River Readers

As a time traveler from the future you hope your time machine doesn't break down (it will), but if it does you definitely need this handy guide on how to make things a bit more comfortable for you. This guide teaches you everything from inventing language to growing food to making computers. It was fascinating to learn how long it took humanity to invent things we take for granted. It was also interesting to learn the technology ladders required for certain things. Thankfully, this is written with a great deal of humor, especially the footnotes. You can't skip the footnotes!

A mash-up of Jane Eyre & Beauty and the Beast in Steampunk mode. Entertaining enough, with a heroine a bit more agentic than Jane Eyre

Before I Let You Go, the stunning new novel from Kelly Rimmer, the best-selling author of Me Without You, When I Lost You and The Secret Daughter, has a heartpounding dilemma at its centre: your sister or her baby. Who do you choose?

Fans of Jodi Picoult, Amanda Prowse and Diane Chamberlain will love Kelly Rimmer.

Following the #4 New York Times bestseller The Road to Grace, Richard Paul Evans's hero Alan Christoffersen faces a life-changing crisis on his journey to grace.
After the death of his beloved wife, after the loss of his advertising business to his once-trusted partner, after bankruptcy forced him from his home, Alan Christoffersen is a broken man.

Leaving everything he knows, he sets out on an extraordinary cross-country journey; with only the pack on his back, he is walking from Seattle to Key West - the end of the map.

Bri wants to be a rapper. Growing up in Garden Heights, the daughter of the legendary underground rapper, Lawless, Bri has a lot to prove. Her daddy was murdered, a victim of gang violence, and her mama lost it after she lost him. Driven by her grief into drug addiction, Bri and her brother, Trey, lived with their grandparents for a time. Jay, Bri's mom, fought hard to win her kids back but the struggle is still real, they are all fighting just to exist. Then the other shoe drops and Jay gets fired from her job. Bri want her rapping to save them.

When the mayor of Wheatfield, Minnesota and his best friend cook up a plan to save their town in a way that won't hurt anyone, the town finds itself a pilgrimage site after an appearance of the Virgin Mary. Investigator Virgil Flowers is summoned to the town when people are shot and soon find two murders as well. He searches for a shooter that no one hears - along with a stolen shipment of Legos somewhere in the vicinity - he knows he will eventually find his suspect. But first, he needs to survive the bad pancakes and chicken pot pies.

Author Lee Child goes back into his character Jack Reacher's past to a time when he is sent to school. But of course, the assignment is not quite that simple. The government has brought together representatives of the military and intelligence communities because of an undercover source's report that an American is offering something for $100 million. What could be worth an offer of that size? Reacher and his best friend Sergeant Frances Neagley head to Germany as their best option, interviewing subjects and chasing leads.

Young Kano Murasaki's nickname is Risuko (Squirrel), earned by the strength of her climbing abilities. When the rich, elderly Lady Chiyome arrives at her village, Risuko is whisked away to be trained to be kunoichi, a term the girl doesn't understand. Put to work with other trainees in the kitchen at Lady Chiyome's remote compound, Risuko balances work with her desire to discover her purpose for being there.

Iris and Lark are identical twins whose differing personalities and styles fit together perfectly. Iris is practical, logical, and outspoken. Lark is a dreamer, artistic, and shy. Their inseparable status is threatened, however, when they are assigned to different fifth-grade classrooms. Iris is sure it's a mistake, but the girls' parents and principal are resolute that separating Iris and Lark will help them grow as individuals.

Rain's family is reeling after the death of her older brother. Her mom tries to keep busy to forget the pain and initiates the family moving to a big city away from their past. Her dad is so depressed that he can hardly get out of bed. And Rain blames herself for her brother's death.

The new neighborhood and school are a challenge because Rain is the only one with her skin color and she is afraid to open up to anyone about her family. Thru running and required community service, Rain realizes that she is not alone.

There are winged horses in the mirrors of Briar Hill that only Emmaline can see. Briar Hill used to be the home of a princess, but is now a hospital for kids sick with TB during WWII. Emmaline spends her days quietly drawing with her friend Anna and trying to convince the other children that the horses are real. Then one day she goes into one of the off limit gardens and finds a wounded winged horse. It appears the Horse Lord has sent her to this world to recover but she is being hunted by the black horse. Emmaline must build a rainbow shield to protect Foxfire in the garden.

A captivating novel of family, fame, and religion that tells the story of the seventeen-year-old daughter of an evangelical preacher, star of the family's hit reality show, and the secret pregnancy that threatens to blow their entire world apart.

Aptly named patriarch King repairs to an island with his wife and daughters to escape an unnamed cataclysm. Even though for a time they welcomed castaway women, the daughters are taught to fear strangers, especially men, who are considered toxic. This insular, hothouse environment, though meant to protect the girls, also sequesters them from being able to adjudge their parents' stringent "exercises" as little more than torture. When King disappears, the daughters' carefully crafted world begins to crumble, and emotions (which the exercises were meant to curb) bubble up.

*Starred Review* I liked my java so black, the police planted evidence on it, says the wry, self-aware, yet ultimately self-defeating narrator of this trenchant satire. Hired (after a humiliating competition) as the black face of a racist corporation, he embarks on a relentless, single-minded quest to medically demelanize his biracial son, Nigel. Nothing, not the contempt of his wife and mother nor the physical and psychological anguish of his child, will deter him from rescuing the teenager from life as a black man.

Recently divorced after a long struggle with infertility, the unnamed narrator of poet Sims' first novel clings to Cat, her ex-husband's pet that she never even liked. Sadly, work doesn't distract her from her misery. As a non-tenure-track lecturer at an overpriced, second-rate city school, she has only one class this semester, a poetry survey for a handful of students (one of whom seems to be hitting on her).