirely new to me so I loved learning this language through the story while unraveling the alternate history. It’s more weighty than many mysteries, but not as dense as some historical fiction which made it just about right for me.
Check the BPL Catalog for this title: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union