magical realism

The latest in the Assassin's Creed juggernaut, Origins (available for PS4 and XBoxOne) is immediately striking due to the sheer amount of pretty.  The vast expanses of desert, the detail in the cities, the shining pyramids, the stars in the sky...this game is gorgeous.  Happily, it's more than just a pretty face!

The controls are a little bit smoother in this iteration, although you'll still have moments of climbing the wall right next to the ladder you were intending to use.  After this many games, I'm fairly certain that's a feature by now, not a bug.  The weapons/armor system reminds me of

The Portrait follows the journey of Pierre-François Chaumont, a married Parisian attorney. As a boy, Pierre is influenced by his uncle to become a collector of objects. He begins with scented erasers, but quickly raises the level of sophistication and moves on to antiques. By the time the reader finds Pierre in present day, his collection is massive and a point of contention between him and his wife. It is his latest purchase, a portrait of a man, which really puts their marriage on shaky ground. As a result of a heated auction bid, Pierre pays way too much for the piece, but he has to have it

“They lived in a house at the end of the road and were friends to mankind”- Kinneson family motto.

In 1930, in the Vermont town of Kingdom Common-- sharing a border with Canada-- lives the fiercely independent Miss Jane Hubble Kinneson, known to most as Miss Jane. On the dawn of her 50th birthday, she finds herself embroiled in a battle with her cousin, Eben Kinneson Esquire, for the preservation of her beloved land, Kingdom Mountain-- some of the last untouched wilderness and home to glacial ponds, flora and fauna, and wildlife dating  back 10,000 years. Enter Henry Satterfield, a weather

Haruki Murakami is not for everyone, but he’s one of my favorite authors. His indescribable blend of post modernism, magic realism, and surrealism set in his native Japan never fail to provoke rumination on topics ranging from existential to mundane. This novel is translated by the prize-winning J. Philip Gabriel.

Many of Murakami’s protagonists are shy, inward-turning souls seeking something beyond their present circumstances. Kafka on the Shore centers around Kafka Tamura, a 15-year-old who has decided to abandon his home and make it on his own. He is warned by a sort of alter ego, a boy

I was lucky enough to hear AS King speak when she visited our Library in August 2015. Eventually, after much fascinating talk, one of the moderators got around to asking her about her newest book, I Crawl Through It. "What's it about?" We all laughed, as we had earlier established how difficult it can be to neatly summarize a King novel. But then King's expression turned serious and she said, "It's about the way teens have to deal, daily, with both intruder drills and standardized tests - and how messed up that is." I had already been planning on reading King's new book, but now I knew, I had to read it now.

The Waverley family, Claire and Sydney, both have the gift of helpful magic. They live in the charming town of Bascom, North Carolina where it’s autumn and as temperatures fall, everyone and everything grows restless and problems flourish.

Claire runs Waverley’s Candies out of her kitchen, making handcrafted confections. Business is so good she can’t keep up with demand on her own. When someone offers to buy the business, Claire is stuck in a quandary.

Sydney owns a successful hair salon and knows what hairstyle will look best on anyone. But she’s reluctant to fire a new hire who isn’t

While the protagonist, Victoria, is incredibly flawed in The Language of Flowers, it is unlikely you will ever feel anger towards her.  Trapped in the uncaring hands of foster care her entire life, she is socially inept, volatile and completely mired in grief and rage. 

After being booted out of foster care at the age of eighteen, Victoria struggles to find a foothold in adult life.  Thanks to a florist, Renata, and a flower vendor, Grant, Victoria finds anchor in her passion, the language of flowers.  While she is busy healing the lives of others through her remarkable talent of arranging

Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus is a wonderful, mysterious, enchanting novel, as magical as the circus it tells the story of. Two wizards challenge each other to a contest, pitting their two students, a boy called Marco and a girl named Celia, against each other, with a surreal, avant garde circus, Le Cirque de Rêves, as the battleground. As it goes on, the game gets more and more complicated, drawing more and more people into a web of magic, love and loss. But The Night Circus is more than just a story of a contest. It's a story about love, sacrifice, family, the nature games and stories