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:
“For a moment Jack felt the strongest inclination to snatch up his little gilt chair and beat the white-faced man down with it…”
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That quote from Master and Commander is in the first chapter, and seems an unlikely start to a friendship that is one of the most interesting in fiction. When Jack Aubrey meets Stephen Maturin at a concert, they have a rather violent disagreement about music. The two are such opposites: Jack, a straightforward, blunt captain in the Royal Navy and Stephen a naturalist and physician with a tendency towards secrecy. In this opening volume Jack is a lieutenant desperate for his first real ship to command. When he does finally get his ship, he rather impulsively asks Stephen along as ship’s doctor. Set in the Napoleonic era, the book is full of nautical slang and ship’s jargon, but somehow that all fades into the background as the reader is swept into a vivid picture of a time, and a gripping series of adventures on the high seas.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Master and Commander
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
GREAT LINE:
And so Weetzie and My Secret Agent Lover Man and Dirk and Duck and Slinkster Dog and Fifi’s canaries lived happily ever after in their silly-sand-topped house in the land of skating hamburgers and flying toupees and Jah-Love blonde Indians.
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Francesca Lia Block’s books are my guilty pleasure reading – usually short, offbeat, and delicious. Weetzie Bat is my favorite of her works. It is loosely about the adventures of a quirky teenager living in L.A. The prose is luscious, decadent, slinky. I read this book in one sitting, and it made me want to devour every one of her other books. If you grew up in L.A. (or some other urban place) you will appreciate the broad strokes she paints of the place. Block is a lover of language and the way that words dance together and roll off your tongue. You’ll find most of her books in our Teen section, but make no mistake, this is adult reading as well!
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Weetzie Bat
GREAT LINES:
I’d just about convinced myself that everything I thought I’d seen in the basement had all been a dream, when I idly slipped the small painting out of the paper bag. It took everything in me to keep from crying out in shock!.
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Remember Max Fleischer’s Betty Boop cartoons? Or the mischievous Felix the Cat? Kim Deitch’s graphic novel ought to remind you of them, as The Boulevard of Broken Dreams whirls us back to the madcap pre-psychedelia of those old cartoons. Deitch got his start as an underground comix artist, but with this linked collection of short stories he builds a fictional biography of the 30s-era animated box office sensation, Waldo the Cat. From drug visions to hoary old vaudeville routines, Waldo and his anthropomorphized pig, elephant, and monkey friends lead us back and forth through the decades and the success (and failure) of their creators. By the end, Waldo’s no longer the charming scamp but a belligerent hallucination who haunts the artist’s alcoholic fade. The art by itself is quite a show, loaded with meticulous whimsy, but Deitch weaves a human story, too, stretching history and dreams – the hopeful kind and the nightmare – into one tapestry.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Boulevard of Broken Dreams
GREAT LINE:
Pete usually used his own door except when he could bully me into opening a people door for him, which he preferred.
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Dan Davis is on the verge of amazing riches when he successfully invents a household robot. But he is betrayed by his business partner and fiancee and his company is sold to a big corporation. He does get some money out of the deal and Dan uses that money to put himself into suspended animation. When he wakes up he finds that his money and his stocks are gone. Luckily in the time he has been asleep time travel has become possible. Now he needs to go back in time to set things right. There are many complications and plot twists as Dan works to be reunited with his soul mate and recover his fortune. At the same time Dan is trying to be reunited with his cat Pete. Pete is one of the great characters in this book and the title references him. When Pete finds that there is snow out of one door he asks Dan to open all of the other doors in the house to see if they might be a door into summer. Not only is this a charming bit of the story, it is also a good analogy for the novel’s plot as Dan keeps looking for a way into a sunnier situation.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: The Door Into Summer
GREAT LINES:
I have let others- one in particular- tell my story for far too long. Now is the time to set the record straight, to sort out the humbug from the truth, and vice versa.
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This portrait of “little person” Mercy Lavinia Warren Bump Stratton Magri, aka general Mrs. Tom Thumb, has depth and pathos, while immersing the reader in United States history. Vinnie is 2 feet 10 inches tall, a pituitary dwarf who is not content to stay at home in Middleborough, Massachusetts with her farming family. Recruited by an unprincipled carnival boss, Colonel Wood, she eventually winds up working with the fascinating P. T. Barnum, marrying General Tom Thumb, traveling the world, meeting royalty, and losing her beloved sister in a harrowing childbirth death scene. What elevates this title from a laundry list of interesting life events is Benjamin’s extraordinarily full character development. Vinnie is brilliant, determined, ruthless, loving, and fiercely protective of her little sister. P. T. Barnum is the ultimate showman, but he is also a man seeking an intellectual equal, and he finds that in Vinnie. Benjamin inserts newspaper articles, ads from magazines and other primary source documents in a series of “intermissions”, which take the reader deeper into Vinnie’s world. Meticulously researched, with an extensive bibliography, Benjamin has developed the facts of Vinnie’s life into a heartfelt, fascinating story.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb
GREAT LINES:
“It’s so funny. And full of pathos, too. Just how I like it!”
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Just the title, Absurdistan, tells you an awful lot about this book. It is comic and wry; a very good kind of satire. Misha Vainberg is a Jew, raised in Russia, educated at a liberal arts college in the American Midwest (Accidental College – ha!) and returned to Russia for what looks like the duration when his visa was not renewed. His father was part businessman, part gangster and the legacy he leaves to Misha is that of a Jew in exile first in Russia and then in fictional Absurdistan. Throughout Misha is at best pathetic – vastly overweight, disfigured by a botched adult circumcision, and longing for his sweetheart Rouenna and her Brooklyn to which he is unable to return. There are too many bits in the book to list, but it gives you a taste of the humor to know that Misha’s father once sold an 800 kg screw to a Halliburton subsidiary for $5 million. The commentary on US involvement in the Middle East and the new capitalism of Russia is enough to keep the book really interesting. Add to it what seem to be semi-autobiographical elements (Misha’s nemesis is Jerry Shteynfarb) and it’s a winner all the way around. At one point in Absurdistan a character describes the fictional Shteynfarb’s work as being “so funny. And full of pathos, too. Just how I like it. Homeboy made good!” Whether he’s patting himself on the back, or quietly mocking himself I can’t tell. But I say Absurdistan is exactly that, funny and full of pathos…just how I liked it.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Absurdistan
GREAT LINES:
Espionage is an art really.
A fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants affair.
The less rhyme or reason… the better.
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Intricately connected vignettes tell the stories of ordinary people caught up in the deadly business of espionage across World War Two-era Europe. People who do not normally read graphic novels may find themselves surprised by this book, which lingers on the large and small ways that these people betray themselves and others as they play their parts in the spy game. Of course, there is also plenty of action and suspense to go along with the pathos and dense character work. Artist Matt Kindt is relatively unknown, even in the comics world, but shows himself to be a genius of the form. In addition to employing several styles to help differentiate the plot lines, he also litters his panels with clues and codes that sharp readers will enjoy untangling as they connect the dots between the troubled characters. Super Spy is a dazzling work that is sure to appeal to readers who love twisty, believable tales of espionage.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Super Spy