Featured Contributor Friday

This Friday, enjoy a post from Nicole, our newest member of Library staff! She will be assisting in the Children’s and YA departments while earning her degree at Simmons.  Stop in and say hi! (P. S. Learn more about Nicole here.)

Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

Pub Date: June 2011

Fiction (Young Adult)

352 pgs.

I know, I know - I shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. But with a cover like this, how could I not want to read Ransom Riggs’s Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children? Between the cover, the title, and a quick flip through the vintage photographs scattered throughout the book, I was eager to devour every bit of it. Riggs’s debut novel tells the tale of Jacob, who isn’t quite sure if his grandfather is a liar or a lunatic. Either way, Grandpa Portman’s fascinating tales about the bizarre orphans he grew up with both delight and frighten the young Jacob. Years later, a mysterious death and even more mysterious letter and photograph lead sixteen-year-old Jacob on a remarkable journey to discover the truth surrounding his grandfather’s life by returning to that strange orphanage in Wales that was once his grandfather’s home.

This fantasy is mysterious and at times even a bit frightening.  Fans of Tim Burton and David Lynch, keep an eye on Ransom Riggs. His own cinematography background is evident in his highly descriptive writing:  “I emerged into the sticky-hot evening to find Ricky smoking on the hood of his battered car.  Something about his mud-encrusted boots and the way he let smoke curl from his lips and how the sinking sun lit his green hair reminded me of  a punk, redneck James Dean” (p. 26).  Riggs definitely knows how to plant an image in readers’ minds.

Fans of historical fiction will likely enjoy the story, not to mention the eerie actual vintage photographs in the book that represent the peculiar orphans, at times making Riggs’s fantastic story seem all too real.  I really wanted to love this book, and I was not disappointed.  The pacing was rather uneven, which might disappoint readers who enjoy more action, since some parts of the novel move rather slowly.  The intriguing plot and format of the novel kept my interest, however.  The ending leaves one wanting more, and Riggs is in the process of writing a sequel, which I cannot wait to get my hands on.

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is going to be made into a movie, but Riggs isn’t going to make it himself. Instead he’s going to let Tim Burton and Jane Goldman tackle this one. I, for one, cannot wait to see what they come up with!

Check out Riggs’s own trailer for the novel.

For more on Ransom Riggs, check out his website.

-Nicole

Featured Contributor Friday

In lieu of a genre study this week we have something better – a new voice for the blog.  Marie works in the Children’s room at the Library, and manages our periodical collection.  The following is her review -

The Weight of Silence by Heather Gudenkauf

Pub Date: January 2009

Fiction (Adult)

384 pgs.

A round of applause for Gudenkauf’s gripping and tense debut novel. At dawn, one quiet humid August morning in Willow Creek, Iowa, 2 seven year old girls from 2 separate families have been abducted in the middle of the night. The descriptive prologue immediately draws the reader into a very serious and tense situation. One of the missing young girls, Calli, is a selective mute. Antonia, Calli’s mother, speaks with a sense of relief the last four words of the prologue. “You have finally spoken.”

I picked this paperback up by accident and couldn’t lay it to rest. Calli, a fragile, dreamy child, hasn’t spoken a word for the past four years due to an incident that she witnessed in her home at the age of three. Petra Gregory, Calli’s best friend, also goes missing the same night. The reader soon discovers that Petra is more than a best friend.  She is Calli’s voice whenever they’re together.

The author moves the story along at a fast pace with brief precise chapters dealing with the important characters in the story. There are only a few main characters and the reader is constantly questioning who abducted these two young girls. “Family Silence” or “Family Secrets” would have been other appropriate titles for this novel. Calli’s mother and Petra’s father have been silent and secretive about their family situations. This unspoken silence brings into question what happened to these two girls. Let the reader be assured that this story has a happy and redemptive ending.

Heather Gudenkauf is an educator who has spent the past sixteen years working with students of all ages in the Iowa school system. She is also an individual with a hearing impairment. So this story brings into light the problems faced by children with disabilities. It is beautifully written and touches all aspects of family life. It’s definitely a pageturner!   -Marie

P.S. Have a wonderful, book-filled holiday weekend!

Eye Contact by Cammie McGovern

Pub Date: June 2006

Fiction (Adult)

304 pgs.

I so wanted to finish this in time for my post about suspense fiction last week.  There was a bit of buzz surrounding this book when it was published a few years ago, and I remember thinking it looked interesting. Alas, I had plucked it off the shelf only the night before I wrote the post, and my body betrayed me by falling asleep that night against my will, the book unfinished, but not before I had made a sizeable dent in it.  I compensated by staying glued to the couch for the next two evenings, unable to take my eyes off the pages. It was that good.

Billed as a “thrilling novel of psychological suspense,” Cammie McGovern’s Eye Contact was, for me, a wonderfully told, emotionally wrought story of the relationship between a mother and her 9-year-old autistic son, wrapped up in, yes, a thrilling, suspenseful package. In the woods behind Woodside Elementary, the body of a 10-year-old girl has been found, stabbed. The only witness to this horrific crime is Adam, the autistic son of Cara. Adam has severe developmental problems, language not least among them. Cara tries desperately to unlock Adam’s mental world in order to help the police solve the case. She finds an unexpected ally in Morgan, a thirteen-year-old with his own social and developmental problems who is intent on solving the case to atone for, and draw attention away from, his own unrelated crime.

The thing that impressed me about Eye Contact was the sheer number of things McGovern does well. The mystery itself not only keeps the reader guessing, but the various relationships between the characters are handled deftly and sympathetically. A young mother, Cara also attended Woodside Elementary and her own issues with herself and the people around her provide the backbone for the story. The story also provides much insight into the worlds of special-needs children and those who care for them. The mystery itself leads the reader through various twists and turns in the case–my one criticism is that it feels a bit frantic towards the end, although the twists are intriguing and each twist does reveal something more about one or another of the characters. Simply said, this is an unusual, breathtaking thriller, one you won’t soon forget.

Featured Genre Friday: Suspense

Suspense is a genre I hadn’t read for years and have recently gotten back into.  I started with Stuart Woods, one of those authors I see go out all the time but had never read myself, and suddenly I was saying to myself, Oh, now I get it!

Orchid Beach by Stuart Woods / Pub Date: Nov. 1998 / 336 pgs.

Holly Barker moves to Orchid Beach, Florida after a scandal forces her to retire early from her two-decades-long army career.  She accepts a job offer from the Orchid Beach chief of police, an old army buddy of her father’s, to be his deputy.  Of course, by the end of her first day on the job, the Chief is left in a coma, and Holly is up to her ears in a mystery, acting Chief to a police force she’s not sure she can trust– a force who is, in turn, suspicious of her.  Woods wastes no time getting to the action, and I was surprised how fast I got into the story and into the tough and intelligent character of Holly in particular.  Woods has a particular ear for dialogue and renders his lead character compassionately.  The man knows how to write a woman’s character.  After finishing Orchid Beach in nearly a day (appropriately, I took it along with me to the beach), I quickly devoured the second in the Holly Barker series, Orchid Blues, and am waiting on the third. Thank you, Mr. Woods, for reintroducing me to the world of suspicious doings and dangerous situations.

Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane / Pub Date: April 2003 / 336 pgs.

I’ve recently been on a kick of movies based on Dennis Lehane novels–Gone Baby Gone, Mystic River–I just love ‘em! But then I realized I had never actually read a Dennis Lehane novel, so I figured a good place to start was with Shutter Island, as it, too, will be made into a film this fall.  A stand-alone novel, Shutter Island takes place on an island off the coast of Massachusetts in the mid-1950′s.  U.S. marshal Teddy Daniels and his partner, Chuck Aule, are summoned to the “hospital” for the criminally insane on the island to investigate the disappearance of a missing patient, Rachel Solando. The nature of the hospital and all its patients, though, isn’t necessarily what it seems.  Lehane’s is a calm, controlled page-turner;  he’s got the psychological-suspense aspect down pat, and readers are treated to a satisfyingly complex plot full of puzzles and deceptions large and small.  For fans of atmospheric, unpredictable reads, Shutter Island is tough to beat.

On the Street Where You Live by Mary Higgins Clark / Pub Date: April 2001 / 320 pgs.

I figured the next obvious place to go was to the queen of suspense herself, Mary Higgins Clark.  On the Street Where You Live is a century-spanning mystery. In the twenty-first century, we have Emily Graham, a pretty yet down-on-her-luck attorney, who has just purchased her family’s turn-of-the-century Victorian in a seaside New Jersey resort town.  Emily’s not had an easy time of it lately–she’s moving to escape bad memories of a crazed stalker.  At least her stalker is finally in jail–or is he? In the late 19th century, we have Madeline Shapely, Emily’s great-great-great aunt who’s had an even worse time–she was found murdered when she was just 19, in 1891. When a body is found in the foundation of Emily’s new house, it is of yet another young woman who disappeared four years before–but something is found in her lifeless hand that offers a connection to Madeline’s disappearance, more than one hundred years before. Emily is quickly sucked into the mysteries surrounding her ancestral home and begins her own investigation–and starts to realize that she can literally trust no one.  Read this book for the plot, not the characterization–with so many characters, it is hard to flesh them all out, and Clark doesn’t try. What she does offer is an old-fashioned suspenseful mystery that will appeal to true fans of the genre.

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood / Pub Date: August 2001 / 521 pgs.

When thinking of suspense authors, one might not typically immediately think of Margaret Atwood.  But that’s what’s great about Atwood–she defies genres.  To me, the many layers of this novel–the mysterious death, the  family secrets, the complexities of the plot–justifiably place it in suspense territory.  The Blind Assassin is the story of two sisters, one of whom dies in the novel’s opening. In her 80′s, in the present day, Iris Chase reflects on the ambiguous death of her beautiful twenty-five-year old sister Laura in 1945. Laura’s novel, called The Blind Assassin, was published posthumously, and its text makes up a good part of the novel, as a novel-within-a-novel.  Atwood’s tale weaves together important events in the twentieth century–the two world wars, Communist witch hunts, the Depression–with a sweeping family saga, mystery, suspense, science fiction, a love story…there’s a lot, a lot to like about this Booker prize-winning novel. On top of all that, Atwood’s use of language is, as always, to die for. In my humble opinion, she is one of the best writers alive today.  Set aside an evening to just dive into this novel. You won’t regret it.