In Career of Evil, Cormoran Strike and Robin are in a slump - they've not had much work lately. They only have two paying cases at the moment, both rather tedious surveillance jobs. Although postponed, Robin and Matthew are still planning to be married. When a motorcycle courier is waiting with a box at the office for Robin, she assumes it's an order of wedding cameras. It's not. It's a severed leg. Immediately, Strike can think of three people who would send him a leg.
If the phrase "training run" has ever been part of your vocabulary – whether in reference to you or someone near you – you're bound to get a laugh, cringe, and sigh out of My Year of Running Dangerously. Combining two of my favorite topics, memoirs and running, acclaimed journalist Tom Foreman uses his storytelling skills to recount his monumental return to distance running.
I wish Kurt Vonnegut were alive to read this masterful literary homage. I'm not the only one who sees the connection. Margaret Wappler writes in the October 23, 2015 issue of the New York Times Book Review: "King’s devotion to a passionately experimental style, in a genre often beholden to formula, is inspiring. Kurt Vonnegut might have written a book like this, if he had ever been cyber-bullied on Facebook."
If you remember (or have heard anyone talk about) LPs, 8-tracks, bell bottoms and the time when disc jockey Wolfman Jack ruled the FM radio waves; watch this to relive it or to see what it was like. The 6-disc set compiles some of the best performances from the NBC Friday night variety show.
Roderick Townley is a local author of novels for young readers and poetry for all. His stories, though diverse in their settings and plots, might overall be described as elegant fantasies that balance whimsical and unsettling elements while exploring the nature of magic, dreams, reality, memories, identity, and stories.
In the beginning, I loved Love Love. The ordinary, every day struggles of Judy Lee and her bother Kevin resonated strongly with me. Both divorced and drifting through their lives, they are separately blindsided with challenges that would set anyone on a downward spiral. Judy, having walked out of her temp job has unknowingly lost her insurance. When she's bitten by a rattlesnake, the hospital bills mount and Judy is burdened with crushing debt . . . and she's still unemployed.
Alternating chapters tell the intertwined stories of Laia and Elias, who find their paths converging through Keris Veturius, Commandant of the Martial Empire's elite military academy. The Commandant loathes Elias, her accidental son whom she tried to abandon as a newborn, only to see him rescued by others and become the top student of her current graduating class. Elias wants nothing more than to escape his future as an enforcer of tyranny, but to cross the Commandant and the Empire is sure death.
We're so excited to share the Open Category winner of our #IHeartU contest: Heather McKenzie, for her work When Pluto was a Planet. We fell in love with its inventive and adept use of language as well as its creative imagery. Tell us what you love about When Pluto was a Planet in the comments!
Alix's exclusive school is targeted by an anonymous group of vandals who turn out to be radical activists out to get her father, putting her and her family in danger. The group claims that Alix's powerful father helps corporations that knowingly allow innocent victims to die in order to make enormous profits from unsafe products cover up their wrongdoings, and they want her to help blow the whistle on his misdeeds.
