book

The Giver of Stars

By Moyes, Jojo
Star Rating
★★★★★

Rated by Lisa H
Oct 7, 2019

The Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyes is historical fiction at its very best!  Set in 1939 Southern Kentucky, the lives of five strong female characters come together to form and operate the Packhorse Library, where they deliver by horseback, books, magazines and newspapers to those living in remote, rural areas.

One of the main characters, Alice, an Englishwoman, marries an American and is brought to Kentucky where she hopes to start a new, dazzling life with her husband. That is not to be the case.  Alice finds living with her husband and her father-in-law to be stifling and oppressive. Alice

Let your Body Interpret your Dreams

By Eugene Gendlin
Star Rating
★★★★

Rated by Michelle H.
Oct 2, 2019

Let Your Body Interpret Your Dreams isn’t going to help you interpret your dreams quickly, but it will help you interpret them correctly. Eugene Gendlin’s technique is simple. You’ve got to feel something rather than think it. And while Gendlin does recommend a popular technique – working with others to free associate meanings so as to stumble upon one that resonates—he’s clear about the limits of this technique. The intellect is a slow tool, and language can’t reliably access dream meaning. Our bodies are the true knowers, Gendlin says. Offering a number of techniques to help us recognize

Recursion

By Blake Crouch
Star Rating
★★★★

Rated by Heather C
Sep 30, 2019

Recursion occurs when a thing is defined in terms of itself or of its type.  --Wikipedia

I first heard about this book on NPR and was intrigued enough to immediately put it on my holds list.  You can find out more about how to make your own holds list here. Let me just say that this book did not disappoint!

Memory makes reality.  That's the tag line of the latest thriller by Blake Crouch.  Memory also makes you who you are.  Remembering what you learned in school, a moment from childhood, your favorite Christmas, your first kiss; but what if what you remember isn't real? 

Who hasn't wanted

Kill the Farm Boy

By Delilah S. Dawson
Star Rating
★★★

Rated by Hilary S.
Sep 27, 2019

First, I must admit that I picked Kill the Farm Boy solely on its cover. I had no familiarity with either author before, nor had I read any reviews. I thought it looked like a fun and easy read, and that was exactly what I was in the mood for, so I tried it out. It is a lighthearted fantasy, packed in humor. But it's the type and quality of humor that makes this either a "love it" or "hate it" for many readers: poop jokes (lots of them), raunchy sex jokes and innuendo (lots of those, too). The idea is a good one - take the typical fairy tale trope and turn it on it's head by introducing

Ask Again, Yes

By Mary Beth Keane

Rated by Library Staff (not verified)
Sep 25, 2019

Attempting to understand the human experience, and dealing with the aftermath of tragedy is something to which all people can relate. Mary Beth Keane’s novel Ask Again, Yes explores this phenomenon through the Gleeson and Stanhope families- neighbors in a suburb of New York City. The reader is introduced to the parents of both families at the beginning of the novel, and walks through life with their youngest children, Kate Gleeson and Peter Stanhope. We see the way various characters react to experiences with marriage, mental health, love, betrayal, and forgiveness. I found myself struggling

Tell The Machine Goodnight

By Katie Williams
Star Rating
★★★★

Rated by Jed D.
Sep 16, 2019

What if a machine could tell you how to be happy?  What if your results could be manipulated?  What if you had to do something illegal, immoral, or unethical to achieve happiness?  These are a few of the questions posed in the speculative fiction novel Tell the Machine Goodnight, by Katie Williams.  Set in 2035, our protagonist Pearl works for a Facebook or Google-like tech organization, Apricity, whose name means "the warmth of the sun during winter".  Businesses include Apricty readings as a benefit. along with insurance and retirement packages.  Apricity is brought in to help victims of

Only Child

By Navin, Rhiannon
Star Rating
★★★★★

Rated by Lisa H
Sep 11, 2019

Only Child by Rhiannon Navin, is narrated through the voice of Zach, a first grade boy who hides in a closet with his teacher and classmates while a lone gunman begins shooting people in his elementary school.  In the aftermath of the shooting, once 19 people are pronounced dead, we are taken through a captivating emotional journey, hearing not only Zach’s thoughts, but those overheard conversations of his parents. The family’s lives are torn apart and put back together as they each try in various ways to heal from this tragedy. Zach’s mother is bent on exacting revenge from the shooter’s

How to Give Up Plastic: A Guide to Changing the World, One Plastic Bottle at a Time

By McCallum, Will
Star Rating
★★★★★

Rated by Lisa H
Sep 10, 2019

How to Give Up Plastic: A Guide to Changing the World, One Plastic Bottle at a Time by Will McCallum is a scary, eye-opening, informative book that outlines the world’s use of plastics (which is in almost everything - including our clothing), the impact plastics are having on the environment, and suggestions to reduce the amount of plastic we use each day. Will McCallum is at the heart of the anti-plastics movement for the past three years and is Head of Oceans at Greenpeace UK. In his book, the author mostly focuses on single-use plastics which mainly include items like plastic bags, straws

The Family Upstairs

By Lisa Jewel
Star Rating
★★★★

Rated by Lisa H
Aug 28, 2019

The Family Upstairs by Lisa Jewel is a well-written thriller that not only contains a mystery but is also loaded with lots of family drama.

Libby Jones, who at age 25 is happy with her simple life, working to sell kitchen remodels, finds herself pulled into discovering her past when she inherits a $7 million dollar home from her biological parents who died in a suicide pact when she was 10 months old. Told from many characters’ perspectives, we learn that the Chelsea house in London has a history that is dark and disturbing.  The book continually switches between the past and present

Where'd You Go Bernadette

By Maria Semple

Rated by Library Staff (not verified)
Aug 27, 2019

The movie adaptation of Where'd You Go Bernadette, starring Cate Blanchett, has finally hit theaters (see Trailer), but all good bibliophiles know that the book is almost always better than the movie, and in the case of Where'd You Go Bernadette, the novel is absolutely fabulous and not to be missed. The titular character, Bernadette Fox wears many hats. She's a wife, mother, famed former architect, and for many mothers at the local school, the obnoxious bane of their existence. Bernadette is also a recluse, which proves a bit of a problem when her daughter, Bee, brings home the grades to earn

Romance Revival


Rated by Library Staff (not verified)
Aug 14, 2019

August is Read-a-Romance month. Do yourself a favor and check out what the genre has to offer and what it has been up to lately. I guarantee you will be pleasantly surprised.

The Romance genre has made a huge comeback, for me, recently. There are just so many great titles being released and I cannot resist their beautiful, colorful, happy covers. I took a break from reading romances because the love story lines and happily ever after endings got a little boring for me. I switched to dark mysteries, thrillers, and literary fiction for a long time. This past fall and spring so many titles that

Munmun

By Jesse Andrews
Star Rating
★★★★

Rated by Chris K.
Jul 23, 2019

Whoa! Now here's an exercise in extended metaphor. Andrews has taken an idea that could have been a simple allegory and turned it into a fully developed novel. Imagine, if you will, an alternate reality in which physical size is literally determined by wealth. A standard person is middlescale. The middlerich are those larger than that up two doublescale and the middlepoor extend to halfscale. Smaller than that are the littlepoors: quarterscale, eighthscale, and tenthscale--about the size of a rat. The bigrich just get bigger and bigger to hundreds of feet tall. Buildings, roads, vehicles, and

Where the Crawdads Sing

By Delia Owens
Star Rating
★★★★

Rated by Hilary S.
Jul 19, 2019

On the face of things, Where the Crawdads Sing is about murder. But this isn't your typical, fast-paced whodunit. Even when the plot moves into the investigation stage the story takes its time, much like the water Kyra lives on, winding between the present and past.  A victim of her circumstances, Kyra is alone in the world at the age of 10. As a young woman, Kyra has limited interactions with the town and its people. Her world revolves around the swamp and marsh, necessity bringing her to the edge of town and thereby society. As she grows up we see more of her inner turmoil: the desire to

Book Expo 2019

Star Rating
★★★★

Rated by Gregg W.
Jul 17, 2019

Hollywood has the Oscars. Football has the Super Bowl. Political parties even have their national conventions in election years. Many industries have an event where the most influential people in that world gather together, usually around a celebration or competition of some sort. The book publishing world doesn’t have anything quite like that, but BookExpo is something very close to it. BookExpo is a yearly convention where book publishers, editors, authors, marketing people, booksellers, bloggers, book reviewers - and yes, even librarians - get together, talk about the industry, and look

The Illuminae Files

By Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff

Rated by Library Staff (not verified)
Jul 15, 2019

The Illuminae Files Trilogy is like no trilogy you've experienced before. Stylistically it stands apart as the story unfolds via a dossier of compiled e-mails, video recordings, military documents, interviews, maps and medical reports that all combine to make for a heady mix of intrigue, political drama, romance, and space opera. In Illuminae, the first in the trilogy, Kady Grant's colony, Kerenza, is attacked by an unknown enemy. Kady manages to escape aboard one of the three remaining spaceships, but her problems have only just begun. The enemy is hot on their tail, a mysterious illness

Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

By T Kira Madden
Star Rating
★★★★★

Rated by Lisa A.
Jun 26, 2019

T Kira Madden's debut memoir in essays is brutal in the best way: gorgeously written, relentlessly honest, and impossible to put down. If you're into stories about daughters who love and struggle with imperfect parents, read this. If you relate to families filled with dysfunction, read this. If you love someone who is queer, read this. If you have a soft spot for essays that make you cry at work, read this. Seriously--I could find a reason for everyone to read this book. Been touched somehow by adoption? By trauma? By being a lost teenager? By having to leave home to find it again? This book

Good Morning, Midnight

By Lily Brooks-Dalton
Star Rating
★★★★

Rated by Maryana K.
Jun 24, 2019

Good Morning, Midnight is an atmospheric story told from the perspective of two flawed characters who have struggled with or avoided human connection most of their lives. From a remote arctic research station to the vast openness of space, the settings evoke a feeling of stillness and quiet that, as I sat reading, had the effect of blocking out the world around me.

Augustine and Sully are seemingly some of the last people left alive after an apocalyptic event. Sully is a mother and astronaut racing through space on her way back to earth after a two year mission aboard the Aether. The earth

Jun 21, 2019

Humanity is curious by nature. Ever since we first looked up at the sky, we have been fascinated with the possibility of reaching those distant lights. Lacking the ability, we wrote stories about what it would be like on that wild frontier. The what-ifs, the hows. But it wasn't until 1817 that these stories stopped being about gods and magic and delved into the concept of science. Man, not gods, were the source of power. Since then, science fiction stories have led the way to scientific advancement.

In 1914, H.G Wells described a future in which scientists had discovered the power of the atom

New Releases in Fiction - June 2019!

Star Rating
★★★★

Rated by Gregg W.
Jun 19, 2019

Hello and welcome to our look at some new releases at the Johnson County Library! Each month we look at five fiction titles making their debut that we think you should know about. You might not find these books on the bestseller lists, but that's okay, as we love putting the spotlight on books you might not have heard about. Give one - or more - of these titles a chance to make it in your hold list. We hope you find something new!

Blake Crouch caused many eyebrows to raise with his 2016 sleeper hit DARK MATTER. Writing a Michael Crichton-ish science thriller but with a postmodern twist and

The Last Voyage of Poe Blythe

By Ally Condie
Star Rating
★★★★

Rated by Anne G
May 28, 2019

"Some people always burn." - Ally Condie, The Last Voyage of Poe Blythe

            Poe Blythe is the seventeen-year-old captain of the last mining ship from the Outpost. In this dystopian fiction, she wants far more than the gold they tear from the Serpentine River. She is looking for revenge, and she is going to use her steampunk-ship to do.  Poe has vowed vengeance on the river raiders who robbed her of everything two years ago. This woman of steel navigates the treacherous waters of the Serpentine. As she does so, she realizes there might be a traitor among her crew.

            The book

Listening and Reading My Way through Scotland


Rated by Library Staff (not verified)
May 22, 2019

What do you think of when you imagine Scotland? Do you picture the rolling, verdant fields of the Highlands? Maybe you think of the craggy, stony mountains or the foggy moors filled with sheep. How about 6,000 miles of windswept coastline? Scotland sounds like a dream but what should I really expect? The perfect way to discover a place is through reading!

There are so many resources at the library to help prepare for my trip. It’s always nice to feel like you know a place before you get there. I need to have great theme music wherever I go. There are so many amazing CDs in the library

May 20, 2019

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you jumped into a black hole? Or maybe you're curious about what would happen if you traveled to another planet, like Jupiter or Venus? Could this book kill you while you're reading it and, if so, how? And Then You're Dead examines these and dozens of other scenarios to offer a scientific explanation for how you would meet your demise in these unlikely and unlucky ways.

Yes, on the surface this book sounds depressing. The authors bring a dry sense of humor to each scenario that effectively balances out the cringe effect of rather gory descriptions

Before We Were Yours

By Lisa Wingate

Rated by Library Staff (not verified)
May 17, 2019

Before We Were Yours is a moving, fascinating portrayal of an upper class Southern family dealing with dementia care, cancer, secrets and a family in 1939 ripped apart just because they live on the river. Have your Kleenex ready and Google pulled up. This novel presents many topics to discuss for book groups.

Dual timelines tell the story of Avery Stafford digging into her Grandma Judy’s past. A woman named May Crandall approaches Avery at a nursing home event, confusing her for someone named Fern and slipping Avery’s bracelet off. When Avery returns the next day to retrieve the bracelet, a

A Year of Reading Harder: Chapter One


Rated by Library Staff (not verified)
May 15, 2019

Every January, new reading challenges float around the bookish realm of the internet. No matter what your reading time is like or what you want to achieve in a year of reading, there's probably a reading challenge out there for you. For the past few years, I've been interested in the Book Riot Read Harder challenge, which encourages readers to "break out of your reading bubble and expand your worldview through books. With new genres, new authors, and new points of view, the challenge will (hopefully) help you discover amazing books you wouldn’t have otherwise picked up." Some of the tasks in

The Atonement Child

By Francine Rivers
Star Rating
★★★★

Rated by Cheryl M.
May 13, 2019

The Atonement Child had me in its grips from the beginning and held me until the last word. The story centers around three women from the same family. Dynah Carey, a college student at a Christian university; her mother Hannah; and her grandmother, Eve. Dynah becomes pregnant through a rape and must decide if she will keep or terminate the pregnancy. As the novel progresses, each woman tells her unique story around the charged topic of abortion. This is the first Christian fiction that I have read, and I was a little unprepared for the emphasis on Christian doctrines of faith. However

Before She Was Found

By Heather Gudenkauf
Star Rating
★★★

Rated by Heather C
May 8, 2019

Small town.  Urban Legends.  A gruesome stabbing.

Before She Was Found definitely felt like it could be the ripped from the headlines fictionalized retelling of the Slender Man stabbing.  For those unfamiliar, in 2014 two 12 year old girls lured their 12 year old friend into the woods and proceeded to stab her 19 times to appease the entity known as 'Slender Man'.  For the first couple of chapters I was worried that this book was going to be nothing more than a retelling of true events with the names changed.  Though the plot does concern the aftermath of a brutal stabbing involving three 12

My ideal Mother's Room bookshelf

Star Rating
★★★★★

Rated by Caitlin P
May 7, 2019

I am a mother. A working mother. A working mother who somehow scored the right blend of help, stubbornness, and luck to successfully breastfeed. As a working, breastfeeding mother I’ve spent a lot of time in Mother’s Rooms (which thankfully are becoming more prevalent) and as a working, breastfeeding, *librarian* mother, I’ve pondered the books I think should come standard with all Mother’s Rooms. The following is a list I am titling “My ideal Mother’s Room bookshelf.”

 

Unbuttoned: Women Open Up About the Pleasures, Pains, and Politics of Breastfeeding

Unbuttoned is a beautiful compilation

Die Laughing

By William Novak
Star Rating
★★★

Rated by Caitlin P
Apr 10, 2019

Does anyone else remember ordering joke books in the Scholastic Book Order as a kid and eagerly gobbling up all the quips and antics, only to forget them minutes later? William Novak drew me back to this memory with his book Die Laughing: Killer Jokes for Newly Old Folks. This was a surprisingly pleasing random pickup on the heels of April Fools Day, but it’s not as the title suggests only for “newly old folks.” Anyone with a campy sense of humor about aging will find a chuckle in these pages.

Upon realizing he was entering into the class of “old people,” William Novak, father of author B. J

The Harvey Way

By Carolyn Meyer
Star Rating
★★★★★

Rated by Heather McCartin
Apr 8, 2019

In the late 1800s and early-mid 1900s, the Harvey Girls were considered to be elite hostesses and servers for entrepreneur and businessman Fred Harvey.  Harvey developed the concept of the ‘Harvey House’ dining areas along various railways across the United States, including the Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe.  These hospitality restaurants worked in tandem with the railways in order to provide first class service to passengers and railroad employees.  Meals were served promptly on a strict schedule and all Harvey Girls were expected to follow a strict code of conduct that included a

The Lady From The Black Lagoon

By Mallory O'Meara
Star Rating
★★★★

Rated by Heather C
Apr 5, 2019

"Never underestimate the power of nerds."  Self proclaimed nerd Mallory O'Meara pours her heart and three years of her life into The Lady From The Black Lagoon,  a biography to uncover the lost legacy of Milicent Patrick.  

Sadly, but not surprisingly, I was unfamiliar with Milicent Patrick and her work.  I knew nothing of her time at Disney as an animator or her work at Universal Studios making monsters come to life for the big screen.  In reading this book I was struck by how hard it must have been to work in a male dominated field in which no matter how talented you are most of your male