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Beyond the Bestsellers
May 2023
Go beyond the bestsellers and try something new!
Fascinating Fiction
The Book That Wouldn't Burn
by Mark Lawrence
 
All books, no matter their binding, will fall to dust. The stories they carry may last longer. They might outlive the paper, the library, even the language in which they were first written.
 
The greatest story can reach the stars…
 
The boy has lived his whole life trapped within a book-choked chamber older than empires and larger than cities.

The girl has spent hers in a tiny settlement out on the Dust, where nightmares stalk and no one goes.

The world has never even noticed them. That’s about to change.

Their stories spiral around each other, across worlds and time. This is a tale of truth and lies and hearts, and the blurring of one into another. A journey on which knowledge erodes certainty and on which, though the pen may be mightier than the sword, blood will be spilled and cities burned.
Hula
by Jasmin Iolani Hakes
 
Set in Hilo, Hawai’i, a sweeping saga of tradition, culture, family, history, and connection that unfolds through the lives of three generations of women - a tale of mothers and daughters, dance and destiny.
 
“There’s no running away on an island. Soon enough, you end up where you started.”
 
Hi'i is proud to be a Naupaka, a family renowned for its contributions to hula and her hometown of Hilo, Hawaii, but there’s a lot she doesn’t understand. She’s never met her legendary grandmother and her mother has never revealed the identity of her father. Worse, unspoken divides within her tight-knit community have started to grow, creating fractures whose origins are somehow entangled with her own family history.
 
In hula, Hi'i sees a chance to live up to her name and solidify her place within her family legacy. But in order to win the next Miss Aloha Hula competition, she will have to turn her back on everything she had ever been taught, and maybe even lose the very thing she was fighting for.
 
Told in part in the collective voice of a community fighting for its survival, Hula is a spellbinding debut that offers a rare glimpse into a forgotten kingdom that still exists in the heart of its people
Love Buzz
by Neely Tubati Alexander
 
In this spectacularly enjoyable and serendipitous adventure, a chance romantic encounter during a wild night at a Mardi Gras bachelorette party sends strait-laced Serena Khan’s carefully constructed life into chaos.
 
A wretched maid of honor. A hangover from hell. Raucous Mardi Gras crowds. There isn’t much Serena Khan is enjoying about this four-day New Orleans destination bachelorette party for her semi-estranged cousin, the bride-to-be.
 
UNTIL sparks fly with a handsome stranger, who - like her - is also from Seattle, at the ladies’ last stop of the evening, a Bourbon Street bar. After their conversation is cut short, Serena is overwhelmed by the desire to find the charming man with the brooding eyebrows, but her list of clues is pretty short:
 
His name is Julian
He lives on Chamber Hill
He works at a tech company
He loves Lil Wayne and Nirvana
 
The need to find him is, for Serena, both irresistible and totally irrational. In a few short weeks, her college alumni magazine is featuring her in a “Life at Thirty” feature, cementing her as a success story. She will have officially achieved the safe, stable life her late mother insisted upon. Julian is not part of the plan.
 
As she combs Seattle for her New Orleans flame, stripping away the perfectly curated life that would have made her mother proud, Serena must decide if the pursuit of real passion is worth it, and fast, before she destroys the life she always thought she wanted.  
Mrs. Nash's Ashes
by Sarah Adler
 
A starry-eyed romantic, a cynical writer, and (the ashes of) an elderly woman take the road trip of a lifetime that just might upend everything they believe about true love.

Millicent Watts-Cohen is on a mission. When she promised her elderly best friend that she’d reunite her with the woman she fell in love with nearly eighty years ago, she never imagined that would mean traveling from D.C. to Key West with three tablespoons of Mrs. Nash’s remains in her backpack. But Millie’s determined to give her friend a symbolic happily-ever-after, before it’s (really) too late - and hopefully reassure herself of love’s lasting power in the process.

She just didn’t expect to have a living travel companion.

After a computer glitch grounds flights, Millie is forced to catch a ride with Hollis Hollenbeck, an also-stranded acquaintance from her ex’s MFA program. Hollis certainly does not believe in happily-ever-afters - symbolic or otherwise - and makes it quite clear that he can’t fathom Millie’s plan ending well for anyone.

But as they contend with peculiar bed-and-breakfasts, unusual small-town festivals, and deer with a death wish, Millie begins to suspect that her reluctant travel partner might enjoy her company more than he lets on. Because for someone who supposedly doesn’t share her views on romance, Hollis sure is becoming invested in the success of their journey. And the closer they get to their destination, the more Millie has to admit that maybe this trip isn’t just about Mrs. Nash’s love story after all - maybe it’s also about her own.
Summer Reading
by Jenn McKinlay
 
When a woman who’d rather do anything than read meets a swoon-worthy bookworm, sparks fly, making for one hot-summer fling.

For Samantha Gale, a summer on Martha’s Vineyard at her family’s tiny cottage was supposed to be about resurrecting her career as a chef, until she’s tasked with chaperoning her half-brother, Tyler. The teenage brainiac is spending his summer at the local library in a robotics competition, and there’s no place Sam, who has dyslexia, likes less than the library. And because the universe hates her, the library’s interim director turns out to be the hot-reader guy whose book she accidentally destroyed on the ferry ride to the island.

Bennett Reynolds is on a quest to find his father, whose identity he’s never known. He’s taken the temporary job on the island to research the summer his mother spent there when she got pregnant with him. Ben tells himself he isn’t interested in a relationship right now. Yet as soon as Sam knocks his book into the ocean, he can’t stop thinking about her.

An irresistible attraction blossoms when Ben inspires Sam to create the cookbook she’s always dreamed about and she jumps all in on helping him find his father, and soon they realize their summer fling may heat up into a happily ever after. 
You Are Here
by Karin Lin-Greenberg
 
As a once-bustling mall prepares to shut its doors for the final time, the residents of an upstate New York town must reckon with a shocking act that forces them to reevaluate who they are and what they want.
 
The inhabitants of a small town have long found that their lives intersect at one focal point: the local shopping mall. But business is down, stores are closing, and as the institution breathes its last gasp, the people inside it dream of something different, something more. In its pages, You Are Here brings this diverse group of characters vividly to life - flawed, real, lovable strangers who are wonderful company and prove unforgettable even after the last store has closed.
 
The only hair stylist at Sunshine Clips secretly watches YouTube primers on how to draw and paint, just as her awkward young son covertly studies new illusions for his magic act. His friend and magician’s assistant, a high school cashier in the food court, has attracted the unwanted attention of a strange boy at school. She tells no one except the mall’s chain bookstore manager, a failed academic living in the tiny house he built in his mother-in-law’s backyard. His family is watched over by the judgmental old woman next door, whose weekly trips to Sunshine Clips hide a complicated and emotional history and will spark the moment when everything changes for them all.
 
Exploring how the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are inextricably bound to the places we call home, You Are Here is a keenly perceptive and deeply humane portrait of a community in transition, ultimately illuminating the magical connections that can bloom from the ordinary wonder of our everyday lives.  
Notable Nonfiction
Automate Your Busywork : Do Less, Achieve More, and Save Your Brain for the Big Stuff
by Aytekin Tank
 
Learn to automate your busywork and focus on what really matters 
 
In Automate Your Busywork: Do Less, Achieve More, and Save Your Brain for the Big Stuff entrepreneur, founder, and CEO of Jotform, Aytekin Tank delivers a can’t-miss blueprint to help you make the most of your most precious asset: time. You’ll explore what’s possible when you offload repetitive tasks, why automation has democratized innovation, and how you can use cheap - or even completely free - no-code automation tools to transform your ability to focus on what truly matters in your business and life. 
In the book, you’ll discover: 
  • Why the future of business is no-code, and how you can use an automation-first mindset to unlock your productivity potential 
  • How to move from busywork to less work, and finally to having the time you need to accomplish your most important work 
  • How you can use delegation and automation to achieve “timefulness,” the state of having enough time 
A must-read handbook for every entrepreneur, founder, business owner, and freelancer who just doesn’t have enough hours in the day, Automate Your Busywork will also earn a place in the libraries of managers, executives, and other business leaders looking to maximize their most valuable resource. 
Brave the Wild River : The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon
by Melissa L. Sevigny
 
The riveting tale of two pioneering botanists and their historic boat trip down the Colorado River and through the Grand Canyon.
 
In the summer of 1938, botanists Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter set off to run the Colorado River, accompanied by an ambitious and entrepreneurial expedition leader, a zoologist, and two amateur boatmen. With its churning waters and treacherous boulders, the Colorado was famed as the most dangerous river in the world. Journalists and veteran river runners boldly proclaimed that the motley crew would never make it out alive. But for Clover and Jotter, the expedition held a tantalizing appeal: no one had yet surveyed the plant life of the Grand Canyon, and they were determined to be the first.
 
Through the vibrant letters and diaries of the two women, science journalist Melissa L. Sevigny traces their daring forty-three-day journey down the river, during which they meticulously cataloged the thorny plants that thrived in the Grand Canyon’s secret nooks and crannies. Along the way, they chased a runaway boat, ran the river’s most fearsome rapids, and turned the harshest critic of female river runners into an ally. Clover and Jotter’s plant list, including four new cactus species, would one day become vital for efforts to protect and restore the river ecosystem.
 
Brave the Wild River is a spellbinding adventure of two women who risked their lives to make an unprecedented botanical survey of a defining landscape in the American West, at a time when human influences had begun to change it forever.
Edison's Ghosts : The Untold Weirdness of History's Greatest Geniuses
by Katie Spalding
 
Overturn everything you knew about history’s greatest minds in this raucous and hilarious book, where it turns out there's a finer line between "genius" and "idiot" than we've previously known.
 
"As Albert Einstein almost certainly never said, everyone is a genius – but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” So begins Katie Spalding’s spunky takedown of the Western canon, and how genius may not be as irrefutably great as we commonly understand. While most of us may never become Einstein, it may surprise you to learn that there’s probably a bunch of stuff you can do that Einstein couldn’t. And, as Spalding shows, the famous prodigies she explores here were quite odd by any definition. For example:
 
  • Thomas Edison, inventor of the lightbulb, believed that he could communicate with the undead and built the world’s very first hotline to heaven: the Spirit Phone.
  • Marie and Pierre Curie, famous for discovering radioactivity, slept next to a lump of radioactive material for years and strapped it to their arms to watch it burn them in real-time.
  • Lord Byron, acclaimed British poet, literally took a bear with him to university.
  • Isaac Newton discovered the laws of gravity and motion, but he also looked up at the sun without eye protection. The result? Three days of blindness.
  • Tesla, whose scientific work led to the invention of the AC unit, fell in love with a pigeon. 
Super Visible : The Story of the Women of Marvel
by Margaret Stohl
 
An eye-opening and engaging celebration of the women who have helped make Marvel one of the most successful comics and entertainment companies in the world.
 
What does a hero's journey look like when the hero in question happens to be a girl? #1 New York Times bestselling author and Marvel creator Margaret Stohl (The Life of Captain Marvel, Black Widow: Forever Red) along with Judith Stephens, producer and
cocreator of the Women of Marvel podcast, interviewed more than 120 women and nonbinary Marvel contributors in search of the
answer to that question.

With one shared goal - to make the historically invisible work of women visible - and with unprecedented access to Marvel creators, writers, actors, and more, Stohl and Stephens set out to tell the story of the women of the “House of Ideas” from 1939 through today, and along the way, to find the meaning of their own Marvel stories.
 
Packed with biographies and illustrations of creators, graphical reprints and excerpts of historic Marvel comics, and exclusive interviews from award-winning actors; acclaimed directors; lauded writers; top artists and influential producers, Super Visible: The Story of the Women of Marvel is an essential read for fans of all ages. 


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