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Monday, February 1, 2016

Stop by the Devereaux Library to see what new bestsellers have arrived.




Slade House: A Novel by David Mitchell

“The joy in Slade House is in the discovery. It’s in seeing different people make the same mistakes over and over again. . . . It’s in thinking that you’d be smarter, of course. That you’d see through all this B-movie schlock (like creepy portraits, sad ghosts and stairways that go nowhere), find the secret door, and escape. Only to find that you’re already trapped.”
- NPR



The Secret Chord: A Novel by Geraldine Brooks

“There’s something bordering on the supernatural about Geraldine Brooks.  She seems able to transport herself back to earlier time periods, to time travel.  Sometimes, reading her work, she draws you so thoroughly into another era that you swear she’s actually lived in it.  With sensory acuity and a deep and complex understanding of emotional states, she conjures up the way we lived then … Brooks has humanized the king and cleverly added a modern perspective to our understanding of him . . . [Her] vision of the biblical world is enrapturing.”





Welcome to Night Vale: A Novel by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor

“All hail the glow cloud as the weird and wonderful town of Night Vale brings itself to fine literature. . . . A fantastic addition with a stand-alone tale of the mysterious desert town that also offers loyal listeners some interesting clues about the nature of the place.”




The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto by Mitch Albom

 “Albom’s The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto hits the right notes. Albom’s love for music is richly apparent... and his maxims about life will no doubt bring readers on a pleasantly sentimental journey about the bandmates in their lives.”



See Me by Nicholas Sparks

“See Me” starts as a classic tale of a couple struggling to overcome their mismatched backgrounds. … Colin and Maria meet cute when he helps her with a flat tire in the middle of a rainstorm, and then she spots him bartending when she is out with her sister. … Before you can say, “Deny thy father and refuse thy name,” this Romeo and Juliet surmount all their apparent incompatibilities, even managing a stolen night of carnal passion without angering Maria’s stereotypically conservative Mexican parents. … As the mystery elements of the plot develop, these weaknesses only increase. Someone keeps leaving dead roses in Maria’s car, sending her threatening notes and finally targeting her family’s home in his rifle sights. … Worse, all that intrigue turns out to be disconnected from Colin and Maria. If their ho-hum romance had been a red herring, I might have cheered — what a clever way of Sparks to send up his usual style and show us a bit of his darker side. But their relationship remains center stage all the way to the last “Okay,” and I found myself wondering what was so mysterious about a workmanlike romance novel.




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