Ocean City Free Public Library Book Blog

The Passage is a heady mix of all things that are currently hot in the reading world as of late: vampires, the end of the world, political tension and violence. So it makes sense that it would be a great book for summer, albeit lengthy at 700+ pages. What starts off in the not so distant future as a gov't science experiment quickly escalates into the apocalypse for mankind as the subjects of said experiment turn out to be bloodthirsty monsters. Fast forward nearly 100 years later to a small colony of humans struggling to stay alive. The key to all of this is a little girl named Amy. Intrigued? You should be.

Sam Kingston is an ordinary teenager - self absorbed, heavily concerned about her popularity, disinterested in school...the usual. Everything is hunky dory with Sam until she gets into a horrific car accident on the way home from a party. However, instead of dying, Sam is forced to relive her last day alive over and over again (a la the movie Groundhog Day ) As Sam tries to change the events that caused her death, she undergoes a major transformation as she re-evaluates the important things in life. Gradually, things like a hot boyfriend and looking a certain way lose meaning compared to spending moments with family and true loves. Overall, I enjoyed this book. It was a very quick read and there were lots of tense moments.

Whenever anyone asks me for some of my favorite authors, 9 times out of 10 I will throw Lionel Shriver into the mix. We Need to Talk About Kevin is on my list of favorite books of all time (and proved to be one of the most sucessful book discussions that the library's book club has ever had), and The Post Birthday World messed with my head for weeks afterwards. The thing to keep in mind when reading Shriver is that she (and yes, Lionel Shriver is a female) evokes such deep emotions and feelings in all of her works, though they usually err on the negative side. The same can be said for So Much For That . Shep Knacker has been saving for years in the hopes of retiring to a remote island off of the African coast. The time has almost come for him to leave when he finds out his wife Glynis has mesothelioma and needs him to keep working in order to retain health insurance. The fact that Glynis is kind of a bitch merely adds to the frustration. Throughout the novel, Shep relies on his f...

One of the best things about reading Jodi Picoult is that she's so consistent. You always know what you're going to get whenever you read any of her works: the family drama (usually involving a fiercely devoted mother, an ignored sibling and some poor child with a disability or medical problem), the lawyer-with-a-heart-of-gold character, a tense courtroom scene and some contemporary references sprinkled here and there. And while some might say that "consistency" is just a nice way of saying "formulaic," I would argue that there is something quite comforting in being able to rely on a decent reading experience. This time around, Picoult focuses on her attention on Aspergers Syndrome, which occurs on the low end of the autism spectrum. Jacob Hunt is an 18 year old kid trying to fit in with everyone else. His social skills teacher, Jess, encourages him to ask girls out, make normal conversation and eye contact and attempt to empathize with others. His mother, E...

Acting as a follow up to the epic Pillars of the Earth , World Without End continues to follow the lives, tragedies and successes of the citizens of 14th century Kingsbridge. This time around, Follett's main characters are a group of young friends - brothers Ralph and Merthin, independent Caris and crafty Gwenda. As the four age throughout the book, each character becomes intertwined with each other as they each take different routes in life - knight, builder, healer and farmer. Kingsbridge is well known throughout the area for having a beautiful cathedral (built in POTE ) and there is much drama when it comes to how the priory is run. Things don't get any better when the Plague hits. Though this is a really really lengthy work, it goes by exceptionally fast. I still have the same qualms with this one that I did with POTE (unrealistic dialogue and character life spans, etc), but it was still a very enjoyable read.

Maybe because it's winter and that's a naturally dreary time of a year, but I enjoy a good dystopic novel every once in awhile. The Unit filled that hole quite nicely. Set in the near future, Dorrit, a 50 year old woman with no family or children, enters the Second Reserve Bank Unit. The unit is a government established program for elderly "dispensibles," or those without families, to donate their vital organs and participate in clinical trials and pharmaceutical experiments. Though it's a terrifying place, the unit is set up to be quite comfortable to its residents - plenty of free food, accessible health care, expensive clothing and spacious apartments. When Dorrit falls in love with another resident, she begins to question the whole notion of the Unit...and that's when things start to get a little bleak. There are bright spots throughout the novel, but overall, as the genre dictates, the book is kind of depressing.

I waited until after I finished reading Under the Dome (almost 1,100 pages in less than a week!) to read anything about it. This review from Aol.com pretty much falls into line with my opinion: By now with Stephen King, it's easy to think this is all kind of ridiculous. An invisible dome descending upon a small town in Maine? People trapped inside, trying to figure out what on Earth is going on and — as always in a Stephen King story — dying in droves? Good Lord. Is the King of Really Heavy Books — the author who is a one-man argument for the hernia-preventing benefits of e-books — running out of viable plot devices? This is, after all, the guy who wrote entire volumes about cell phones turning fellow citizens into ravenous zombies, about possessed and murderous 1958 Plymouths and about evil, immortal clowns who live in the sewers and prey upon children. Really, now. How much gimmickry can one writer expect us to stomach? Those statements are all completely fair and true. Trouble ...

Second in the Hunger Games trilogy, Catching Fire picks up right where Hunger Games left off. By cleverly tricking the organizers, Katniss and Peeta have just managed to survive the deadly games created by the Capitol that forces teens to murder one another for the entertainment of the masses. Instead of celebrating their joint victory, Katniss is targeted by the President for cheating the system. I don't want to spoil the second 1/2 of the book, but lets just say that Katniss and Peeta's nightmares are far from over... I thought this was a tense follow up to the 1st book and I can't wait for the final part.

As the first selection for the Adult Summer Weekly Book Club, I was obligated to re-read this novel for the upcoming discussion (my job is so hard sometimes). Bel Canto has always been one of my favorite works of literary fiction because of Patchett's beautiful prose and its heartbreaking conclusion. Set in an undisclosed South American country, a group of foreign ambassadors, politicians and one magnificent opera singer are celebrating a guest's birthday when the palace is overrun by terrorists. What starts off as an extremely tense situation slowly grows into a prime example of Stockholm Syndrome where the hostages and the terrorists create their own little shared world together. This novel has everything - there are two sweet love stories, lots of cases of unrequited love, death, violence, suspense, the evolution of unusual friendships and more. In writing this review, I really can't do this work justice. It's that good. Seriously, you should read this novel. ...

In the wake of Twilight's massive commercial success, some YA works have been generating a lot of buzz. If I Stay is one of those books (there's already discussion of a movie deal), though there are virtually no reasonable comparisions between the two in terms of plot, character development or theme. In spite of this confusion, If I Stay remains a short and sad tale about 17 year old Mia who is hovering between life and death in a coma at the hospital. While on a winter drive, an oncoming car smashes into her car, killing her parents and younger brother. Mia must decide if she wants to "leave," that is, die and be with her family, or if she will "stay," and live a life of an orphan. I won't ruin the ending, but I will say that this book did make me tear up a few times, especially considering that all of the characters in the book are just so nice. Flawed, but genuinely nice. I'd be curious to see how the film stacks up to the novel.

Set in Pakistan, this series of short stories revolves around the servants, family members and employees of wealthy landowner/farm manager K.K. Harouni. Readers only meet Harouni in one story, the rest of the time, he is a mere catalyst, representative of great power and opportunity, or else a figure to be manipulated. The nice thing about this book is that characters appear several times throughout the different stories at different points in time. For example, Haruoni's nephew Sohail appears in "Lady in Paris," at a turning point in his relationship. He appears again in later stories in a much different type of setting. The not so nice thing about this book is the abject poverty and sense of hopelessness can be brutal at times. While some of the characters enjoy their meager living situations (see "A Spoiled Man," which had a heartbreaking ending), the majority of the female characters in all of the stories are ruthless in their attempts to break out of thei...

I'm not going to lie - I think Jodi Picoult kind of phoned in this novel, mainly because she blatantly recycled parts of My Sister's Keeper and Change of Heart . I don't know, when I read Picoult, it's always the same - the lawyer with a turbulent past, the family in crisis, a depressing ending - and while sometimes, I like the familiarity, sometimes, it just gets on my nerves. In Handle with Care , Charlotte and Sean O'Keffe have a daughter, Willow, who is born with osteogensis imperfecta, or brittle bones disease. Their financial status is spiraling downward due to high medical costs, so Charlotte decides to sue her OB for wrongful birth - meaning that her gyno should have told her about Willow's condition in utero so Charlotte would have had the option of abortion. Of course, this being a Jodi Picoult novel, Charlotte's OB is her best friend. Despite the intriguing plot potential (the O'Keffe's have another daughter who has A LOT of issues that s...

In this heartbreaking novel, de Rosnay fictionalizes a true event that most of us have unfortunately never heard about - the 1942 roundup and deportation of Parisian Jews to Auschwitz. This roundup was executed by French police and included thousands of young children basically sentenced to death. Sarah's Key shifts back and forth between narratives - that awful day as seen in the eyes of a young girl and the present day, where journalist Julia Jarmond is covering the anniversary of the event for a local magazine. The two narratives seem oddly disjointed at first, but as the story progresses, readers will see how the two become intertwined within each other. Be warned: this book is really depressing, not because of the sad story behind the young girl in 1942, but because most books concerned with the Holocaust are really really depressing as a rule. It's absolutely shocking that such atrocities took place during the war in countries far beyond Poland and Germany.

For some reason, I felt like it took me forever to finish this one, which is strange because it was a rather cute little story. Truly is a heroine of enormous proportions - she was born big (which ultimately kills her mother and turns her father into an alcoholic) and continues to just grow and grow throughout her life in upstate New York. All of this is compounded by the fact that her older sister, Serena Jane, is beloved by the rest of the town for being little, dainty, beautiful and perfect. Despite all of these hardships, Truly remains a kind figure, if something of an outcast. However, after her sister's untimely demise, Truly must move in to take care of Serena's nefarious husband and child. And this is where things start to get a little...crazy. There's lots more to this story than I'm describing - betrayal, murder, mysticism and true love. The pacing is quick and Baker does a nice job of characterization. Overall, a good read.

I have to give Wally Lamb some credit - the man certainly has an almost athletic sense of endurance to constantly keep churning out 600+ page novels. It's hard to keep a reader's attention for that long. Lamb almost managed to keep mine for the entire novel - I started skimming on certain sections because I knew that they weren't *really* that relevant to the direct plot line. However, that being said, I really enjoyed this one, so much so that I managed to finish it in the course of a weekend, which is pretty good for me. Anyway, the novel centers on Caelum Quirk, an English teacher, and his wife Maureen, who unfortunately happens to work at Columbine High School on the day when Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris commit the atrocious mass-shooting. Maureen survives, but becomes a shell of her old self. In an effort to help Maureen recover psychologically, the two move back to Caelum's old family farm in Connecticut. A lot of stuff happens at this point - Caelum redis...

I think if I were to re-title this book, I'd call it "Serena: the baddest bitch of the woods" (although that probably would offend a whole lot of people, but whatever). At any rate, this novel is about a young couple who run a timber business in North Carolina during the Great Depression. At first, no one really takes beautiful Serena or her ideas about business all that seriously. That swiftly changes as even her poor husband, George, becomes a pawn in her game. Before marrying Serena, George unintentionally impregnates a local girl, Rachel. After Serena cannot bear children, Rachel and her child are her next targets. Overall, a very dark and menacing book. If you liked MacBeth, you'd probably like Serena . I think this book had the highest body count out of any book I've read in a long time, although most of the deaths are widely attributed to tree accidents.

Set in the not-so-distant future where the government runs everything, a group of 24 teenagers from 12 different "Districts" (some as young as 12) are picked to participate to the death in the annual "Hunger Games." Told from the perspective of Katniss Everdeen, a teen who volunteers to participate to save her sister, this is a brutal but compelling tale. Who will win and at what cost? I know some people may think this book is a total rip off of the Japanese work Battle Royale , and while the two do share a lot of similarities, I'd say there are enough differences to merit reading Collins' work. What's nice too is that Hunger Games is Book 1 of the series, so it'll be interesting to see where it goes. At any rate, if you liked reading this, you might want to also check out the old Stephen King (Richard Bachman) novel The Running Man , which is set in the future and shares the same kind of "survive while the government tries to kill you...

What a sad little novel this was. Set in current day England, the novel is split into 4 different perspectives - best friends Dara and Abigail, Abigail's boyfriend Sean, and Dara's father Cameron. The narrative deftly weaves together all four characters, though each individual has to deal with their respective personal triumphs and tragedies (e.g. Sean's struggle to abandon his years-long dissertation on Keats, Abigail's infidelity, etc). The prose is tight, but incredibly moving and emotional.

As a major fan of the film, I decided to give the novel a whirl. Goldman's book is designed to appear as an abridged version of a much larger satiric work by S. Morgenstern, a Florinese (fictitious) writer. I'm not going to lie - I actually believed all of this at first, so color me naive. The story is about murder, magic, torture, friendship, fencing, monsters and above all else, true love. Through various twists and turns, Princess Buttercup is about to marry the evil Prince Humperdinck, though her heart belongs to Westley. Add a bunch of wacky and wonderful characters to the mix and you have a fabulous story for the ages. Goldman also was in charge of writing the screenplay to the film, so the bulk of the book made the leap onto the big screen, including choice bits of dialogue, which is awesome. "Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die."

At the risk of sounding vapid, whoa, this book is a total downer... Winner of, like, a zillion awards (including the Pulitzer!), The Road is a post-apocalyptic tale about a man and his son as they wander around the United States trying to survive from cannibals and the elements fueled by canned goods and their fierce love for each other. The themes of love, God, morality and mortality all tie in together into one seamless piece. McCarthy's work is dark and his imagery is brutal at times (lots of dead bodies everywhere), but it's still an oddly beautiful book. Depressing as all hell, but a powerfully moving read.