Whether you're a lush (as Betty White says, "Vodka is a kind of hobby") or a teetotaler, this book will fascinate and entertain (I was laughing out loud at least once every chapter). I particularly recommend the eAudiobook, which I listened to on a long road trip.
Linda Rodriquez has always wanted to be a writer. As for so many of us, life doesn't always give us what we want. At least not right away. Luckily for mystery and poetry readers, Linda has found her voice and created a successful writing life. You can hear Linda read at the Thomas Zvi Wilson Reading Series, co-sponsored by Johnson County Library and The Writers Place.
If you’re expecting something akin to Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid, you will be in for a disappointment. Lydia Millet’s Mermaids in Paradise is both hilarious and heart-wrenching. Narrator Deb has just gotten married to Chip, her positive, gregarious partner.
In March of this year ProQuest announced they were “advancing the research experience for family history enthusiasts and genealogical experts with a new version of its popular HeritageQuest® Online.” Being an avid family researcher, I was always a little disappointed that we could not access Ancestry.com from home through the Johnson County Library as there was always so much more to find on Ancestry.com than there was on HeritageQuest.
Beg: a Radical New Way of Regarding Animals, with its sweet-faced dog peering at me from a soft, sage green background, imploring me to “regard him in a new way” didn’t prepare me for the most heavy-handed, condescending book I’ve ever experienced. Freedman doesn’t actually present “a radical new way of regarding animals” so much as beat readers over the head with how perfectly enlightened she’s become and then shame us into submitting to her will.
Wow, what an amazing life Linda Ronstadt led! In a musical career that spanned almost half a century, she sang rock/pop, opera, American standards (accompanied by an orchestra), country, blues and Mexican rancheras (with a mariachi band)! Along the way she performed, jammed, hung out and/or formed friendships with an eclectic group of famous musicians including Jim Morrison, the Eagles, Jackson Browne, Dolly Parton, and Rosemary Clooney—to name just a few.
Philadelphia, 1944. The world is at war and yet Maddie and her husband, Ellis, and their friend Hank don't seem to notice. Having been forced out of their home after a drunken outburst at a New Year's Eve party, Ellis and Maddie are cut off completely from his well-off family. After throwing the final insult and claiming his father was a liar when he saw the Loch Ness monster in Scotland decades before, Ellis plans a reckless trek across the Atlantic with Hank, and Maddie is forced to go with them against her wishes.
Dad is Fat is a collection of essays on parenting written by stand-up comedian Jim Gaffigan. Gaffigan writes about the trials and tribulations of raising five children in New York City in a 2-bedroom fifth floor walk-up apartment. His observations are spot on – and hilarious.
Annie O’Sullivan is a realtor heading out to show a house one summer afternoon. Near the close of the open house, Annie is abducted by a potential client, a stranger who drugs and transports her to a remote mountain cabin on Vancouver Island where he repeatedly beats, rapes, and terrorizes her. As the days and nights of her captivity begin to blur together, Annie is forced to conform to the whims of a psychopath, "The Freak,” and to sacrifice parts of herself in an effort to survive. When she resurfaces a year later, it is as a shell of the person she used to be.
Amber Benson is mostly known as an actor, primarily for her role as Tara Maclay on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but she's also an accomplished author with a number of books and other projects under her belt.
