Reconnect to Reading with a Great Book!

We hope you all have enjoyed the Strongsville Branch Librarians’ Book Blog recommendations.  This will be our last submission on the Strongsville Patch website.  If you enjoyed our book recommendations and want to continue to find out about great new books, please visit the Cuyahoga County Public Library’s What to Read page at http://www.cuyahogalibrary.org/What-to-Read.aspx

Please continue to visit your local Strongsville Branch Library and stop in to see us soon so we can give you some more great recommendations in-person.  Happy Holidays, Happy New Year, and Happy Reading!
                                                                               

Alice in Tumblrland: And Other Fairy Tales for a New Generation By Tim Manley, November 2013, 272 pages.

This book gives us a new spin on some of the most classic fairy tales that we’ve all heard.  The Ugly Duckling is still feeling ugly but now she has an Instagram account and there’s one filter that makes her look amazing.  Cinderella decides to trade in her glass slippers for the much more comfortable Crocs.  The Tortoise and the Hare are still at each other but now they’re using Facebook.  Goldilocks has gone gluten-free and poor Peter Pan has to finally grow up and get a job or at least start paying rent.  There are more than 100 fairy tales illustrated and re-imagined for today.  Isn’t Siri just like a fairy godmother?  This book will leave you laughing and thinking about our modern world and how technology affects our lives. 

Perfect: a Novel By Rachel Joyce, December 2013, 448 pages.

From the best-selling author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry comes this spellbinding new novel.   The book follows the parallel stories of Byron and Jim and goes between 1972 and present day.  In 1972, something horrible happens to Byron while driving with his mother.  It changes their whole family.  In present day, Jim is a loner and a drifter who has been in and out of a mental hospital.  Readers will be absorbed into this novel and will want to know how these two character’s stories will interweave at the end.  This is a beautifully written new novel. 

Under the Wide and Starry Sky By Nancy Horan, January 2014, 496 pages.

This well written historical novel paints a portrait of author Robert Louis Stevenson and his improbable romance with his American wife Fanny.  Thirty-five years old Fanny Osbourne meets lawyer and aspiring Scottish writer Stevenson (ten years her junior) in an artist’s colony in France where she is recovering from a tragic loss. Their intense and passionate love affair should delight readers and fans of book The Paris Wife. 

Reviews brought to you each week by Librarians –
Jennifer Niederhausen, Dona Stein, & Heather Timko
Adult Services Division
Strongsville Branch Library