Reviews

It is 1865 and the country is going through many changes. The Civil War is over. The Emancipation Proclamation has given freedom to millions of slaves. Conflicts continue between the Native Americans and settlers. In the midst of all this change, the Union Pacific is pushing westward to complete the first transcontinental railroad.

12.21 is Dustin Thomason’s second book after his well received debut novel Rule of Four that he co-wrote with his friend Ian Caldwell.

Carlisle vs. Army is more than the story of the legendary football game between two football powers in 1912. It’s the story of its 3 principal characters - Jim Thorpe, Pop Warner, and Dwight Eisenhower. Carlisle didn’t look at this as just any football game.

Will Grayson is your average high school student—just trying to get through school while not attracting too much attention. This plan doesn’t always work very well because his best friend, Tiny Cooper (who is not tiny, by the way), is loud. And Tiny is about to attract way more attention because he wants to put on a musical about his life . . . for the entire school.

Final Fantasy XIII-2 (pronounced thirteen two)—available on both PS3 and X-Box 360—begins three years after the end of Final Fantasy XIII.  (There’s a good summary of the original game in the sequel, so you don’t need to play the first in order to play the second.)  It opens with a confusing montage of Lightning (protagonist

What qualities make an artist’s work effective, insightful, and enduring? Whether it was Claude Monet’s first  showing of what eventually became the foundation for the “Impressionist” movement or Kurt Cobain’s acoustic swan song on MTV’s (Yes, children.

The setting is Berlin and the year is 1936.  In award winning author, Jeffrey Deaver’s book, Garden of Beasts, Germany is planning rearmament while Hitler is strengthening his rise to power.

Masque of the Red Death, by Bethany Griffin is an intriguing re-production of Poe’s original version, “The Masque of the Red Death”. Griffin creates a world that has succumbed to an air-borne infectious disease, which leaves people dying on every corner.

In this dystopian/alternate world novel, The Pledge by Kimberly Derting, the country of Lundania is on the brink of war. The Queen, whose magical powers pass down through generations, is growing old and does not have a female heir.

A good ghost story works beneath the surface of our attention, shifting it now and again to a telling plot insight and then letting it sink back into eerie atmosphere. In the recently republished novella Mrs.