Staff Recommendation - Tomboy: A Graphic Memoir

Elizabeth Steans, circulation supervisor, recommends this graphic memoir by Liz Prince. “The story is very compelling; conveying the stresses of social construction of gender and identity from a young girl’s point of view.”

Tomboy

By Liz Prince

San Francisco, Zest Books, 2014

Available in the library on the 

1^st Floor - EMC Young Adult Section

Call Number: HQ1075 .P75 2014

“From the age of 2, Liz knows she hates dresses. As a child, she wears boys clothes and plays with boys. However, as she enters her teen years, things change. Still wishing to dress like a boy and disdainful of all things girly—including the inevitable biology of puberty—she stays true to herself and her identity, but not without struggling to fit into a teenage society that neatly compartmentalizes how boys and girls should act. Liz’s troubles are magnified as she navigates the ways of the heart, falling for boys who often pass her over for girls who are more feminine. As she stumbles and bumbles her way to friends who will accept her, she pulls readers along that oh-so-tough and bumpy road of adolescence. Simple, line-based art provides a perfect complement to her keen narration, giving this an indie, intimate feel and leaving readers feeling like they really know her. Liz’s story, captured with wry humor and a deft, visceral eye, is a must-read for fans who fell for Raina Telgemeier’s work in middle school.” Kirkus Review

Staff Recommendation: Where'd You Go, Bernadette

Archives staff member, Robin Melland, recommends listening to the audiobook version of Maria Semple’s novel. “It is a silly and fun book where crazy, weird things keep happening – pure entertainment.”    

Student worker, Colleen Roach, recommends reading the hardcover edition from the fourth floor browsing collection. “This book has just enough drama and mystery in it to keep you hooked but not so much that you get sick of the story and characters. It is interesting to see the path that Bernadette's life takes in response to her successes and failures and how that path affects those around her. 

It was an easy book to stay interested in because of the slight twists that happen throughout the story.”  

Where’d You Go, Bernadette

By Maria Semple

New York: Hachette Audio, 2013 (9 CDs) or

New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2012

Available in the library on 4^th floor.

Call number:

 PS3619.E495 W54 2013 (Audiobooks) 

 PS3619.E495 W54 2012 (Browsing books)

Janet Maslin from The New York Times writes “The tightly constructed “Where’d You Go, Bernadette” is written in many formats — e-mails, letters, F.B.I. documents, correspondence with a psychiatrist and even an emergency-room bill for a run-in between Bernadette and Audrey. Yet these pieces are strung together so wittily that Ms. Semple’s storytelling is always front and center, in sharp focus. You could stop and pay attention to how apt each new format is, how rarely she repeats herself and how imaginatively she unveils every bit of information. But you would have to stop laughing first.

Everyone in this sparkling novel is wily, smart or even smarter. The brainiest character is arguably Elgin, who works at Microsoft and leads the design team for what, the book says, is Bill Gates’s favorite project. Elgin is famed for not wearing shoes, for giving the fourth-most-watched TED talk and for generally being Microsoft’s version of a rock star.” Full Review

June 2012 Browsing Books---Finding the Feasts

Eating for Beginners: An Education in the Pleasures of Food from Chefs, Farmers and One Picky Kid by Melanie Rehak

Library Call Number: TX633.R45 2010

Library Location: Browsing Area (4th Floor) 

Author Rehak begins a year-long search as a thoughtful eater and new mother into the food choices of today’s world, trying to understand how to choose the right foods, do the right thing, eat the best meals possible and “make peace with our food,” even if it means her child will occasionally hit the Burger King later on.

American Terroir: Savoring the Pleasures of our Woods, Waters and Fields by Rowan Jacobson.

Library Call Number: TX631.J335 2010

Library Location: Browsing Area (4th Floor)

 

Terroir means “taste of place,” the local soil, air and water that gives many of our foods, from apples to maple syrup, chocolate to oysters, a distinct and local flavor. Like a Michigan apple grower who can bite into a local apple and tell you whose orchard it came from, Jacobson’s book explores the “flavor landscapes of America…where our great foods live.”  With recipes.

Twain’s Feast: Searching for America’s Lost foods in the Footsteps of Samuel Clemens by Andrew Beahrs 

Library Call Number: TX633.B393 2010

Library Location: Browsing Area (4th Floor)

Adapted from the dust jacket:  In A Tramp Abroad, Mark Twain paused during a tour of Europe to compose a fantasy menu of the American dishes he missed the most. Desperately sick of European hotel cooking, his menu included some 80 regional specialties, a true love letter to American food: Lake Trout, from Tahoe. Hot biscuits, Southern style. Canvasback-duck, from Baltimore. Black-bass, from the Mississippi.  Beahrs’ book sets out to discover whether eight of these forgotten regional specialties can still be found on American tables. The menu, it turns out, was also a memoir and a map. The dishes he yearned for were all connected to cherished moments in his life-from the New Orleans croakers he loved as a young man on the Mississippi to the maple syrup he savored in Connecticut, with his family, during his final, lonely years