Historical Romance

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• Historical Fiction
• Romance

Mr. Darcy’s Daughters
By Elizabeth Aston
F ASTON
This sequel to Pride and Prejudice is set in 1818. Mr. and Mrs. Darcy (née Elizabeth Bennett) have gone on a diplomatic mission to Constantinople and left their five daughters in London with Darcy's cousin Colonel Fitzwilliam and his wife.

Katharine of Aragon
By Jean Plaidy
F PLAIDY
Katharine of Aragon faces an uncertain future of poverty, humiliation, and exile, until she catches the eye of the new heir to the British throne.

Love Only Once
By Johanna Lindsey
ROMANCE LINDSEY
Kidnapped and seduced by the handsome Nicholas Eden, lovely Regina Ashton falls for her captor, but scandal, danger, and tragic misunderstandings threaten their relationship, in a tale set in Regency England.

The Secret Life of Bees
By Sue Monk Kidd
F KIDD
Its 1964, the year of the Civil Rights Act, in Sylvan, S.C. Fourteen-year-old Lily is on the run with motherly servant Rosaleen, fleeing both Lily’s abusive father T. Ray and the police who battered Rosaleen for defending her new right to vote.

The History of Love
By Nicole Krauss
F KRAUSS
Sixty years after a book's publication, its author remembers his lost love and missing son, while a teenage girl named for one of the book's characters seeks her namesake, as well as a cure for her widowed mother's loneliness.

The Kommandant’s Girl
By Pam Jenoff
F JENOFF
Becoming a spy for the resistance after the Nazi's invade Poland, Emma Bau, taking on a new identity as a gentile, becomes a high-ranking Nazi official's assistant and, leading a double life, compromises her marriage vows, her safety, and the lives of those she loves for the cause.

Clean, Fast-Paced Fantasy Similar to Christopher Paolini

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• Clean books
• Fast pace
• Fantasy
• Christopher Paolini read-alikes

The Amulet of Samarkand
By Jonathan Stroud
YA F STROUD
Nathaniel, a magician’s apprentice, summons up the djinni Bartimaeus and instructs him to steal the Amulet of Samarkand from the powerful magician Simon Lovelace.

Across the Nightingale Floor
By Lian Hearn
F HEARN
In a novel set in a land much like feudal Japan, a young boy named Takeo becomes a pawn in the ceaseless battles between rival warlord clans in a culture ruled by codes of honor and formal rituals.

Elantris
By Brandon Sanderson
SCIFI SANDERSO
Arriving in a kingdom of Arelon to enter a marriage of state, princess Sarene discovers that her intended has died and that she is considered a widow, leaving her a lone force

Lightning Thief
By Rick Riordan
YA F RIORDAN
After learning that the father he never knew is Poseidon, God of the Sea, Percy Jackson is transferred from boarding school to Camp Half-Blood, a summer camp for demigods, and becomes involved in a quest to prevent a war between the Gods.

Assassin’s Apprentice
By Robin Hobb
SCIFI HOBB
As Fitz, an outcast and the bastard son of Prince Chivalry, grows to manhood, a legacy of magical skills and other mysterious talents propels him into the role of protector of the kingdom, if his initial perilous mission does not destroy him first.

Lighthouse Land
By Adrian McKinty
YA F McKinty
Thirteen-year-old Jamie is overjoyed when a bequest sends him and his mother to live on an Irish island, where he and his newfound friend Ramsay travel back in time to help a young girl save her people from certain death.

Alcatraz versus the Evil Librarians
By Brandon Sanderson
YA F Sanderso
On his thirteenth birthday, foster child Alcatraz Smedry receives a bag of sand which is immediately stolen by the evil Librarians who are trying to take over the world, and Alcatraz is introduced to his grandfather and his own special talent, and told that he must use it to save civilization.

Contemporary Warfare

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• Warfare
• Books published in the last 10 years
• Nonfiction

All Things Must Fight to Live: Stories of War and Deliverance in the Congo
By Bryan Mealer
967.4103 MEA 2008
A foreign correspondent in Africa shares his dramatic experiences in the Congo as set against the region's troubled history, in an account that discusses the impact of the past decade of war, the activities of violent militia, and the nation's hopes for recovery.

Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq
By Thomas Ricks
956.7044 RIC 2006
This is a thorough history of the war in Iraq from the planning stages through the continued insurgency in early 2006. The inclusion of internal documents and research from interviews with American soldiers and officers makes his tragic portrait particularly damning and compelling as Ricks makes a case for a war poorly planned and bravely but blindly fought.

The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World
By Rupert Smith
355.02 SMI 2007
Smith states, "war no longer exists,” claiming that nuclear warfare has changed the face of warfare, ending the large-scale industrialized warfare which made use of massive tank and air power offensives. supported by the application of intensive air power. The result is a need for understanding of politic contexts of opponents’ actions and then revised strategies.

Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One
By David Kilcullen
355.425 KIL 2009
Kilcullen differentiates between insurgents who have local grievances versus those who support movements with a worldwide agenda and argues that the U.S. had done a poor job of applying different tactics to these very different situations, continually misidentifying insurgents with limited aims and legitimate grievances (whom he calls "accidental guerrillas") as part of a coordinated worldwide terror network.

The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier’s Education
By Craig Mullaney
Mullaney 2009
Mullaney is a young veteran of the war in Afghanistan who writes of his military education, through West Point and the camps and retreats involved in becoming an Army Ranger. His story builds to the ‘unforgiving minute’ when he finds himself leading his men through a brutal gunfight with Afghan insurgents.

Teen Romance

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• Teen books
• Romance

Anahita’s Woven Riddle
By Meghan Nuttall Sayres
YA F SAYRES
Anahita takes fate into her hands when her father promises her in marriage to a man she dislikes in Iran over 100 years ago. She convinces her father to let her hold a contest in which potential suitors must correctly answer the riddle she has woven into her wedding carpet. A diplomat, a schoolteacher, a shepherd, and a prince compete in Anahita's battle of wits.

Graceling
By Kristin Cashore
YA F CASHORE
In a world where some people are born with extreme and often-feared skills called Graces, Katsa struggles for redemption from her own horrifying Grace, the Grace of killing, and teams up with another young fighter to save their land from a corrupt king.

Keturah and Lord Death
By Martine Leavitt
YA F LEAVITT
When Lord Death comes to claim sixteen-year-old Keturah while she is lost in the King's Forest, she charms him with her story and is granted a twenty-four hour reprieve in which to seek her one true love.

The Luxe
By Anna Godbersen
YA F GODBERSE
In Manhattan in 1899, five teens of different social classes lead dangerously scandalous lives, despite the strict rules of society and the best-laid plans of parents and others. Elizabeth and Diana Holland reign supreme; or so it seems. Scratch the surface, though, and you can detect festering jealousies that threaten to topple them.

General Winston’s Daughter
By Sharon Shinn
YA F SHINN
Seventeen-year-old heiress Averie Winston travels with her guardian to faraway Chiarrin, a country her father's army has occupied, and once she arrives and is reunited with her fiancé, she discovers that her notions about politics, propriety, the military, and even her intended have changed.

Contemporary Classics

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• Contemporary classics
• Meaningful themes
  

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
By Mary Ann Shaffer
F SHAFFER
As London is emerging from the shadow of World War II, writer Juliet Ashton discovers her next subject in a book club on Guernsey Island--a club born as a spur-of-the-moment alibi after its members are discovered breaking curfew by the Germans occupying their island.

These is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901
By Nancy E. Turner
F TURNER
This is the fictionalized diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 17, who goes from New Mexico to Texas and back, protecting her family with her rifle. She recounts the trials and heartache of settling the Arizona Territory but also the joys of life that helped her to keep moving forward.

The Book Thief
By Markus Zusak
F ZUSAK
Trying to make sense of the horrors of World War II, Death relates the story of Liesel--a young German girl whose book-stealing and story-telling talents help sustain her family and the Jewish man they are hiding, as well as their neighbors.

The Wednesday Wars
By Gary Schmidt
YAF SCHMIDT
Seventh-grader, Holling Hoodhood, is convinced his teacher hates him. During the 1967 school year, on Wednesday afternoons when all his classmates go to either Catechism or Hebrew school, seventh-grader Holling Hoodhood stays in Mrs. Baker's classroom where they read the plays of William Shakespeare and Holling learns much of value about the world he lives in.

Well-written Historical Fiction in the Style of Charlotte Brontë

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• Historical Fiction
• Charlotte Brontë read-alikes

The Thirteenth Tale
By Diane Setterfield
F SETTERFI
Margaret Lea, a bookish loner, is summoned to the home of Vida Winter, England’s most popular novelist, and commanded to write her biography. Miss Winter has been falsifying her life story and her identity for more than 60 years. Facing imminent death and feeling an unexplainable connection to Margaret, Miss Winter begins to spin a haunting, suspenseful tale of an old English estate, a devastating fire, twin girls, a governess, and a ghost.

Wide Sargasso Sea
By Jean Rhys
F RHYS
In a prequel to Jane Eyre, Creole heiress Antoinette Cosway lives in Dominica and Jamaica in the 1830s before she travels to England, becomes Mrs. Rochester, and goes mad.

A History of Love
By Nicole Krauss
F KRAUSS
Sixty years after a book's publication, its author remembers his lost love and missing son, while a teenage girl named for one of the book's characters seeks her namesake, as well as a cure for her widowed mother's loneliness.

Suite Francaise
Author Irene Nemirovsky
F NEMIROV
Nemirovsky, a young Russian Jewish emigre, became a celebrated novelist in Paris at age 26 in 1929. She wrote eight more novels; then, even though she was certain that she wouldn’t survive Germany’s occupation of France, she embarked on a grandly symphonic, courageous, and scathing work about Frances collaboration with the Nazis. She completed two of five planned movements before she was sent to Auschwitz, a heart-wrenching story meticulously documented in a supplemental section. This is the story of life in France under the Nazi occupation including two parts--"Storm in June," set amid the chaotic 1940 exodus from Paris, and "Dolce," set in a German-occupied village rife with resentment, resistance, and collaboration.

Teen Fantasy with Princesses, Dragons, Magic and More

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• Teen books
• Fantasy
• Princesses

The Princess and the Hound
By Mette Ivie Harrison
YA F HARRISON
George has always felt burdened by his princely duties, and even more by the need to hide the magic through which he speaks with animals, but when he is betrothed to the strange princess of a neighboring kingdom, his secret, and the persecution of people like himself, must come to an end.

Wildwood Dancing
By Juliet Marillier
YA F MARILLIER Five sisters who live with their merchant father in Transylvania use a hidden portal in their home to cross over into a magical world, the Wildwood.

The Hero and the Crown
By Robin McKinley
YA F MCKINLEY
Aerin, with the guidance of the wizard Luthe and the help of the blue sword, wins the birthright due her as the daughter of the Damarian king and a witchwoman of the mysterious, demon-haunted North.

Sunlight and Shadow
By Cameron Dokey
YA F DOKEY
At the age of sixteen, Mina's father took her out of the shadows and into the sunlight in the hopes of giving her a new life, but Mina's mother retaliates by luring a handsome prince into a dangerous agreement to free Mina. Based on the opera “The Magic Flute.”

The Faerie Path
By Frewin Jones
YA F JONES
Anita, an ordinary sixteen-year-old girl, is transported from modern-day London to the realm of Faerie where she discovers that she is Princess Tania, the long-lost daughter of King Oberon and Queen Titania.

Humorous History

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• Humor
• Nonfiction
• History

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
By Chip Heath and Dan Heath
306.13 HEA 2007
Unabashedly inspired by Malcolm Gladwell's bestselling The Tipping Point, the brothers Heath—Chip a professor at Stanford's business school, Dan a teacher and textbook publisher—offer an entertaining, practical guide to effective communication. Drawing extensively on psychosocial studies on memory, emotion and motivation, their study is couched in terms of "stickiness"—that is, the art of making ideas unforgettable.

Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life
By Amy Krouse Rosenthal
BIO Rosenthal
Amy Krouse Rosenthal, has written a snappy, random, remarkable memoir--the first of its kind to give readers an honest flaws-n-all perspective of what it's like to be...ordinary. Rosenthal has collected a lifetime of thoughts, observations, and decisions, and created an alphabetized personal encyclopedia, complete with cross-referenced entries and illustrations.

History’s Great Untold Stories
By Joseph Cummins
909 CUM 2006
This volume combines vivid first-hand accounts of pivotal events in history with authoritative commentary. Revealing startling links among events and people separated by centuries and continents, the epic struggles and bombastic personalities have been carefully chosen for their power to challenge some of the fiercest debates of our present day. History's Great Untold Stories will be welcomed by readers who are eager to uncover "history's mysteries" and explore lesser known, non-Western views of world events.

Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise
By Ruth Reichl
BIO Reichl
In her third memoir, Ruth Reichl focuses on her life as a food critic, dishing up a feast of fabulous meals enjoyed during her tenure at The New York Times. As a critic, Reichl was determined to review the "true" nature of each restaurant she visited, so she often dined incognito--each chapter highlights a new disguise, a different restaurant, and a fresh culinary adventure.

Mysterious Teen Fantasy

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• Mysteries
• Teen books
• Fantasy
  

The Secret Hour
By Scott Westerfeld
YA F WESTERFELD
Upon moving to Bixby, Oklahoma, fifteen-year-old Jessica Day learns that she is one of a group of people who have special abilities that help them fight ancient creatures living in an hour hidden at midnight—creatures that seem determined to destroy Jess. This is the first in the Midnighters trilogy.

Dreamhunter
By Elizabeth Knox
YA F KNOX
In a world where select people can enter "The Place" and find dreams of every kind to share with others for a fee, a fifteen-year-old girl is training to be a dreamhunter when her father disappears, leaving her to carry on his mysterious mission. There is a second book, Dreamquake, in this duet.

Wildwood Dancing
By Juliet Marillier
YA F MARILLIER
When their cousin Cezar arrives after their father becomes ill, Jena fears his true motive for showing up while worrying about her sister's new relationship with a dangerous creature from the Other Kingdom, an enchanted world only available to them on the night of the full moon.

The New Policeman
By Kate Thompson
YA F THOMPSON
When his mother asks for "time" for her birthday, Irish teenager J.J. Liddy sets out to find it and stumbles upon Tir na n'Og, the land of the fairies, where he uncovers secrets about his family history, magic, the music that he loves, and a crime his great-grandfather may or may not have committed.

Heir Apparent
By Vivian Vande Velde
YA F VANDE VELDE
Trapped in the dangerous game of Heir Apparent, Giannine is forced to obtain a magic ring, find stolen treasure, solve the dwarf's stupid riddles, and slay a dragon--among other challenges--in order to survive.

Interesting Real Life Stories

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• Biographies

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir
By Bill Bryson
BIOGRAPHY BRYSON
The Thunderbolt Kid was born in the 1950s when six-year-old Bryson found a mysterious, scratchy green sweater with a satiny thunderbolt across the chest. The jersey bestowed magic powers on the wearer–X-ray vision and the power to zap teachers and babysitters and deflect unwanted kisses from old people. These are the memoirs of that Kid, whose earthly parents were not really half bad–a loving mother who didn't cook and was pathologically forgetful, but shared her love of movies with her youngest child, and a dad who was the greatest baseball writer that ever lived.

A Girl Named Zippy
By Haven Kimmel
BIOGRAPHY KIMMEL
Kimmel's smooth, impeccably humorous prose evokes her childhood as vividly as any novel. Born in 1965, she grew up in Mooreland, Ind., a place that by some "mysterious and powerful mathematical principle" perpetually retains a population of 300, a place where there's no point learning the street names because it's just as easy to say, "We live at the four-way stop sign."

Prize Winner of Defiance Ohio
By Terry Ryan
BIOGRAPHY RYAN
In the 1950s, the Ryan family struggled to make ends meet. Ten kids and a father who spent most of his paycheck on booze drained the family's meager finances. But mom Evelyn Ryan, a former journalist, found an ingenious way to bring in extra income: entering contests on the backs of cereal boxes and the like. The author, Evelyn's daughter, tells the entertaining story of her childhood and her mother's contest career with humor and affection.

Glass Castle
By Jeannette Walls
BIOGRAPHY WALLS
Walls chronicles her upbringing at the hands of eccentric, nomadic parents--Rose Mary, her frustrated-artist mother, and Rex, her brilliant, alcoholic father. To call the elder Walls's childrearing style laissez faire would be putting it mildly. As Rose Mary and Rex, motivated by whims and paranoia, uprooted their kids time and again, the youngsters (Walls, her brother and two sisters) were left largely to their own devices.

When You Are Engulfed in Flames
By David Sedaris
BIOGRAPHY SEDARIS
In David Sedaris's excellent latest collection, cringe-worthy moments follow on the heels of laugh-out-loud ones--you may never buy another pair of thrift-store pants, for example, and that's only the beginning.

Well-written Romance, of the Less-Steamy Variety

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• Romance

Daughter of the Forest
By Juliet Marillier
SCIFI MARILLIER
To reclaim the lives of her bewitched brothers, Sorcha leaves the only safe place she has known and starts on a journey of pain, loss, and terror. She drifts into the hands of a Briton who, undeterred by her magically imposed silence, takes her under his protection. The course of true love has rarely run less smoothly, but Sorcha's daring and perseverance pay off in the end for herself, her brothers, and her Briton love.

Into the Wilderness
By Sarah Donati
F DONATI
When Elizabeth Middleton arrives in upstate Paradise, N.Y., after a sheltered life in England, she means to teach school. Her father, however, wants her to marry Dr. Richard Todd and fulfill both men's ambitions for property. Then Elizabeth meets Nathaniel Bonner, a Scotsman raised by Mohawks and Lizzie rejects her father's plans.

Green Darkness
By Anya Seton
F SETON
This unforgettable story of undying love combines mysticism, suspense, mystery, and romance into a web of good and evil. Richard Marsdon marries a young American woman named Celia, brings her to live at his English estate, and all seems to be going well. Then Richard becomes withdrawn, and Celia is constantly haunted by a vague dread. When she suffers a breakdown and wavers between life and death, a wise doctor realizes that only by forcing Celia to relive her past can he enable her to escape her illness. Celia travels back 400 years in time to her past life as a beautiful but doomed servant.

Forest House
By Marion Zimmer Bradley
SCIFI BRADLEY
Eilan, a Druid girl raised in the cult of the Goddess, has fallen in love with a young Roman named Gaius. He is a half-Briton whose mother was of the Druid tribes and whose father is a powerful officer in the Roman legions. Their forbidden love mirrors the clash of cultures in Roman Britain.