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Post by sadie on Jul 17, 2012 13:37:35 GMT -5
Chasing Power (Hidden Talents) by Genevieve Pearson
When business student Samantha Gibson finds herself cornered by a euro-trash Darth Vader wannabe in a dark alley, it’s a nightmare end to a terrible week. Of course super powers aren’t real--until someone’s using theirs to bash your head in.
It turns out that a one-in-a-million accident has caused her to catch the attention of the Talents, a group of humans with amazing abilities. And a surprising number would rather have her dead than competing with them. Sam’s happy to tell anyone who’ll listen to her that she doesn’t actually have super powers. The problem is getting anyone to listen to her.
Enter Lane, Al, and Harry, three nerdy best friends and Talents. While their powers may not be glamorous, or even all that super, they’re determined to do the right thing. They grab Samantha and hit the road, racing cross-country towards a group offering protection.
To independent Sam, each minute of being a damsel in distress is like an iron-spike in her foot. It’s possible that friendship, and love aren’t the liability she thought they were, but it’s also possible that she may not live to find out. Because with stronger and stranger opposition barring their way, safe haven may be a pipe dream in a world where everyone is chasing power...
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Post by beth on Jul 17, 2012 23:07:12 GMT -5
is this one written for a teen audience or for adults?
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Post by sadie on Jul 18, 2012 0:05:55 GMT -5
It's a fun sci-fi........probably the target is a young audience........but I enjoyed it........you know who this author is, don't you?
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Post by beth on Jul 18, 2012 8:57:04 GMT -5
Sadie, I do not, unless she's self published online.
I took a quick look and there's no entry for her on Wiki.
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Post by sadie on Jul 18, 2012 21:01:35 GMT -5
It's my daughter in law.
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Post by beth on Jul 19, 2012 16:36:49 GMT -5
arrrrrrgh Now see .. I'm thinking she must be very new not to be in wiki. You guys need to set up an entry for her. Then, earlier I went over to Amazon and looked her up and thought , "what a pretty girl. She should have a pic on her back book covers. Still .... no idea whatsoever. duhhhh I know people who would enjoy her books. Shall pass the word.
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Post by sadie on Jul 19, 2012 18:04:45 GMT -5
Thanks! Yes......she is simply gorgeous.
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Post by sadie on Aug 15, 2012 23:48:24 GMT -5
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce
Meet Harold Fry, recently retired. He lives in a small English village with his wife, Maureen, who seems irritated by almost everything he does, even down to how he butters his toast. Little differentiates one day from the next. Then one morning the mail arrives, and within the stack of quotidian minutiae is a letter addressed to Harold in a shaky scrawl from a woman he hasn’t seen or heard from in twenty years. Queenie Hennessy is in hospice and is writing to say goodbye. Harold pens a quick reply and, leaving Maureen to her chores, heads to the corner mailbox. But then, as happens in the very best works of fiction, Harold has a chance encounter, one that convinces him that he absolutely must deliver his message to Queenie in person. And thus begins the unlikely pilgrimage at the heart of Rachel Joyce’s remarkable debut. Harold Fry is determined to walk six hundred miles from Kingsbridge to the hospice in Berwick-upon-Tweed because, he believes, as long as he walks, Queenie Hennessey will live.
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Post by sadie on Sept 8, 2012 10:14:15 GMT -5
Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures by Emma Straub
Overview The enchanting story of a midwestern girl who escapes a family tragedy and is remade as a movie star during Hollywood’s golden age.
In 1920, Elsa Emerson, the youngest and blondest of three sisters, is born in idyllic Door County, Wisconsin. Her family owns the Cherry County Playhouse, and more than anything, Elsa relishes appearing onstage, where she soaks up the approval of her father and the embrace of the audience. But when tragedy strikes her family, her acting becomes more than a child¹s game of pretend.
While still in her teens, Elsa marries and flees to Los Angeles. There she is discovered by Irving Green, one of the most powerful executives in Hollywood, who refashions her as a serious, exotic brunette and renames her Laura Lamont. Irving becomes Laura’s great love; she becomes an Academy Award-winning actress—and a genuine movie star. Laura experiences all the glamour and extravagance of the heady pinnacle of stardom in the studio-system era, but ultimately her story is a timeless one of a woman trying to balance career, family, and personal happiness, all while remaining true to herself.
Ambitious and richly imagined, Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures is as intimate—and as bigger-than-life—as the great films of the golden age of Hollywood. Written with warmth and verve, it confirms Emma Straub’s reputation as one of the most exciting new talents in fiction.
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Post by sadie on Oct 13, 2012 17:13:03 GMT -5
In the Shadow of the Banyan by Vaddey Ratner
Overview You are about to read an extraordinary story. It will take you to the very depths of despair and show you unspeakable horrors. It will reveal a gorgeously rich culture struggling to survive through a furtive bow, a hidden ankle bracelet, fragments of remembered poetry. It will ensure that the world never forgets the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979, when an estimated two million people lost their lives. It will give you hope, and it will confirm the power of storytelling to lift us up and help us not only survive but transcend suffering, cruelty, and loss.
For seven-year-old Raami, the shattering end of childhood begins with the footsteps of her father returning home in the early dawn hours, bringing details of the civil war that has overwhelmed the streets of Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital. Soon the family’s world of carefully guarded royal privilege is swept up in the chaos of revolution and forced exodus. Over the next four years, as the Khmer Rouge attempts to strip the population of every shred of individual identity, Raami clings to the only remaining vestige of her childhood— the mythical legends and poems told to her by her father. In a climate of systematic violence where memory is sickness and justification for execution, Raami fights for her improbable survival. Displaying the author’s extraordinary gift for language, In the Shadow of the Banyan is a brilliantly wrought tale of human resilience.
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Post by beth on Oct 17, 2012 15:14:39 GMT -5
Thanks, Sadie. All 3 of these sound interesting. In the Shadow of the Banyan is probably the one I'll try to get around to reading, once my current stack is finished.
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Post by sadie on Oct 25, 2012 9:52:47 GMT -5
Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore
by Robin Sloan
Overview A gleeful and exhilarating tale of global conspiracy, complex code-breaking, high-tech data visualization, young love, rollicking adventure, and the secret to eternal life—mostly set in a hole-in-the-wall San Francisco bookstore
The Great Recession has shuffled Clay Jannon out of his life as a San Francisco Web-design drone—and serendipity, sheer curiosity, and the ability to climb a ladder like a monkey has landed him a new gig working the night shift at Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. But after just a few days on the job, Clay begins to realize that this store is even more curious than the name suggests. There are only a few customers, but they come in repeatedly and never seem to actually buy anything, instead “checking out” impossibly obscure volumes from strange corners of the store, all according to some elaborate, long-standing arrangement with the gnomic Mr. Penumbra. The store must be a front for something larger, Clay concludes, and soon he’s embarked on a complex analysis of the customers’ behavior and roped his friends into helping to figure out just what’s going on. But once they bring their findings to Mr. Penumbra, it turns out the secrets extend far outside the walls of the bookstore.
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Post by sadie on Nov 29, 2012 12:06:42 GMT -5
Angela's Ashes: A Memoir by Frank McCourt
Overview “When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.”
So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. Frank’s mother, Angela, has no money to feed the children since Frank’s father, Malachy, rarely works, and when he does he drinks his wages. Yet Malachy—exasperating, irresponsible, and beguiling—does nurture in Frank an appetite for the one thing he can provide: a story. Frank lives for his father’s tales of Cuchulain, who saved Ireland, and of the Angel on the Seventh Step, who brings his mother babies.
Perhaps it is story that accounts for Frank’s survival. Wearing rags for diapers, begging a pig’s head for Christmas dinner and gathering coal from the roadside to light a fire, Frank endures poverty, near-starvation and the casual cruelty of relatives and neighbors—yet lives to tell his tale with eloquence, exuberance, and remarkable forgiveness.
Angela’s Ashes, imbued on every page with Frank McCourt’s astounding humor and compassion, is a glorious book that bears all the marks of a classic.
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Post by sadie on Jan 22, 2013 9:37:35 GMT -5
The Thirteenth Tale
by Diane Setterfield
Overview Sometimes, when you open the door to the past, what you confront is your destiny.
Reclusive author Vida Winter, famous for her collection of twelve enchanting stories, has spent the past six decades penning a series of alternate lives for herself. Now old and ailing, she is ready to reveal the truth about her extraordinary existence and the violent and tragic past she has kept secret for so long. Calling on Margaret Lea, a young biographer troubled by her own painful history, Vida disinters the life she meant to bury for good. Margaret is mesmerized by the author's tale of gothic strangeness — featuring the beautiful and willful Isabelle, the feral twins Adeline and Emmeline, a ghost, a governess,a topiary garden and a devastating fire. Together, Margaret and Vida confront the ghosts that have haunted them while becoming, finally, transformed by the truth themselves.
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Post by sadie on Jan 31, 2013 10:55:07 GMT -5
Genesis (Song of the Silvertongue) [Kindle Edition] by Genevieve Pearson
The Angels are at war. Unwilling to get their hands dirty, they use their half-breed children, the Nephilim, as warriors by proxy. Imbued with a powerful song known as Silvertongue, the Nephilim fight in their fathers’ names to save humanity...or destroy it.
* * *
“Leave town. Find me.”
Those were the last words nineteen year old Kyrie’s dead beat father spoke to her. Exiled from her home town, Kyrie and her sole remaining friend, Aaron, head west to Los Angeles, the City of Angels—because Kyrie's absentee dad is an Angel, and where better to find one?
But instead of sunny skies she finds endless rain, and rather than her father, a Nephilim half-brother, Cal, who needs her help. It seems that enemy Nephilim are gathering in L.A. in unprecedented numbers and a prophet is predicting doom, Old Testament Style.
Kyrie must master her growing skills as a Nephilim, and fast, because she's Cal's only ally in facing a conspiracy over a century in the making. But Aaron doesn’t trust Cal and his vaunting of the so-called “rules” of the Nephilim. Torn between old loyalties and new, Kyrie fights to find her way in the increasingly complicated world of the Angels. And if she can’t keep her head above water, Kyrie will drown with the city she’s trying to save.
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