Good Reads & Views

The New Cool: A Visionary Teacher, His FIRST Robotics Team, and the Ultimate Battle of Smarts by Neal Bascomb
Nonfiction

What a great read! Exciting science, nail-biting drama, and fun too. The FIRST program presents challenges teams have to solve by building robots that can answer the challenge set that year. A few of the participating teams get some airtime here, but the real stars of the show are the DPenguineers from Dos Pueblos Engineering Academy. Teacher Amir Abo-Shaeer and his students and volunteers take on the challenge in 2009. Through incredibly hard work, long hours, and teamwork, they build and refine their robot in preparation for the regional and national competitions.

    

Big Girl Panties by Stephanie Evanovich
Fiction

Big Girl Panties by Stephanie Evanovich,the niece of Janet Evanovich, is a funny and emotional story about Holly Brennan, a thirty-two year old widow, who is overweight and struggling to get her life back. On a plane ride back from settling her husband’s estate, she meets Logan, a personal trainer to famous athletes, who offers to get her back in shape. Although she dreads working out he helps her break her bad eating habits, she loses weight and gets in shape. While working with Logan she also gains back her self-esteem and works through the grief of losing her husband. A friendship is formed as well as an intimacy but can they make it as a couple?

This Case is Gonna Kill Me by Phillipa Bornikova
Fiction

Linnet Ellery’s world is different than ours: the Powers (vampires, werewolves and the elven Alfar) publicly announced their presence more than 30 years ago, and human kind has learned to live carefully alongside these great beings. Linnet is human, but was fostered by vampires, which gives her an advantage when she begins her legal career at a White-Fang law firm. Linnet and her supervisor are working late one night on a probate case involving a widow, her werewolf husband’s multimillion dollar business, and his werewolf progeny when they are attacked by a werewolf. Linnet barely escapes with her life, but her boss is not so lucky. When Linnet barely escapes several more seemingly random yet vicious attacks, she realizes she has made some powerful enemies. Fortunately, she has equally powerful friends, including an elven private detective and a demoted vampire, who have her back as she tries to uncover the source of these attacks.

This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral—Plus Plenty of Valet Parking!—in America’s Gilded Capital by Mark Leibovich
Nonfiction

It’s been called the political beach book of the summer of 2013, and for good reason. By turns hilarious and sobering, this is an easy-reading, gossipy, fun yet snide, look at Washington, D.C., politics. Leibovich skewers politicians and the journalists who cover them (himself included) as he describes the way things really work in the capital. From the opening scene at Tim Russert’s funeral—that year’s major social event—to the chapters about a power-hungry congressional aide and the online newsletters where everyone’s eager to see their own name, this book will give you a peek into the inner circles of power. If you liked Hardball by Christopher Matthews, you’ll like this one.

Pagan Spring by G.M. Malliet
Fiction

Dishy vicar Max Tudor, formerly MI5, is in a happy place, romantically and figuratively, with his biggest challenge being the completion of his Easter Sermon. Then he attends a dinner party that includes some recent arrivals to the village and is pulled into crime-solving action when one of the dinner guests is found dead shortly thereafter. Clues of adultery, long-ago crimes and the French Resistance all could play a role in helping Max solve this crime in time to finish that dreaded sermon and spend some quality time with the love of his life. This is the third title in the series, newcomers may want to start with Wicked Autumn, followed by A Fatal Winter, both of which were nominated for Agatha Awards for best traditional mystery novel.

And Then I Found You by Patti Callahan Henry    
Fiction

The story is about Kate Vaughan who has a secret that she must deal with before she can face her future. She has a successful business and a strong relationship with her family. Now she has a devoted boyfriend, Rowan who is the perfect mate, but she is having a hard time loving him with all of her heart. She must deal with the mistakes she’s made and face the truth. She must travel back to the person she once loved with all of her heart, face her secret, and discover the courage she never knew she had. 

Eva’s Eye by Karin Fossum
Fiction

The first novel of the Inspector Konrad Sejer series written in 1995 has finally arrived in English. Eva Mangus, a struggling divorced mother, and her 6 year old daughter are out for a walk when they find the decomposing body of a man floating in the icy river. Eva pretends to notify the police and then rushes her daughter away from the area. Inspector Sejer quickly identifies the body as that of a man who disappeared several months before. A few days before his disappearance a high end prostitute was found smothered in her room and Sejer can’t help but feel there is a connection between the two. His wide-ranging campaign of interviewing everyone even slightly connected with either person leads him to Eva who had ties to both. Suddenly the story veers both forward and backwards and may sometimes be hard to follow but the reader will remain transfixed as the final revelations unravel in a fast paced and gripping way.

Proxy by Alex London
YA Fiction

The haves and the have nots collide in this dystopian teen novel. Knox is born to privilege, but he acts out a lot to get back at his dad and gets into trouble constantly. Because Knox's family is rich, they buy the debt of a proxy named Syd to take brutal punishments in Knox's place. Then Knox does something truly horrible, and Syd escapes rather than go to prison. I liked the fast pace of this story and the jarring contrast between Knox's high-tech life in the city and Syd's hardscrabble life in the Valve. There's more to think about here than in the typical dystopian book, and the characters surprised me.

The Humans by Matt Haig
Fiction

The unnamed narrator is an otherworld alien who has taken human form in order to prevent humanity’s progress toward self-destruction. He has taken the place of a brilliant mathematician whose recent breakthrough has the potential to destroy the universe, and the narrator must remove all traces of this mathematical discovery, including any people who have knowledge of it. The narrator is initially disgusted by all things human, but as he lives among them as a man with a family and friends, he begins to discover the “weird and often frightening beauty of being human.” As a 43-year-old newborn on planet Earth, there is much that puzzles and intrigues him: clothing, dogs, coffee, peanut butter, music, dead poets (especially Emily Dickenson), and love. When he forges bonds with the friends and family of the man he has replaced, he begins to have second thoughts about his mission. An amusing and thought-provoking look at the best and worst of humanity, with an emphasis on the best.

Cain at Gettysburg by Ralph Peters
Fiction

When I read a review that compared Cain at Gettysburg favorably to Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels I confess I was skeptical. But this book truly rivals—and in some ways surpasses—Shaara’s Civil War literary masterpiece. In Cain at Gettysburg, author Ralph Peters presents an unflinchingly realistic view of the battle. We see the story unfold from the viewpoints of a variety of Union and Confederate privates and officers, and their stories show the grittiness and the camaraderie of war. For Civil War buffs and fans of modern war classics such as The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien.