Jen deluca5/30/2023 Mitch and April obviously have very real chemistry and her hangup over their age difference and how the community will perceive her relationship is at once understandable and annoying. While this is the third book in the Well Met series centered around a Renaissance Faire, it reads perfectly well as a standalone. Could she really be starting to fall for her fake boyfriend?! April isn’t keen about the idea of being a fake date for Mitch’s grandmother’s anniversary party, but sure, why not? When the party/dinner turns into an entire weekend away, April gets to know the handsome, young(er), fun and funny gym teacher and, for the first time since her marriage broke up almost two decades before, being in a relationship starts to sound like a good idea. When he sees April nursing a cider at the local pub he knows she, a single mom with a mortgage and a steady career, is just the one he needs. Review by Yvonne Selander, collection development librarian
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Walpole the castle of otranto5/30/2023 This framed narration is similar to the novel itself, which presents the story as an analysis of a cryptic manuscript from the time of the Crusades (1095-1291) that is in the process of translation. The grainy black and white frames of the archeological discovery starkly contrasts the vibrant cut-out, stop-motion animation of the abridged story-telling. Švankmajer's 1977 pseudo-documentary follows an amateur archaeologist and his exploration of the setting of Otranto Castle, which he claims is actually based on a castle in Czechoslovakia and not Italy like the novel suggests. The buddha of suburbia novel5/30/2023 Later he attended King’s College London and took a degree in philosophy. Kureishi attended Bromley Technical High School where David Bowie had also been a pupil and after taking his A levels at a local sixth form college, he spent a year studying philosophy at Lancaster University before dropping out. After meeting and marrying Kureishi’s mother Audrey, Rafiushan settled in Bromley, where Kureishi was born, and worked at the Pakistan Embassy. He came to Britain to study law but soon abandoned his studies. His father, Rafiushan, was from a wealthy Madras family, most of whose members moved to Pakistan after the Partition of India in 1947. Kureishi was born in London to a Pakistani father and an English mother. Among his other publications are the collection of essays Dreaming and Scheming, The Word and the Bomb and the memoir My Ear at His Heart. Hanif Kureishi is the author of novels (including The Buddha of Suburbia, The Black Album and Intimacy), story collections (Love in a Blue Time, Midnight All Day, The Body), plays (including Outskirts, Borderline and Sleep With Me), and screenplays (including My Beautiful Laundrette, My Son the Fanatic and Venus). Annie jacobsen surprise kill vanish5/30/2023 When the Saudis decided to allow infidels in the form of a vast American army to do the job, bin Laden “began plotting jihad against the United States.” Waugh saw what he needed to see and developed a plan to eliminate his target that might have kept 9/11 from happening-but it never happened, nixed somewhere between his handlers and the president’s desk. So it was that, as Jacobsen writes, a weathered and fearless contractor named Billy Waugh entered Khartoum to track a well-protected Osama bin Laden, who was enraged after having been rebuffed by the Saudi royals to lead a war against Saddam Hussein. As Jacobsen ( The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency, 2015, etc.) notes, this so-called “third option” is used “when the first option, diplomacy, is inadequate and the second, war, is a terrible idea.” The underlying idea is that getting up close and killing a single opponent or small batch of them is preferable to bombing an entire city or region to achieve the same goal. It’s no secret that intelligence agents operate covertly around the world. A behind-the-scenes look at the most shadowy corners of the American intelligence community. The phantom of the opera susan kay5/30/2023 Most of Erik's history is revealed by a mysterious figure, known through most of the novel as The Persian or the daroga, who had been a local police chief in Persia and who followed Erik to Paris some of the rest is discussed in the novel's epilogue.Įrik is born in a small town outside of Rouen, France. In the novel, Leroux sometimes calls him "the man's voice " Erik also refers to himself as "The Opera Ghost", "The Angel of Music" and attends a masquerade as The Red Death. It is also revealed that "Erik" was not, in fact, his birth name, but one that was given or found "by accident", as Erik himself says in the novel. Erik himself laments the fact that his mother was horrified by his appearance and that his father, a master mason, never saw him. In the original novel, few details are given regarding Erik's past, although there is no shortage of hints and implications throughout the book. Reagan makes enemies easily and soon Mexico is another version of hell. Even in the Zombie Apocalypse there is still wealth to claim and power to steal. Except Mexico has its own obstacles and enemies. Reagan has led the group to Mexico, where the gang hopes to get as far from the Colony's malicious plans for revenge as possible. Now they face a new battleground and the stakes are higher than ever. They lost loved ones, made sacrifices they hadn't been ready for and did whatever they had to in order to stay together. Reagan and her friends fought a hard battle to escape the Colony. Zombies- as if that wasn't enough to ruin any girl's dream of a happily ever after. Finding Winnie by Lindsay Mattick5/29/2023 What is it with adorable animals and WWI? Seems these days no matter where you turn you find a new book commemorating a noble creature’s splendor and sacrifice on the battlefields of Europe. Walker's book is informative, it reads more like a history lesson, whereas this book, despite being longer, reads more like a children's story (it's written as if Mattick herself is telling the story of Winnie to her own real-life son, Cole, named after Captain Colebourn).Ĭomplete with pages from Colebourn's own diary marking the day he bought Winnie, this is deserving of the Caldecott and definitely worth a read (if not a purchase!). It's also much more appropriate for the intended audience. Without doubt, the story presented here is superior, in part because of the sentimental factor of its being written by the great-granddaughter of Captain Harry Colebourn, the man who adopted the real Winnipeg "Winnie" the bear in 1914. Of the two it was ultimately Blackall's neat, clean, highly detailed illustrations that won out and earned the Caldecott medal for this book. Kind of funny how that happened, huh? They both feature incredibly gorgeous artwork. I didn't think there would be any topping the other Caldecott honor true story of Winnie-The-Pooh picture book released in the same year and covering basically identical content ( Winnie: The True Story of the Bear Who Inspired Winnie-the-Pooh). By including actual voices of Choctaw people describing their own lives, it also represents a unique new repository of Choctaw culture.Ĭontributors include Jay McAlvain, Phillip Carroll Morgan, Grayson Noley, Bill Nowlin, Lois Pugh, Eveline Steele, and Tim Tingle. It marks the first such advanced textbook of Choctaw as well as the first easily available reference grammar for teachers. Volume 2 of Choctaw Language and Culture is designed to help teachers and students alike further their understanding of Choctaw by working with and mastering grammatically complex examples of its use. Exercises encourage the student to think about how the language works rather than relying on rote memorization. The authors also demonstrate the many ways a single Choctaw word can be modified to yield subtle differences in meaning. Particularly important is the subject of negation, which permeates Choctaw at all levels, and the concept of definiteness. The authors present such topics as idioms, ways to say "or," negative conditionals, and compound tenses. The book is organized around twelve texts with translations, each followed by a grammar lesson, a vocabulary section that acquaints students with new words, a word-study section, and exercises. Building on the foundations laid by the first volume of Choctaw Language and Culture, this follow-up text presents a more advanced linguistic study of Oklahoma Choctaw, accompanied by short stories and anecdotes written by Choctaws in their native language. Again, I can't really say that I love elephants all that much but my son likes the concept of them and so the cover art on this book gets a round of applause out of this household. I imagine that she got a lot out of talking about something as large as an elephant and I am looking forward to it! We haven't gotten together yet to discuss the book but I really wanted to hear what she had to say about it because this is a lady who is so on fire for God she can draw a message out of A-N-Y-T-H-I-N-G. I read this book because a fabulous lady from our church recommended it for our church book club. I mean doesn't the title just make you wonder? Modoc: The True Story of the Greatest Elephant That Ever Lived. Seriously, what am I doing reading this book? Elephants aren't exactly my thing. Chronicles of Narnia Reading Challenge (74). The specials scott westerfeld5/29/2023 The part that made me laugh was when I read that some of these folks went as far as to put snakes on their pinkies. The way Westerfeld described these people’s “surges” was just silly. They allow their citizens to have any kind of surgery they wish. The city is extremely tolerant and allows the Smokies to hide out there and to also bring runaways in. Their ally is a neighboring city by the name of Diego. I liked this turn of events! I hate when people rush head first into things so it was good to see some improvements on their part. They have unknown allies lurking in the shadows. The new Smokies are more prepared than they used to be. The struggle between the Specials and Smokies heat up in this book. Tally’s character has always been a pleaser, and she is no different in this book. I was hoping, like the other two books, she would overcome this roadblock. I am not sure how I felt about this particular part of the story since I had grown to dislike Special Circumstances so much. They are fast, intimidating, intelligent, and dangerous. Tally has been in training to be a special. The story Takes place a couple of months after book two. Their main goal is to bust the new Smokies and stop the spreading of the nano pills. Tally is now in a special group who themselves the Cutters. |