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    Molly, outreach manager, Brooklyn
    Most recent staff pickGlory O'Brien's History of the Future by A.S. King (ebook available)
    Glory O'Brien's best friend lives on a commune, her dad never leaves the couch, and all she has left of her mom are memories, an interest in photography, and a basement darkroom. High school is coming to an end, but Glory's future doesn't look like much -- until a spontaneous decision results, unexpectedly, in Glory gaining the ability to see people's pasts and futures. King's novel slips easily between Glory's ordinary yet trying life and her terrifying visions, which she records, hoping to stop a horrible future only she can see. Unabashedly feminist, wickedly smart, and painfully on the money about small-town teenage life and friendships, Glory O'Brien is a brilliant and beautiful novel that we can't recommend highly enough. (Molly and Katelyn)

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    Glory O'Brien's History of the Future (Hardcover)

    By A. S. King
    $18.00
    ISBN: 9780316222723
    Availability: On Our Shelves Now
    Published: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers - October 14th, 2014

    Glory O'Brien's best friend lives on a commune, her dad never leaves the couch, and all she has left of her mom are memories, an interest in photography, and a basement darkroom. High school is coming to an end, but Glory's future doesn't look like much -- until a spontaneous decision results, unexpectedly, in Glory gaining the ability to see people's pasts and futures. King's novel slips easily between Glory's ordinary yet trying life and her terrifying visions, which she records, hoping to stop a horrible future only she can see. Unabashedly feminist, wickedly smart, and painfully on the money about small-town teenage life and friendships, Glory O'Brien is a brilliant and beautiful novel that we can't recommend highly enough. (Molly and Katelyn)


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    The Wrenchies (Paperback)

    By Farel Dalrymple
    $19.99
    ISBN: 9781596434219
    Availability: On Our Shelves Now
    Published: First Second - July 15th, 2014

    Neither Farel Dalrymple's art nor his stories go in straight lines -- they follow something more like the logic of dreams, where everything is connected, but it takes you a while to figure out how. The Wrenchies takes place in a disconcerting sideways world, where fierce children fight the monsters of adulthood, and everything connects to a boy and a comic book. There's so much going on here that it will take more than one reading to find all the details, but on first reading, this beautiful, unsettling book left me strangely wistful, and entirely looking forward to whatever Dalrymple does next. (Molly)


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    The Bar Book: Elements of Cocktail Technique (Hardcover)

    By Jeffrey Morgenthaler, Alanna Hale (Photographer), Martha Holmberg (With)
    $30.00
    ISBN: 9781452113845
    Availability: On Our Shelves Now
    Published: Chronicle Books (CA) - June 3rd, 2014

    I know just enough about cocktails to be dangerous (in a good way -- or so I like to think). Much of that is due to the influence of Jeffrey Morgenthaler, who used to tend bar at my hometown local. This isn't your typical recipe book (though there are a few recipes), but an exploration of techniques that will class up your homemade libations. When anyone this good behind the bar shares his considerable knowledge, it's a treat. (Molly)


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    Euphoria (Hardcover)

    By Lily King
    $25.00
    ISBN: 9780802122551
    Availability: On Our Shelves Now
    Published: Atlantic Monthly Press - June 3rd, 2014

    If you're tired of the heat, Euphoria might make you feel a little better, for it's much hotter -- and there are way more bugs -- in 1930s New Guinea, where the brilliant, intuitive anthropologist Nell Stone and her temperamental Australian husband, Fen, are looking for a new tribe to study. They find the Tam, and they also find Andrew Bankson, a fellow scientist who is so unlike Nell and Fen that he fills a strange space in their lives. Though darkness looms from the very first page, Euphoria is a vibrant, taut, and beautifully written depiction of conflicting and complementary passions. (Molly)


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    Dirty Wings (Hardcover)

    By Sarah McCarry
    $19.99
    ISBN: 9781250049384
    Availability: On Our Shelves Now
    Published: St. Martin's Griffin - July 15th, 2014

    Maia and Cass are among the unlikeliest of friends: a dissatisfied, rule-following pianist and a clever and rebellious street kid. Something like fate brings them together, and the bond they form is as close -- maybe closer -- that that between Aurora and the unnamed narrator in McCarry's previous book, All Our Pretty Songs. Readers of that book will recognize Cass and Maia, but Dirty Wings stands alone just fine: it's a fierce, smart, and magical story about friendship and love and music and letting go and finding your place in the world. (Molly & Jenn)


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    The Girl with All the Gifts (Hardcover)

    By M. R. Carey
    $25.00
    ISBN: 9780316278157
    Availability: On Our Shelves Now
    Published: Orbit - June 10th, 2014

    In a spare bunker, a little girl named Melanie and her classmates live strange lives. They're taken to class in restraints, bathed in weird chemicals, and fed nasty things. It's a lonesome, sterile life, one brightened only by the presence of kind teacher Miss Justineau. When the outside world intrudes, Melanie, her sergeant keeper, her teacher, and a laser-focused scientist wind up on a road trip across an England ravaged by biological change. Why it happened, what it means for humanity, and why Melanie is so peculiar -- Carey teases out the answers to these questions and more. But if you get "spoiled" for this one, don't stress; it's the kind of book you can read happily (and quickly, and while being totally creeped out) whether or not you already know certain things about the premise. (Molly)


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    Infinite Sky (Hardcover)

    By C. J. Flood
    $17.99
    ISBN: 9781481406581
    Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 Days
    Published: Atheneum Books for Young Readers - May 20th, 2014

    When a family of travelers sets up camp on property owned by Iris's family, everyone responds differently: Her dad is angry, her brother has his own trouble to deal with, and Iris can't stop sneaking peeks out the window, wondering about lives that look so different than her own. The friendship she strikes up with the traveler boy, Trick, quickly grows complex, transforming Iris's summer into a defining season. Debut YA novelist Flood perfectly captures the pangs and stresses and glories of growing up in a small country town, weaving grace and growth into a story that tell you, from the first page, that things aren't all going to end well. It's a heartbreaker. (Molly)


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    All the Birds, Singing (Hardcover)

    By Evie Wyld
    $24.95
    ISBN: 9780307907769
    Availability: On Our Shelves Now
    Published: Pantheon Books - April 15th, 2014

    Evie Wyld's novel is impossibly balanced -- gorgeous and graceful, dark and taut, it tells the story of Jake, a young woman who's chosen a solitary life on a cold English island. Gradually, in twined narratives of past and present, Wyld explores the questions Jake's situation raises: Why is she there, alone, with a dog and a herd of sheep? What's picking off her sheep, one by one? What brought her there, and what did she leave behind? Wyld is as good at Jake's reluctant, slow-moving connection to other people as she is at depicting the kind of solitude that's sometimes necessary to process, to rebuild, and to heal. I read All the Birds, Singing in two sittings; it's the kind of book that just won't let you go. (Molly)


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    Boy, Snow, Bird (Hardcover)

    By Helen Oyeyemi
    $27.95
    ISBN: 9781594631399
    Availability: On Our Shelves Now
    Published: Riverhead Books - March 6th, 2014

    Helen Oyeyemi can do no wrong. Her last book, Mr. Fox, was a twisty, unsettling riff on "Bluebeard." This one is "Snow White" -- sort of. It's really so much more than that. Boy, Snow, Bird reinvents the wicked stepmother, finds the anger in the perfect daughter, and explores a thorny tangle of identity, love, race, and perception. Oyeyemi writes like no one else, but she's absolutely an heir to the brilliant Angela Carter. Bravo. (Molly)


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    The Free (Paperback)

    By Willy Vlautin
    $14.99
    ISBN: 9780062276742
    Availability: On Our Shelves Now
    Published: Harper Perennial - February 4th, 2014

    The Free is full of Vlautin's boundless compassion for ordinary people facing intensely difficult times. Its characters rotate around Leroy Kervin, an Iraq vet who spends most of the book unconscious, dreaming a parallel version of his life. Vlautin's story is concerned with the cost of war, the cost of health care, the cost of just plain living -- and the toll all these things take on people who are always one step behind. I've wanted every one of Vlautin's novels to be his breakout, especially the boy-and-his-horse story Lean on Pete, but this profoundly, heartbreakingly American story might be the one that makes the world sit up and take notice. (Molly)


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    Dept. of Speculation (Hardcover)

    By Jenny Offill
    $22.95
    ISBN: 9780385350815
    Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 Days
    Published: Knopf Publishing Group - January 28th, 2014

    This tiny jewel of a book is pensive, heartbreaking, glorious and deftly, impeccably pieced together. Our narrator, known only as the wife, makes her way through endless everyday challenges: a crying baby, a shaky marriage, the never-ending task of reconciling the person you thought you'd be with the person it seems you actually are. Ovid, Rilke, Kafka, astronauts, I Can Has Cheezburger -- the things woven into her observations and consolations are familiar, but Offill’s brief, poignant snippets of a life are anything but ordinary. This little book is hard to explain and impossible to put down; at about 175 pages, you can devour it in one cold night. (Molly)