Romantic Reads for Teens

Soft Place to Land (Original) by Susan Rebecca White (2010)

Hatley Branch Library Book Club meets Tuesday, October 11, 2011 at 2:00 pm

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For more than ten years, Naomi and Phil Harrison enjoyed a marriage of heady romance, tempered only by the needs of their children. But on a vacation alone, the couple perishes in a flight over the Grand Canyon. After the funeral, their daughters, Ruthie and Julia, are shocked by the provisions in their will. Spanning nearly two decades, the sisters' journeys take them from their familiar home in Atlanta to sophisticated bohemian San Francisco, a mountain town in Virginia, the campus of Berkeley, and lofts in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. As they heal from loss, search for love, and begin careers, their sisterhood, once an oasis, becomes complicated by resentment, anger, and jealousy. It seems as though the echoes of their parents' deaths will never stop reverberating--until another shocking accident changes everything once again.

Made in the U.S.A. by Billie Letts (2008)

Edgar Branch Library Book Club meets Wednesday, October 12, 2011 at Noon

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The bestselling author of WHERE THE HEART IS returns with a heartrending tale of two children in search of a place to call home. Lutie McFee's history has taught her to avoid attachments...to people, to places, and to almost everything. With her mother long dead and her father long gone to find his fortune in Las Vegas, 15-year-old Lutie lives in the god-forsaken town of Spearfish, South Dakota with her twelve-year-old brother, Fate, and Floy Satterfield, the 300-pound ex-girlfriend of her father. While Lutie shoplifts for kicks, Fate spends most of his time reading, watching weird TV shows and worrying about global warming and the endangerment of pandas. As if their life is not dismal enough, one day, while shopping in their local Wal-Mart, Floy keels over and the two motherless kids are suddenly faced with the choice of becoming wards of the state or hightailing it out of town in Floy's old Pontiac. Choosing the latter, they head off to Las Vegas in search of a father who has no known address, no phone number and, clearly, no interest in the kids he left behind.

MADE IN THE U.S.A. is the alternately heartbreaking and life-affirming story of two gutsy children who must discover how cruel, unfair and frightening the world is before they come to a place they can finally call home.

Publishers Weekly 04/28/2008

In a second Letts title where a pivotal event occurs at a Wal-Mart (the first was the author's bestseller "Where the Heart Is"), two long-neglected kids have to fend for themselvesand quickly. After their father's ex-girlfriend, Floy, who is their guardian, drops dead at the chain's Spearfish, S.D., megastore, 15-year-old Lutie McFee persuades her 11-year-old brother, Fate, to take off in Floy's Pontiac to their long-gone dad's last known address, a fleabag hotel in Las Vegas. There, they discover discouraging secrets about their father's whereabouts. Lutie gets fake working papers and a string of dead-end jobs. But with the threat of foster care looming, Lutie and trivia-mad Fate are soon at the mercy of child predators. Letts (whose son Tracy won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama) manages this potentially maudlin or lurid material with a frank lyricism, delivering a heartbreaking tale about love, loss and survival that will stick with the reader long after the last page is turned. "(June)" Copyright 2008 Reed Business Information.

10/01/2008 School Library Journal

Adult/High SchoolAfter the sudden death of Floy, her father's 300-pound girlfriend, 15-year-old Lutie McFee flees Spearfish, SD, with her 11-year-old brother, Fate. With only an apartment address to guide them, the siblings head toward Las Vegas in Floy's Pontiac, in search of the father they haven't seen or heard from in a year. Lutie's defiant personality lands the pair in a number of dangerous and precarious situations. However, her equally dominant determination drives her to do almost anything to protect her intellectual and withdrawn brother. When she is almost beaten to death during a robbery, a mysterious protector, Juan Vargas, comes to their aid. After getting medical treatment for her, Juan transports Lutie and Fate to his hometown in Hugo, OK. While Fate discovers a world of wonder and happiness, Lutie struggles to accept the support that is being offered to her. The ending, while unlikely, is satisfying and emotionally rewarding. Teens will immediately be drawn into the story by Lutie's feisty personality as well as the adventure, and ultimate hardship, of living by your wits. Recommend this one to those who enjoy gutsy protagonists, gritty plotlines, and fairy-tale endings."Lynn Rashid, Marriots Ridge High School, Marriotsville, MD" Copyright 2008 Reed Business Information.

Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Turtleback School & Library) by Mark Haddon (2004)

Athens Branch Library Book Club meets Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 6:30pm

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Narrated by a 15-year-old autistic savant obsessed with Sherlock Holmes, this dazzling novel weaves together an old-fashioned mystery, a contemporary coming-of-age story, and a fascinating excursion into a mind incapable of processing emotions.

Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel by Jeannette Walls (2009)

Stratford Branch Library Book Club meets Monday, October 17, 2011 at 1:00 pm

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Jacket Notes:

Jeannette Walls's "The Glass Castle" was "nothing short of spectacular" ("Entertainment Weekly"). Now she brings us the story of her grandmother -- told in a voice so authentic and compelling that the book is destined to become an instant classic. ""Those old cows knew trouble was coming before we did."" So begins the story of Lily Casey Smith, in Jeannette Walls's magnificent, true-life novel based on her no-nonsense, resourceful, hard working, and spectacularly compelling grandmother. By age six, Lily was helping her father break horses. At fifteen, she left home to teach in a frontier town -- riding five hundred miles on her pony, all alone, to get to her job. She learned to drive a car ("I loved cars even more than I loved horses. They didn't need to be fed if they weren't working, and they didn't leave big piles of manure all over the place") and fly a plane, and, with her husband, ran a vast ranch in Arizona. She raised two children, one of whom is Jeannette's memorable mother, Rosemary Smith Walls, unforgettably portrayed in "The Glass Castle." Lily survived tornadoes, droughts, floods, the Great Depression, and the most heartbreaking personal tragedy. She bristled at prejudice of all kinds -- against women, Native Americans, and anyone else who didn't fit the mold. "Half Broke Horses" is Laura Ingalls Wilder for adults, as riveting and dramatic as Isak Dinesen's "Out of Africa" or Beryl Markham's "West with the Night." It will transfix readers everywhere.

Publishers Weekly 06/01/2009

For the first 10 years of her life, Lily Casey Smith, the narrator of this true-life novel by her granddaughter, Walls, lived in a dirt dugout in west Texas. Walls, whose megaselling memoir, "The Glass Castle", recalled her own upbringing, writes in what she recalls as Lilys plainspoken voice, whose recital provides plenty of drama and suspense as she ricochets from one challenge to another. Having been educated in fits and starts because of her parents penury, Lily becomes a teacher at age 15 in a remote frontier town she reaches after a solo 28-day ride. Marriage to a bigamist almost saps her spirit, but later she weds a rancher with whom she shares two children and a strain of plucky resilience. (They sell bootleg liquor during Prohibition, hiding the bottles under a babys crib.) Lily is a spirited heroine, fiercely outspoken against hypocrisy and prejudice, a rodeo rider and fearless breaker of horses, and a ruthless poker player. Assailed by flash floods, tornados and droughts, Lily never gets far from hardscrabble drudgery in several statesNew Mexico, Arizona, Illinoisbut hers is one of those heartwarming stories about indomitable women that will always find an audience. "(Oct.)" Copyright 2009 Reed Business Information.

Sarah's Key by Tatiana De Rosnay (2008)

Spencer Branch Library Book Club meets Monday, October 17, 2011 at 6:30pm and Thurs., October 20, 2011 at 1:30 pm

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Haunting and suspenseful, life-affirming and beautiful, "Sarah's Key" offers a compelling portrait of occupied Paris and reveals the taboos and silence that surround this little-known episode in French history. A "New York Times" bestseller. Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten year-old girl, is brutally arrested with her family by the French police in the Vel' d'Hiv' roundup, but not before she locks her younger brother in a cupboard in the family's apartment, thinking that she will be back within a few hours.

Paris, May 2002: On Vel' d'Hiv's 60th anniversary, journalist Julia Jarmond is asked to write an article about this black day in France's past. Through her contemporary investigation, she stumbles onto a trail of long-hidden family secrets that connect her to Sarah. Julia finds herself compelled to retrace the girl's ordeal, from that terrible term in the Vel d'Hiv', to the camps, and beyond. As she probes into Sarah's past, she begins to question her own place in France, and to reevaluate her marriage and her life.

Tatiana de Rosnay offers us a brilliantly subtle, compelling portrait of France under occupation and reveals the taboos and silence that surround this painful episode.

Gloryland by Shelton Johnson (2009)

Wausau Women's Night Out Book Club meets Monday, October 17, 2011 at 6:30 pm

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Born on Emancipation Day, 1863, to a sharecropping family of African and Indian blood, Elijah Yancy never lived as a slave, but his self-image as a free person is at war with his surroundings: Spartanburg, South Carolina, in the Reconstructed South. Exiled for his own survival as a teenager, Elijah walks west to the Nebraska plains and, like other rootless young African-American men of that era, joins up with the U.S. Cavalry. The trajectory of Elijah's army career parallels the nation's imperial adventures in the late nineteenth century: subduing Native Americans in the West and quelling rebellion in the Philippines. Haunted by the terrors endured by black Americans and by his part in persecuting other people of color, Elijah is sustained only by visions, memories, prayers, and his questing spirit--which ultimately finds a home when his troop is posted to the newly created Yosemite National Park in 1903. Here, living with little beyond mountain light, cold rivers, campfires, and stars, he becomes a man who owns himself completely while knowing he's left pieces of himself scattered along his life's path like pebbles on a creek bed. Novelist Shelton Johnson wove Elijah's story from his own family's past, and from the threads of history he found while researching the role of buffalo soldiers in Yosemite. His narrator's voice--poetic, rhythmically cadenced, ranging freely through time--makes this novel a literary meditation on finding a self and a spiritual home, while unveiling a little-known chapter of America's past.

Borkmann's Point: An Inspector Van Veeteren Mystery by Hakan Nesser (2006)

Wausau Mystery Book Club meets Wednesday, October 19, 2011 at 1:00 pm

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Jacket Notes:

In this gripping novel from an internationally acclaimed author, a detective is summoned to a quiet north European town by the sea to track down the link between a series of murders. An ex-con is brutally murdered with an ax in Kaalbringen. Then the body of a wealthy real estate mogul is found, also the victim of a violent attack. There appears to be a serial killer on the loose, and Chief Inspector Van Veeteren is called in to help the local police. In his storied career he has only left one case unsolved, but he's never before faced an ax murderer. As details surrounding the grisly murders are collected, Van Veeteren finds that there is almost nothing to go on; nothing links the two victims. But then there's another murder, and shortly thereafter one of Van Veeteren's colleagues, a promising female detective, goes missing--perhaps because the criminal knows she has come too close to the truth. . . .

In this riveting novel, full of fascinating, quirky characters and deep motives, Hakan Nesser introduces American readers to a detective who is already beloved by his European readership, as he spins a story that leaves even the most veteran crime-novel readers chilled.

Publishers Weekly 01/02/2006

International bestseller Nesser makes his U.S. debut with this classy and rewarding whodunit, which won the Swedish Crime Writers' Academy Prize for Best Novel in 1994. Chief Inspector Van Veeteren, a veteran of 30 years of police work who appreciates fine food and drink, reluctantly cuts short his vacation to help the police chief of the remote town of Kaalbringen and his small crew investigate two ax murders. When the killer claims a third victim and the town's best police investigator disappears without a trace, Van Veeteren, who has left only one case unsolved in his long career, intensifies his hunt. The contemplative inspector believes that in every case a point is reached where enough information has been gathered to solve the crime with "nothing more than some decent thinking." The trick is knowing when that point is reached. Thompson's smooth translation makes this worthy mystery readily accessible to American readers. "(Mar.)" Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

One Was a Soldier by Julia Spencer-Fleming (2011)

Mosinee Branch Library Book Club meets Monday, October 24, 2011 at 1:00 pm

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Spencer-Fleming's debut novel, "In the Bleak Midwinter," introduces readers to Clare Fergusson and Russ Van Alstyne. "One Was a Soldier" takes their relationship--and the series--to the next level. On a warm September evening in the Millers Kill community center, five veterans sit down in rickety chairs to try to make sense of their experiences in Iraq. What they will find is murder, conspiracy, and the unbreakable ties that bind them to one another and their small Adirondack town.

The Rev. Clare Fergusson wants to forget the things she saw as a combat helicopter pilot and concentrate on her relationship with Chief of Police Russ Van Alstyne. MP Eric McCrea needs to control the explosive anger threatening his job as a police officer. Will Ellis, high school track star, faces the reality of life as a double amputee. Orthopedist Trip Stillman is denying the extent of his traumatic brain injury. And bookkeeper Tally McNabb wrestles with guilt over the in-country affair that may derail her marriage. But coming home is harder than it looks. One vet will struggle with drugs and alcohol. One will lose his family and friends. One will die. Since their first meeting, Russ and Clare's bond has been tried, torn, and forged by adversity. But when he rules the veteran's death a suicide, she violently rejects his verdict, drawing the surviving vets into an unorthodox investigation that threatens jobs, relationships, and her own future with Russ. As the days cool and the nights grow longer, they will uncover a trail of deceit that runs from their tiny town to the upper ranks of the U.S. Army, and from the waters of the Millers Kill to the unforgiving streets of Baghdad.

Publishers Weekly 02/28/2011

Adjusting to civilian life after a tour in Iraq proves difficult for Rev. Clare Fergusson in Spencer-Fleming's resonant and timely seventh mystery featuring Clare and her not-so-secret lover, police chief Russ Van Alstyne (after 2008's I Shall Not Want). On returning to Millers Kill, N.Y., Clare jumps right back into her duties as priest of St. Alban's Episcopalian Church. But her 18 months flying helicopters in Iraq aren't entirely in the past: she's drinking more and relying on a mix of leftover pills from her Army medical kit. Along with several other returning service members, Clare joins a community support group for veterans. When a member of the group, Tally McNab, apparently shoots herself in the mouth and falls dead into her swimming pool, Clare spearheads an investigation, hounding Russ to consider homicide. Clare and Russ's relationship deepens, while the focus on the struggles of veterans supplies another strong emotional thread. Author tour; 75,000 first printing. (Apr.) Copyright 2011 Reed Business Information.

Saving CeeCee Honeycutt by Beth Hoffman (2010)

Rothschild Branch Library Book Club meets Wednesday, October 26, 2011 at 11:00 am

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For years, twelve-year-old CeeCee Honeycutt has been the caretaker of her psychotic mother, Camille. The tiara-toting, lipstick-smeared laughingstock of an entire town, Camille was a woman trapped in her long-ago moment of glory as the 1951 Vidalia Onion Queen. But when she is hit by a truck and killed, CeeCee is left to fend for herself. To the rescue comes her previously unknown great-aunt Tootie in her vintage Packard convertible.

Henry IV, Part 1 by William Shakespeare (2000)

Wausau Reader's of Classic Literature Book Club meets Wednesday, October 26, 2011 at Noon

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Henry IV, Part 2 by William Shakespeare (2000)

Wausau Reader's of Classic Literature Book Club meets Wednesday, October 26, 2011 at Noon

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Postmistress by Sarah Blake (2010)

Marathon City Branch Library Book Club meets Thursday, October 27, 2011 at 1:00 pm

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Those who carry the truth sometimes bear a terrible weight...

It is 1940. France has fallen. Bombs are dropping on London. And President Roosevelt is promising he won't send our boys to fight in "foreign wars."

But American radio gal Frankie Bard, the first woman to report from the Blitz in London, wants nothing more than to bring the war home. Frankie's radio dispatches crackle across the Atlantic ocean, imploring listeners to pay attention--as the Nazis bomb London nightly, and Jewish refugees stream across Europe. Frankie is convinced that if she can just get the right story, it will wake Americans to action and they will join the fight.

Meanwhile, in Franklin, Massachusetts, a small town on Cape Cod, Iris James hears Frankie's broadcasts and knows that it is only a matter of time before the war arrives on Franklin's shores. In charge of the town's mail, Iris believes that her job is to deliver and keep people's secrets, passing along the news that letters carry. And one secret she keeps are her feelings for Harry Vale, the town mechanic, who inspects the ocean daily, searching in vain for German U-boats he is certain will come. Two single people in midlife, Iris and Harry long ago gave up hope of ever being in love, yet they find themselves unexpectedly drawn toward each other.

Listening to Frankie as well are Will and Emma Fitch, the town's doctor and his new wife, both trying to escape a fragile childhood and forge a brighter future. When Will follow's Frankie's siren call into the war, Emma's worst fears are realized. Promising to return in six months, Will goes to London to offer his help, and the lives of the three women entwine.

Alternating between an America still cocooned in its inability to grasp the danger at hand and a Europe being torn apart by war, "The Postmistress" gives us two women who find themselves unable to deliver the news, and a third woman desperately waiting for news yet afraid to hear it.

Sarah Blake's "The Postmistress" shows how we bear the fact that war goes on around us while ordinary lives continue. Filled with stunning parallels to today, it is a remarkable novel.

Publishers Weekly 12/21/2009

Weaving together the stories of three very different women loosely tied to each other, debut novelist Blake takes readers back and forth between small town America and war-torn Europe in 1940. Single, 40-year-old postmistress Iris James and young newlywed Emma Trask are both new arrivals to Franklin, Mass., on Cape Cod. While Iris and Emma go about their daily lives, they follow American reporter Frankie Bard on the radio as she delivers powerful and personal accounts from the London Blitz and elsewhere in Europe. While Trask waits for the return of her husbanda volunteer doctor stationed in EnglandJames comes across a letter with valuable information that she chooses to hide. Blake captures two different worldsa naïve nation in denial and, across the ocean, a continent wracked with terrorwith a deft sense of character and plot, and a perfect willingness to take on big, complex questions, such as the merits of truth and truth-telling in wartime. "(Feb.)" Copyright 2009 Reed Business Information.