Featured Books
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Books for the Baby
 It's
bedtime for young Frances--an adorable and irrepressible little
badger--and everyone is ready but her. At 7:00 p.m. Frances is wide
awake and bursting with youthful excitement. She tries every delay
tactic she can muster--from demanding extra hugs and kisses to volleying
a series of urgent last-minute questions ("May I sleep with my teddy
bear?" "May I have my door open?"). She's almost positive there
are spiders, giants, and tigers in her room. Any parent will quickly
identify with this phenomenon--how the last minutes of the day suddenly
become the most action-packed. Garth Williams's illustrations complement
Russell Hoban's sweet story perfectly, capturing the endless energy
and overactive imagination of Frances, and the waning patience of
her exhausted parents. Bedtime for Frances is the perfect
goodnight story to tell your wide-eyed children. And never fear,
like Frances, they too will eventually, contentedly, drift off to
sleep.
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Books for the Elementary School Bunch
The
Secret Garden
Frances Hodgson Burnett, Lois Lowry (Illustrator)
 Mistress
Mary is quite contrary until she helps her garden grow. Along the
way, she manages to cure her sickly cousin Colin, who is every bit
as imperious as she. These two are sullen little peas in a pod,
closed up in a gloomy old manor on the Yorkshire moors of England,
until a locked-up garden captures their imaginations and puts the
blush of a wild rose in their cheeks; "It was the sweetest, most
mysterious-looking place any one could imagine. The high walls which
shut it in were covered with the leafless stems of roses which were
so thick, that they matted together.... 'No wonder it is still,'
Mary whispered. 'I am the first person who has spoken here for ten
years.'" As new life sprouts from the earth, Mary and Colin's sour
natures begin to sweeten. For anyone who has ever felt afraid to
live and love, The Secret Garden's portrayal of reawakening
spirits will thrill and rejuvenate. Frances Hodgson Burnett creates
characters so strong and distinct, young readers continue to identify
with them even 85 years after they were conceived.
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Books for the Middle School
Years
 Few
stories offer more warmth, wisdom, or generosity than this tale
of two boys, their fathers, their friendship, and the chaotic times
in which they live. Though on the surface it explores religious
faith--the intellectually committed as well as the passionately
observant--the struggles addressed in The Chosen are familiar
to families of all faiths and in all nations. In 1940s Brooklyn,
New York, an accident throws Reuven Malther and Danny Saunders together.
Despite their differences (Reuven is a secular Jew with an intellectual,
Zionist father; Danny is the brilliant son and rightful heir to
a Hasidic rebbe), the young men form a deep, if unlikely, friendship.
Together they negotiate adolescence, family conflicts, the crisis
of faith engendered when Holocaust stories begin to emerge in the
U.S., loss, love, and the journey to adulthood. The intellectual
and spiritual clashes between fathers, between each son and his
own father, and between the two young men, provide a unique backdrop
for this exploration of fathers, sons, faith, loyalty, and, ultimately,
the power of love.
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Books for High Schoolers
 "Worse
than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood,"
writes Frank McCourt in Angela's Ashes. "Worse yet is the
miserable Irish Catholic childhood." Welcome, then, to the pinnacle
of the miserable Irish Catholic childhood. Born in Brooklyn in 1930
to recent Irish immigrants Malachy and Angela McCourt, Frank grew
up in Limerick after his parents returned to Ireland because of
poor prospects in America. It turns out that prospects weren't so
great back in the old country either--not with Malachy for a father.
A chronically unemployed and nearly unemployable alcoholic, he appears
to be the model on which many of our more insulting cliches about
drunken Irish manhood are based. Mix in abject poverty and frequent
death and illness and you have all the makings of a truly difficult
early life. Fortunately, in McCourt's able hands it also has all
the makings for a compelling memoir.
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Books for Grown-Ups
 When
Barbara Kingsolver sends missionary Nathan Price along with his
wife and four daughters off to Africa in The Poisonwood Bible,
you can be sure that salvation is the one thing they're not likely
to find. The year is 1959 and the place is the Belgian Congo. Nathan,
a Baptist preacher, has come to spread the Word in a remote village
reachable only by airplane. To say that he and his family are woefully
unprepared would be an understatement: "We came from Bethlehem,
Georgia, bearing Betty Crocker cake mixes into the jungle," says
Leah, one of Nathan's four daughters. But of course it isn't long
before they discover that the tremendous humidity has rendered the
mixes unusable, their clothes are unsuitable, and they've arrived
in the middle of political upheaval as the Congolese seek to wrest
independence from Belgium.As political instability grows in the
Congo, so does the local witch doctor's animus toward the Prices,
and both seem to converge with tragic consequences about halfway
through the novel. From that point on, the family is dispersed and
the novel follows each member's fortunes across a span of more than
30 years.
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