Popular Fiction and Bestseller Suggestion August 2010

Imperfect Birds by Anne Lamott

Editorial Review:
It is sobering to think that Rosie Ferguson is your typical teenage girl. On one hand, she’s in the throes of her senior year in high school: concerned with body image and boyfriends, BFFs and boredom, and, of course, the daily trauma of living with parents who are so hopelessly, well, hopeless. On the other hand, she is an adept addict who’s never met a substance she wouldn’t abuse or a male she wouldn’t seduce. Juggling these two worlds demands bigger and more frequent scores, and more facile lies, while Rosie’s parents, recovering alcoholic Elizabeth and workaholic stepfather James, are reluctant to enforce even the lamest disciplinary rules for fear of losing Rosie’s love—until one night when her world comes crashing down, and Elizabeth and James have no choice but to send Rosie to a wilderness rehab program. Reprising characters from her previous novels, Rosie (1997) and Crooked Little Heart (1998), Lamott intuitively taps into the teenage drug culture to create a vivid, unsettling portrait of a family in crisis. As she eschews the cunning one-liners and wry observations that had become her signature stock-in-trade, Lamott produces her most stylistically mature and thematically circumspect novel to date.            
--Carol Haggas from Booklist

Author Interview and Book Discussion Questions

Best in Books August 2010

Twelve Sharp by Janet Evanovich

Twelve Sharp is the 2006 Quill Book Award winner. This award recognizes achievement in writing and publishing, established with the goal of creating more interest in books and literacy. US-marketed titles are first nominated by a specific group of booksellers and librarians who then choose the top five for each of nineteen award categories. Final winners are chosen by the reading public. While this is no longer an active award it does highlight the popularity of Evanovich’s books by the public. I have never read any of the preceding books in the series, but had no problem getting into this fun, fast-paced story. The characters are written to involve the reader immediately, making it a good book to have on vacation when you finally have the time to get through a book in a few sittings.

Janet Evanovich website

Review:
In a manner almost elegant in its offhandedness, Stephanie Plum gets us up to speed on her life as a bounty hunter in Trenton, NJ; her ever-eccentric family; and her fellows in her cousin's bail-bond office. It doesn't take more than a few pages. Then someone who is mistaken for Ranger--one of the two men in and out of Stephanie's life (the other is Morelli the cop)--is accused of kidnapping his daughter. Evanovich uses all of her considerable arsenal here: wisecracking humor and set pieces about cars, neighborhoods, family matters, and the funeral parlor (now with new directors straight out of Queer Eye for the Burg Guy). Then, at one point, both Morelli and Ranger are living out of Stephanie's apartment (she flees to her childhood bedroom). Evanovich also deftly uses celebrity stalking and identity theft to sketch a quite scary bad guy, and she creates in Ranger's daughter, Julie, a spirited 10-year-old version of her mesmerizing father. The ending is downright terrifying, but the coda is soothing and features a cake with icing roses. Kids? Cupcakes? What could possibly be next? --GraceAnne DeCandido Copyright 2006 Booklist

Classic Suggestion for July

Howards End by E.M. Forster

Like all of Forster's work, Howards End concerns itself with class, nationality, economic status, and how each of these affects personal relationships. It follows the intertwined fortunes of the Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen, and the Wilcox family over the course of several years. The Schlegels are intellectuals, devotees of art and literature. The Wilcoxes, on the other hand, can't be bothered with the life of the mind or the heart, leading, instead, outer lives of "telegrams and anger" that foster "such virtues as neatness, decision, and obedience, virtues of the second rank, no doubt, but they have formed our civilization." Helen, after a brief flirtation with one of the Wilcox sons, has developed an antipathy for the family; Margaret, however, forms a brief but intense friendship with Mrs. Wilcox, which is cut short by the older woman's death. When her family discovers a scrap of paper requesting that Henry give their home, Howards End, to Margaret, it precipitates a spiritual crisis among them that will take years to resolve.


Forster's 1910 novel begins as a collection of seemingly unrelated events--Helen's impulsive engagement to Paul Wilcox; a chance meeting between the Schlegel sisters and an impoverished clerk named Leonard Bast at a concert; a casual conversation between the sisters and Henry Wilcox in London one night. But as it moves along, these disparate threads gradually knit into a tightly woven fabric of tragic misunderstandings, impulsive actions, and irreparable consequences, and, eventually, connection. Though set in the early years of the 20th century, Howards End seems even more suited to our own fragmented era of e-mails and anger. For readers living in such an age, the exhortation to "only connect" resonates ever more profoundly.               - Review from Amazon.com

Book Disuccsion Guide

Best in Books July 2010

The Ghost by Robert Harris

The Ghost is the 2008 Thriller Award for Best Novel sponsored by the International Thriller Writers (ITW). The story's narrator has been hired to ghost write former British Prime Minister, Adam Lang's memoirs after the first collaborator's body is mysteriously found on the shore of Martha’s Vineyard. Lang’s character is a thinly veiled version of Tony Blair and his term in office. The astronomical offer to clean up the first draft is too attractive not to accept even with a tight completion deadline. The anonymous ghost writer has to quickly learn the voice of his subject creating a fast-paced rhythm. As the writer interviews and studies his subject, he is faced with research that points to a man with a questionable background full of dark and evil secrets.

Robert Harris's background as a BBC television correspondent and newspaper columnist add to the authenticity of this political thriller.


Booklist Review
Best-selling author Harris scores again with this intriguing political thriller. On the heels of historical blockbusters Pompeii (2003) and Imperium (2006), Harris now turns his attention to more timely issues. When a celebrity ghostwriter is tapped to be the pen behind the man for the controversial former prime minister of Britain, he gets much more than he bargained for. Although his predecessor died under suspicious circumstances, the anonymous ghostwriter finds the lucrative offer to assist the infamous Adam Lang in cobbling together his memoirs even if it means staying on a desolate Martha's Vineyard in the dead of winter too hard to resist. Not unexpectedly, Lang harbors more dangerous secrets than it is safe for any one person to possess, and the ghostwriter finds himself increasingly enmeshed in a tangled web of treachery, deceit, and international espionage as he unravels a political cover-up that will resonate with contemporary readers. As it turns out, there is more than one ghost, and the fast-paced narrative concludes with an unexpected twist. Expect considerable demand.--Flanagan, Margaret Copyright 2007 Booklist