Book Recommendations

Share this children’s picture-book with your family if you are looking for a new and heartwarming holiday story! Santa in the City tells the tale of Deja who worries that Santa might not be able to visit her since she is a city kid and doesn’t have a chimney for him to come down nor a parking spot to fit a sleigh. Restore your belief in Santa and introduce your child to routines and traditions in homes outside of Groveland neighborhoods. Bold, colorful illustrations capture the joy of the holidays, no matter where you live! Bergen Daley, Youth Services Librarian

 Looking for a new mystery series to read and/or watch? I highly recommend Sally Andrew’s Recipes for Love and Murder!Having a subscription to Acorn, I luckily stumbled onto this new Acorn original series! It is a quirky, amusing, interesting and twisting murder mystery set in South Africa, a nice change of pace from my usual Australian and British mystery settings. My curiosity got the better of me when I learned the series was based on a book so I had to get it (which I did) and read it. I’m so glad that I did!       Respectful Afrikaans address

This YA horror book is a retelling of Carrie. In The Weight of Blood, Maddy (Madison) Washington lives with a strict father, who forces her to keep a secret – that she is biracial. He forces her to claim that she is white. One day, an incident causes her classmates, who already bully her, to find out her secret. This sets off a chain of events that eventually causes a dangerous, disastrous, and bloody prom. I loved the extra elements that Tiffany D. Jackson added to this book! I love the original Carrie, but the inclusion of a focus on racism brought out

A picture-book delight tells a cumulative tale with a mischievous twist. The bear’s hat is gone, and he wants it back. Patiently and politely, he asks the animals he comes across, one by one, whether they have seen it. Follow along as the bear loses hope, until things take an amusing twist. Told completely in dialogue, this entertaining tale plays out in clever illustrations laced with visual humor. I Want My Hat Back is fun for children and adults, and serves as a great example of the power of color and emotional expression in illustration. Recommended for ages 4 and

I am a fan of Deanna Raybourn’s Veronica Speedwell series of historical mysteries and when I heard she’d written a new mystery, Killers of a Certain Age, my curiosity got the best of me. I am very glad it did! I LOVED it! Talk about a fun romp! Without giving too much away, the gist of this book is that it is about four 60 year old women who have just retired from 40 years of being….ASSASSINS. Not just the bad kind (if this is possible), but the kind that worked for a secret international organization that started out hunting

Having loved author Jennifer Ryan’s “The Kitchen Front”, I could hardly wait to read her new book “The Wedding Dress Sewing Circle”. It was just as good!!! During the London Blitz, famous fashion designer Cressida Westcott loses her design shop and her home. Having nowhere else to go, Cressida returns to the family manor house (that she fled decades earlier) in the quaint country village. Arriving with nothing but the clothes on her back, and at a loss of how to rebuild her business, Cressida’s niece Violet is thrilled to finally meet her renowned aunt. Violet is a self-absorbed and

As a princess, but a third daughter, Marra has seen her two older sisters married off to the same terrible prince. One came back dead, and one is being abused by him. To save the sister who is still alive, Marra decides to kill her sister’s awful husband. Marra is not sure how she will fare; she’s quiet, not very bold, and lives a peaceful life at a convent though she’s not a nun herself. But when she decides to save her sister, she knows what she has to do. She tracks down a witch that tells her that if

Thanks to one of our library patrons raving about this book, I read “The Lost Summers of Newport” by Beatriz Williams, Lauren Willig & Karen White over the weekend. This is the 4th collaboration of these 3 authors and what began as a fluke while they were enjoying a night out together, these 3 best-selling authors have found their niche (and they’re all fun reads)! This book is a storyof money and secrets set among the famous summer mansions of Newport, RI, spanning over a century from the Gilded Age to the present day. The authors divided this story into 3

It is 1986 and 12-year-old Nova is waiting for the launch of the Challenger Space Shuttle, and for her sister, Bridget, to return as she had promised. Seven years earlier, Nova and Bridget were put into the foster care system where Nova relied on Bridget to be her voice and advocate, but now her sister is nowhere to be found and Nova needs to find a way to communicate and defend herself. The book Planet Earth is Blue shows the struggles of having autism before communication devices like tablets and cellphones were available for support. Now, in the present, Nova

For fans of The City of Brass, The Stardust Thief is a story where the existence of jinn is recognized by society, but they are also hunted due to the fact that they are inhuman and the healing power in their blood. This book follows a few main characters: Loulie al-Nazari, a young woman who sells powerful jinn relics, and Mazen, the sultan’s son who would rather listen to and tell stories rather than join his brother’s Forty Thieves. Readers will recognize some of the stories in The Stardust Thief. Loulie and Mazen are sent on a perilous journey to