A Sampling of BooksNJ2015

In this richly researched, beautifully designed and illustrated volume, Maria Laurino strips away stereotypes and nostalgia to tell the complicated, centuries-long story of the true Italian-American experience.Looking beyond the familiar Little Italys and stereotypes fostered by The Godfather and The Sopranos, Laurino reveals surprising, fascinating lives: Italian-Americans working on sugar-cane plantations in Louisiana to those who were lynched in New Orleans; the banker who helped rebuild San Francisco after the great earthquake; families interned as "enemy aliens" in World War II. From anarchist radicals to "Rosie the Riveter" to Nancy Pelosi, Andrew Cuomo, and Bill de Blasio; from traditional artisans to rebel songsters like Frank Sinatra, Dion, Madonna, and Lady Gaga, this book is both exploration and celebration of the rich legacy of Italian-American life.Readers can discover the history chronologically, chapter by chapter, or serendipitously by exploring the trove of supplemental materials. These include interviews, newspaper clippings, period documents, and photographs that bring the history to life.

Seventeen-year-old Bianca Piper starts sleeping with Wesley Rush, a notorious womanizer who disgusts her, in order to distract her from her personal problems, and to her surprise, the two of them find they have a lot in common and are able to help each other find more productive ways to deal with their difficulties.

The jumbies are coming! Corinne La Mer isn't afraid of anything. Not scorpions, not the boys who tease her, and certainly not jumbies. She knows that jumbies aren't real; they're just creatures parents make up to frighten their children. But on All Hallows' Eve, Corinne chases an agouti all the way into the forbidden woods. Those shining yellow eyes that follow her to the edge of the trees, they couldn't belong to a jumbie. Or could they? Corinne begins to notice odd occurrences after that night. First she spots a beautiful stranger speaking to the town witch at the market. Then this same beauty, called Severine, turns up at Corinne's house, cooking dinner for her father. Danger is in the air. Sure enough, bewitching Corinne's father is the first step in Severine's plan to claim the entire island for the jumbies. Corinne must call on her courage and her friends and ancient magic to stop Severine and to save her island home.

Lev Golinkin's memoir is the vivid, darkly comic, and poignant story of a young boy in the confusing and often chilling final decade of the Soviet Union. It's also the story of Lev Golinkin, the American man who finally confronts his buried past by returning to Austria and Eastern Europe to track down the strangers who made his escape possible . . . and say thank you. Written with biting, acerbic wit and emotional honesty in the vein of Gary Shteyngart, Jonathan Safran Foer, and David Bezmozgis, Golinkin's search for personal identity set against the relentless currents of history is more than a memoir it's a portrait of a lost era. This is a thrilling tale of escape and survival, a deeply personal look at the life of a Jewish child caught in the last gasp of the Soviet Union, and a provocative investigation into the power of hatred and the search for belonging. Lev Golinkin achieves an amazing feat and it marks the debut of a fiercely intelligent, defiant, and unforgettable new voice.

In 1956, Ava Lark rents a house with her twelve-year-old son, Lewis, in a desirable Boston suburb. Ava is beautiful, divorced, Jewish, and a working mom. She finds her neighbors less than welcoming. Lewis yearns for his absent father, befriending the only other fatherless kids: Jimmy and Rose. One afternoon, Jimmy goes missing. The neighborhood--in the throes of Cold War paranoia--seizes the opportunity to further ostracize Ava and her son. Years later, when Lewis and Rose reunite to untangle the final pieces of the tragic puzzle, they must decide: Should you tell the truth even if it hurts those you love, or should some secrets remain buried?

A 2014 National Indie Excellence Award winner A Junior Library Guild Selection, 2014 A School Library Journal Top 10 Latino Books of 2014 As a straight-A student with a budding romance and loyal best friend, M.T.'s life seems as apple-pie American as her blondish hair and pale skin. But M.T. hides two facts to the contrary: her full name of Monserrat Thalia and her status as an undocumented immigrant. With senior year of high school kicking into full swing, M.T. sees her hopes for a "normal" future unraveling. And it will take discovering a sense of trust in herself and others for M.T. to stake a claim in the life that she wants. Author Maria E. Andreu draws from her personal experience to tell a story that is timely, relevant, and universally poignant.

A thirteenth-century historical novel about a rabbi's wife who perseveres amid rising anti-Semitism in Europe.

One pint-sized girl. Ten supersized crises. And it's high noon. Madeline 'Twigs' Henry is a small teen in the shadow of some big problems. Born prematurely, and still so tiny in stature that people think she's in the fifth grade, Twigs has a mighty spirit. She needs that spirit when life throws a bucket of stones at her. It starts with a drunken deserter dad. Mom and little sister are so obsessed with their own love lives that Twigs has to take care of both of them. Her adored soldier brother Matt is suddenly missing in the Middle East. Just as Twigs is trying to figure out how she can solve everybody's problems (and find out if her boyfriend is cheating on her after just one week away at school), the flash of a knife slices her life, and Twigs must stand up to a gang of thugs to try to save the person she loves most--the very father who left her all alone.

In December 1992, three groups of teenagers head to the theater to see the movie version of the famed Eons & Empires comic books. For Adam it's a last ditch effort to connect with something (actually, someone, the girl he's had a crush on for years) in his sleepy Florida town before he leaves for good. Passionate fan Sharon skips school in Cincinnati so she can fully appreciate the flick without interruption from her vapid almost-friends-a seemingly silly indiscretion with shocking consequences. And in suburban Chicago, Phoebe and Ollie simply want to have a nice first date and maybe fool around in the dark, if everyone they know could just stop getting in the way. Over the next two decades, these unforgettable characters criss-cross the globe, becoming entwined by friendship, sex, ambition, fame and tragedy. A razor-sharp, darkly comic page-turner, In Some Other World, Maybe sheds light on what it means to grow up in modern America.

Azra has just turned sixteen, and overnight her body lengthens, her olive skin deepens, and her eyes glisten gold thanks to the brand-new silver bangle that locks around her wrist. As she always knew it would, her Jinn ancestry brings not just magical powers but the reality of a life of servitude, as her wish granting is controlled by a remote ruling class of Jinn known as the Afrit. To the humans she lives among, she's just the girl working at the snack bar at the beach, navigating the fryer and her first crush. But behind closed doors, she's learning how to harness her powers and fulfill the obligations of her destiny. Mentored by her mother and her Zar "sisters," Azra discovers she may not be quite like the rest of her circle of female Jinn . . . and that her powers could endanger them all.

When Louisa and Bear meet at Princeton in 1975, sparks fly. Louisa is the sexually adventurous daughter of a geneticist, Bear the volatile son of a plumber. They dive headfirst into a passionate affair that will alter the course of their lives, changing how they define themselves in the years and relationships that follow. Lisa Gornick's Louisa Meets Bear is a gripping novel in interconnected stories from an author whose work "starts off like a brush fire and then engulfs and burns with fury" ( The Huffington Post ). Reading Louisa Meets Bear is like assembling a jigsaw puzzle, as we uncover the subtle and startling connections between new characters and the star-crossed lovers. We meet a daughter who stabs her mother when she learns the truth about her father, a wife who sees herself clearly after finding a man dead on her office floor, a mother who discovers a girl in her teenage son's bed. Each character is striking, each rendered with Gornick's trademark sympathy and psychological acuity. We follow them over the course of a half century, from San Francisco to New York City and from Guatemala to Venice, through pregnancies, tragedies, and revelations, until we return to Louisa and Bear. With characters as flawed and deeply human as those of Elizabeth Strout, and with Alice Munro's gift for piercing insight into the lives of women, Louisa Meets Bear grapples with whether we can--or can't--choose how and whom we love.

The distinctive new crowdsourced publishing imprint Swoon Reads proudly presents its first published novel--an irresistibly sweet romance between two college students told from 14 different viewpoints. The creative writing teacher, the delivery guy, the local Starbucks baristas, his best friend, her roommate, and the squirrel in the park all have one thing in common--they believe that Gabe and Lea should get together. Lea and Gabe are in the same creative writing class. They get the same pop culture references, order the same Chinese food, and hang out in the same places. Unfortunately, Lea is reserved, Gabe has issues, and despite their initial mutual crush, it looks like they are never going to work things out. But somehow even when nothing is going on, something is happening between them, and everyone can see it. You'll be rooting for Gabe and Lea too, innbsp;Sandy Hall'snbsp;quirky, completely original novel A Little Something Different , chosen by readers, writes, and publishers, to be the debut titles for the new Swoon Reads imprint!

A coming-of-age memoir by a Colombian-Cuban woman about shaping lessons from home into a new, queer life In this lyrical, coming-of-age memoir, Daisy Hernández chronicles what the women in her Cuban-Colombian family taught her about love, money, and race. Her mother warns her about envidia and men who seduce you with pastries, while one tía bemoans that her niece is turning out to be " una india " instead of an American. Another auntie instructs that when two people are close, they are bound to become like uña y mugre , fingernails and dirt, and that no, Daisy's father is not godless. He's simply praying to a candy dish that can be traced back to Africa. These lessons--rooted in women's experiences of migration, colonization, y cariño --define in evocative detail what it means to grow up female in an immigrant home. In one story, Daisy sets out to defy the dictates of race and class that preoccupy her mother and tías, but dating women and transmen, and coming to identify as bisexual, leads her to unexpected questions. In another piece, NAFTA shuts local factories in her hometown on the outskirts of New York City, and she begins translating unemployment forms for her parents, moving between English and Spanish, as well as private and collective fears. In prose that is both memoir and commentary, Daisy reflects on reporting for the New York Times as the paper is rocked by the biggest plagiarism scandal in its history and plunged into debates about the role of race in the newsroom. A heartfelt exploration of family, identity, and language, A Cup of Water Under My Bed is ultimately a daughter's story of finding herself and her community, and of creating a new, queer life.

Winner of the 2015 Theodor Seuss Geisel Award Two fuzzy creatures can't agree on who is small and who is big, until a couple of surprise guests show up, settling it once and for all! The simple text of Anna Kang and bold illustrations of New Yorker cartoonist Christopher Weyant tell an original and very funny story about size--it all depends on who's standing next to you.

Propounding his "small ball theory" of sports literature, George Plimpton proposed that "the smaller the ball, the more formidable the literature." Of course he had the relatively small baseball in mind, because its literature is formidable--vast and varied, instructive, often wildly entertaining, and occasionally brilliant. From this bewildering array of baseball books, Ron Kaplan has chosen 501 of the best, making it easier for fans to find just the books to suit them (or to know what they're missing). From biography, history, fiction, and instruction to books about ballparks, business, and rules, anyone who loves to read about baseball will find in this book a companionable guide, far more fun than a reference work has any right to be.

An exciting new take on the bestselling Willow Falls series from middle-grade superstar Wendy Mass. In 11 Birthdays, Finally, 13 Gifts, and The Last Present, we've seen the kids of Willow Falls in different magical situations. With Graceful, the tables are turned -- this time it's a kid who's doing the magic. Grace has powers to alter peoples' fates, and is guided by hints left behind by Angelica, the magician from the first books. It's supposed to take a few years for Grace's powers to return full force -- but something's affecting the magic in the town of Willow Falls, and Grace needs to do something now! Luckily, she's got the help of all her friends . . . if she can just keep them safe from their own choices and all the pizza her powers produce -- which is much harder than she ever imagined. Family, friendship, and everyday magic -- nobody does it better than Wendy Mass!

To Find Your Future, You Have to Face Your Past At sixteen, Morgan Lindstrum has the life that every other girl wants--at least from the outside. A privileged only child, she has everything she could ever want, except her parents' attention. A Princeton physicist and a high-powered executive, they barely have any time for each other, much less for Morgan. Then her beloved grandfather dies, depriving Morgan of the only stable figure in her life. If that's not enough, she suddenly finds out he was never her grandfather at all. To find out the truth about her family, Morgan makes her way to Brooklyn, where she meets Terence Mulvaney, the Irish immigrant father who her mother disowned. Morgan wants answers; but instead of just satisfying her curiosity, Mulvaney shows her the people in his condemned tenement building, who are suffering and have nowhere to go. He challenges her to help them, by tearing away the veil of shame, and showing her wealthy parents and her advantaged circle of friends a world they don't want to know exists. The temptation to walk away from this ugly reality, as her mother did, is strong. But if she does, can Morgan ever really leave behind what she learned when she crossed into Brooklyn?

Acclaimed author Mary Morris returns to her Chicago roots in this sweeping novel that brilliantly captures the dynamic atmosphere and the dazzling music of the Jazz Age. In the midst of boomtown Chicago, two Jewish families have suffered terrible blows. The Lehrmans, who run a small hat factory, lost their beloved son Harold in a blizzard. The Chimbrovas, who run a saloon, lost three of their boys on the SS Eastland when it sank in 1915. Each family holds out hope that one of their remaining children will rise to carry on the family business. But Benny Lehrman has no interest in making hats. His true passion is piano--especially jazz. At night he sneaks down to the South Side, slipping into predominantly black clubs to hear jazz groups play. One night he is called out and asked to "sit in" on a group. His playing is first-rate, and the other musicians are impressed. One of them, the trumpeter, a black man named Napoleon, becomes Benny's close friend and musical collaborator, and their adventures together take Benny far from the life he knew as a delivery boy. Pearl Chimbrova recognizes their talent and invites them to start playing at her family's saloon, which Napoleon dubs "The Jazz Palace." But Napoleon's main gig is at a mob establishment, which doesn't take too kindly to freelancing. And as the '20s come to a close and the bubble of prosperity collapses, Benny, Napoleon, and Pearl must all make hard choices between financial survival and the music they love.

In 1871, five young girls were sent by the Japanese government to the United States. Their mission: learn Western ways and return to help nurture a new generation of enlightened men to lead Japan.Raised in traditional samurai households during the turmoil of civil war, three of these unusual ambassadors--Sutematsu Yamakawa, Shige Nagai, and Ume Tsuda--grew up as typical American schoolgirls. Upon their arrival in San Francisco they became celebrities, their travels and traditional clothing exclaimed over by newspapers across the nation. As they learned English and Western customs, their American friends grew to love them for their high spirits and intellectual brilliance.The passionate relationships they formed reveal an intimate world of cross-cultural fascination and connection. Ten years later, they returned to Japan--a land grown foreign to them--determined to revolutionize women's education.Based on in-depth archival research in Japan and in the United States, including decades of letters from between the three women and their American host families, Daughters of the Samurai is beautifully, cinematically written, a fascinating lens through which to view an extraordinary historical moment.

An abandoned baby, a glorious old Newport mansion, and awakening romance swirl the glittering waters of Breakwater Bay . . . Preservationist Meri Hollis loves her latest project, restoring one of Newport's forgotten Gilded Age mansions. And with summer approaching, she'll be able to spend more time with her grandmother on the Rhode Island shore. She has a great job, a loving family, and she's pretty sure her boyfriend is going to propose on her thirtieth birthday. But everything Meri believes about family, happiness, truth, and love is shattered when her family's darkest secret is exposed. Thirty years before, Meri's neighbor and friend, Alden Corrigan, took his father's dinghy out to fish. In a sudden storm, he rushed to help a woman stranded on the breakwater. She was just a girl . . . a very pregnant girl who disappeared soon after they reached safety--but not before she left behind a special gift. Now that the truth is out, life will change for everyone in Breakwater Bay, and Meri and Alden will have to make decisions that could ensure their future together . . . or separate them for good.

After being mugged in New York City, Miss Felicity Prim decides to leave the big city and purchase a home in the country, where she will be safe from the dangerous criminals who call New York home. A devoted reader of crime fiction, Miss Prim believes that her reading experiences have given her the skills required to become an amateur sleuth in her new home of Greenfield, Connecticut. She gets her chance to prove her mettle when she finds a corpse in her basement. As Miss Prim searches for the victim's identity and killer, she finds her father's old journals, which create a crisis in her family. Meanwhile, Miss Prim's young friend, Dolly, has become involved in a dangerous situation and needs Miss Prim's help. Can Miss Prim, with her insights into human behavior and her steadfast refusal to rely on forensics and databases (which she considers the crutches of lazy investigators), save the day and bring everything to a happy resolution? Of course she can.

After an all-out war with the evil Kin lord in Mexico, Jax Aubrey is back in Pennsylvania with his guardian, Riley, and liege lady, Evangeline. Although they're in hiding, a man named Finn Ambrose tracks them down, claiming to be Jax's uncle and giving Jax hope that he actually has a family after all. But Uncle Finn may have an ulterior motive. As it turns out, Jax's great-aunt is the reigning leader of the Dulacs, the enemy clan who assassinated Riley's family. When the Dulacs kidnap Jax's best friend, Billy, to lure Jax to New York, it becomes clear that the Dulacs, family or not, will stop at nothing to get what they want. Hoping to trade himself for Billy--while keeping Riley and Evangeline out of danger--Jax goes to Manhattan on his own, where he meets Uncle Finn; his nearly identical twin cousin, Dorian; and the rest of his supposed relatives. There, he stumbles upon a maze of magic tunnels below his family's apartment building. Uncle Finn and the sinister Dulacs have been keeping secrets from him--and one of them might be the location of Evangeline's long-lost sister, Addie. With the Eighth Day--and the entire Emrys bloodline--hanging in the balance, Jax struggles to comprehend who he really is despite all that he knows. An Ambrose? A Dulac? An Aubrey? Or an inquisitor who will stop at nothing to keep his liege safe?

They are lovers on opposite sides of a brutal war, with everything at stake and no possibility of retreat. They can trust no one--especially not each other. Major Lord Peter Tremayne is the last man rebel bluestocking Kate Grey should fall in love with, but when the handsome British viscount commandeers her home, Kate throws caution to the wind and responds to his seduction. She is on the verge of surrender when a spy in her own household seizes the opportunity to steal the military dispatches Tremayne carries, ensuring his disgrace--and implicating Kate in high treason. Painfully awakened to the risks of war, Kate determines to put duty ahead of desire, and offers General Washington her services as an undercover agent in the City of Brotherly Love. Months later, having narrowly escaped court martial and hanging, Tremayne returns to decadent, British-occupied Philadelphia with no stomach for his current assignment--to capture the woman he believes betrayed him. Nor does he relish the glittering entertainments being held for General Howe's idle officers. Worse, the glamorous woman in the midst of this social whirl, the fiancEe of his own dissolute cousin, is none other than Kate Grey herself. And so begins their dangerous dance, between passion and patriotism, between certain death and the promise of a brave new future together.

Four girls at a southwestern boarding school discover they have amazing feline powers and must unite to stop an ancient evil in this riveting adventure. Ana's average, suburban life is turned upside down when she's offered a place at the exclusive boarding school in New Mexico that both of her late parents attended. As she struggles to navigate the wealthy cliques of her new school, mysterious things begin to occur: sudden power failures, terrible storms, and even an earthquake! Ana soon learns that she and three other girls-with Chinese, Navajo, and Egyptian heritages-harbor connections to priceless objects in the school's museum, and the museum's curator, Ms.Benitez, is adamant that the girls understand their ancestry. It turns out that the school sits on top of a mysterious temple, the ancient meeting place of the dangerous Brotherhood of Chaos. And when one of the priceless museum objects is shattered, the girls find out exactly why their heritage is so important: they have the power to turn into wild cats! Now in their powerful forms of jaguar, tiger, puma, and lion they must work together to fight the chaos spirits unleashed in the ensuing battle...and uncover the terrifying plans of those who would reconvene the Brotherhood of Chaos.

Finally, Jackson Donne has it figured out. After leaving the private investigation business, he's looking toward the future -- and getting married to Kate Ellison. Donne is focused on living the good life -- planning the wedding, finishing college, and anticipating a Hawaiian honeymoon -- until he receives an anonymous email with a link and an old picture of him on the police force. Once Donne clicks the link, nothing else in his life matters. Donne sees a live-stream of the onething he never expected. Six years ago, his fiancée, Jeanne Baker died in a car accident with a drunk driver. Or so Donne thought. He's taken to a video of Jeanne bound to a chair, bruised and screaming, but very much alive. He starts to investigate, but quickly finds out he's lost most of his contacts over the years. The police hold a grudge going back to the days when he turned in his corrupt colleagues, and neither they nor the FBI are willing to believe a dead girl's been kidnapped. Donne turns to Bill Martin -- the only man to love Jeanne as much as he did -- for help. And that decision could cost him everything.

Raised in a poor yet genteel household, Rachel Woodley is working in France as a governess when she receives news that her mother has died, suddenly. Grief-stricken, she returns to the small town in England where she was raised to clear out the cottage...and finds a cutting from a London society magazine, with a photograph of her supposedly deceased father dated all of three month before. He's an earl, respected and influential, and he is standing with another daughter-his legitimate daughter. Which makes Rachel...not legitimate. Everything she thought she knew about herself and her past-even her very name-is a lie. Still reeling from the death of her mother, and furious at this betrayal, Rachel sets herself up in London under a new identity. There she insinuates herself into the party-going crowd of Bright Young Things, with a steely determination to unveil her father's perfidy and bring his-and her half-sister's-charmed world crashing down. Very soon, however, Rachel faces two unexpected snags: she finds she genuinely likes her half-sister, Olivia, whose situation isn't as simple it appears; and she might just be falling for her sister's fiancé... From Lauren Willig, author of the New York Times bestselling novel The Ashford Affair , comes The Other Daughter , a page-turner full of deceit, passion, and revenge.

You're twelve years old; a month has passed since your Korean Air flight landed at lovely Newark Airport; your fifteen-year-old sister is miserable; your mother isn't exactly happy, either; you're seeing your father for the first time in five years, and although he's nice enough, he might be, well--how can you put this delicately?--a loser. You can't speak English, but that doesn't stop you from working at East Meets West, your father's gift shop in a strip mall, where everything is new. Welcome to the wonderful world of David Kim.