Ocean City Free Public Library Book Blog

This month's book was Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward . This month's choice was a little more in the middle when it came to liking it. Some members struggled to finished it but fought through to the end. Sing, Unburied, Sing was about the journey of a young boy named Jojo and his mother Leonie and their journey of finding their way to themselves and "home."  Some of our readers mentioned how the story got too painful sometimes. Jesmyn Ward's writing style really felt realistic, you could feel the pain, anxiety, and heaviness of the story across the pages. Truly a talent to capture and portray such emotions, even if the story is not a happy one. We were amazed by that talent. We did talked quite a bit about the relationship between Jojo and his grandfather Pops. How much he looked up to him and how he was an important person in his life.  We gave this book 3 books out of 5. While it was a difficult book to read story wise, it still was a book that was written w...

      It is only recently that I began reading the Ransom Riggs Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children series, but once I started I easily knocked out the first two books in one day. The second novel in the series, Hollow City  continues immediately where the first novel ends--with the peculiar children of the Cairnholm time loop fleeing from the hollowgasts, while searching for a way to restore their guardian, Miss Peregrine, back to her human form.       While the use of time travel was introduced in the first novel, it is a much more reinforced idea Hollow City . In Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children , the protagonist Jacob is taught how to travel effortlessly between his own timeline and a day during the second World War that continuously loops back each night--thus the people within the loop relive the same day repeatedly. However, in Hollow City, this time loop is nonexistent, and Jacob decides to remain in the past in order to...

       Landline is the latest novel by Rainbow Rowell, and author who has written both adult and YA romance novels. Landline follows the story of TV writer Georgie McCool as she struggles to balance her work life and her home life, while the state of her marriage declines. When she attempts to postpone a family holiday vacation as the result of an emergency at work, her husband, Neal, insists on taking their children home for Christmas anyway without Georgie. During the holiday week, Georgie tries to call Neal at his mother's house--however Neal's habit of never charging his cell phone leads to Georgie resorting to her parent's old rotary land-line phone to call Neal's mother's land-line. What Georgie soon realises is that this land-line connection allows her to call Neal in the past before they were ever married. Georgie now has an opportunity to either fix her marriage before it begins or to end it and see if they would have been better off never being marr...

        In the years following the death of J.R.R. Tolkien, his son Christopher (being named as literary executor to his father’s unfinished works) has been completing and publishing many of his fathers as-yet unpublished works. This includes The Silmarillion and The Unfinished Tales of Middle Earth (which Middle Earth fans would recognise as source material for some of the plot lines in the newer Hobbit movies) as well as The Tale of Sigurd and Gudrun, The Fall of Arthur, and most recently Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary. ***       In addition to writing The Lord of the Rings series (which has undoubtedly become one of the most well recognised staples of geek culture, having spawned movies, comics, cartoons, video games, and table games from just one trilogy and its prequel), John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was a renowned professor of English language and literature, holding multiple positions at Oxford. It is h...

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 ...