Reviews

Staff Review

The Asperkids Launch Pad

By Jennifer Cook O'Toole
Star Rating
★★★★

Rated by Lisa J.
Apr 11, 2014

O’Toole, award winning author of Asperkids and The Asperkid’s (Secret) Book of Social Rules, a social worker, teacher, mother of three Asperkids and an Aspie herself, has developed a “how-to” guide for parents of children with Asperger Syndrome (AS) on how to best structure their home life to support their AS kids.

Staff Review

Hard As It Gets

By Laura Kaye
Star Rating
★★★★

Rated by Lisa J.
Apr 11, 2014

Becca Merritt needs help.  Her younger brother and only remaining family member is missing, leaving her a cryptic message which leads her to a tattoo shop called Hard Ink and Nick Rixey, former member of her late father’s Special Forces team.  Unknown to Becca, Nick has hard feelings toward her late father and, based on those feelings, dismisses her request for assistance in finding her brother.  However, realizing that there really is something going on and that Becca is in danger, Nick's Special Forces training and protective instincts kick in and he can’t leave Becca to fe

Staff Review

Feel The Heat

By Kate Meader
Star Rating
★★★

Rated by Lisa J.
Apr 11, 2014

Lili DeLuca set aside her plans for grad school and took over managing her family’s Italian restaurant when her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer.  Now that her mother has completed her treatment, Lili, bullied as a child because she was heavy, still has a hard time believing that she should pursue her photography career instead of continuing to manage the failing family restaurant.  When she discovers Jack Kilroy, famous chef, has picked her father’s restaurant to be the showcase for his new television series pitting Jack against Lili’s father in a

Staff Review Apr 10, 2014

Weather—a fact of nature we all live with. The extremes of this past winter are a hot topic from the news to neighborly conversations. But rarely does weather become such a dominating life force as it did for almost a decade from 1931 to 1939 in the southwest plains—the Dust Bowl. In The Worst Hard Time Pulitzer Prize winner Timothy Egan takes us back to a time we think we know and delves so deeply that we come away with a new respect for the people who lived through the “dirty thirties.”



Staff Review

The Museum of Extraordinary Things

By Alice Hoffman

Rated by Library Staff (not verified)
Apr 3, 2014

This book is such a great and eerie read. Hoffman’s work of historical fiction paints a despairing portrait of two lives which become intertwined through a series of odd events. Coralie is a disfigured girl who is forced to perform as a mermaid in her father’s Museum of Extraordinary Things on Coney Island.

Teen Review

The Perks of Being A Wallflower

By Stephen Chbosky
Star Rating
★★★★

Rated by Becky C.
Mar 31, 2014

Charlie, a modern-day Holden Caulfield, reminds me of myself when I was an uber-angsty adolescent. That’s the good thing about reading Young Adult Fiction as a middle aged adult: you have a broader worldview which allows you to appreciate teenage angst in a deeper way. You’ve been there and back. You’ve lived through it. You know there’s a way out. You understand.

Staff Review

Asterios Polyp

By David Mazzucchelli
Star Rating
★★★★★

Rated by Helen H.
Mar 21, 2014

Asterios Polyp is a self-assured, domineering, wind-bag of a paper architect. A paper architect being one “whose reputation rests on his designs, rather than on the buildings constructed from them. In fact, none of his designs had ever been built.”

When we meet Asterios, his Manhattan apartment, where he wallows in self-pity while riding out a mid-life crisis, has just burned to the ground. So he takes the last of his money, hops on a bus, and “give[s] up on the one thing [he] thought defined him.” And it “prove[s] to be a lot less difficult than [he] could have imagined.”

Staff Review

Sister Mother Husband Dog, (etc.)

By Delia Ephron
Star Rating
★★★★★

Rated by Sarah As
Mar 20, 2014

Delia Ephron has written an entertaining group of personal essays that range from the deeply touching to the absurdly humorous in Sister Mother Husband Dog, (etc.)  The first essay in the book is a tribute to her late sister, the writer Nora Ephron.  The two sisters worked together writing  screenplays for several popular movies, including You’ve Got Mail and Sleepless in Seattle. Certainly she writes of her sister in a loving way, but she also shares with us the humanness of the relationship – the jealousy and the competition.