Adult, Fiction, History, Mystery, Nonfiction

While You Wait December 2023: The Price You Pay and Killers of the Flower Moon

Posted on December 8, 2023December 8, 2023 by Anneliese

NOTE: Apologies! It was pointed out that the first version of this post had a book in it, The Stakes by Ben Sanders, where the only copy in the library system had been withdrawn – it wasn’t actually available! It’s been replaced with a new readalike below.

On the fiction side, we’ve got a new Nick Petrie book being requested like mad. It’s the eighth book in his Peter Ash series, so people who have gotten invested in them are clearly eagerly awaiting this new release. And there’s nothing to boost the popularity of a non-fiction book like being made into a movie, so it’s not surprising that Killers of the Flower Moon is seeing a surge in popularity (plus, my mom says it’s an amazing book!).

The Price You Pay by Nick Petrie

Lewis has helped Peter Ash out of more trouble than Peter cares to remember. So he doesn’t hesitate when Lewis asks a favor in return. Lewis has left his criminal past behind, but a former associate may be in trouble, and he and Peter must drive into the teeth of a blizzard to find him. When they discover blood in the snow and a smoldering cabin, both men know things are bad. Then they learn that someone has stolen notebooks full of incriminating secrets about Lewis’s long-ago crimes, and realize the situation is much worse than they’d thought.

To save Lewis’s wife, Dinah, and her two boys, Lewis and Peter must find the notebooks. With Peter’s longtime girlfriend, June Cassidy, they begin the search—facing ruthless and violent foes at each turn, including one powerful person who will stop at nothing for revenge. Will Peter and Lewis be able to keep that dark past buried? Or will they need to step into the darkness to save the people they love most?

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Adult, Biography & Memoir, Contemporary, Fiction, Historical, Nonfiction

While You Wait November 2023: Mother-Daughter Murder Night and Counting the Cost

Posted on November 17, 2023November 13, 2023 by Anneliese

Two months in a row with a non-fiction book topping the most-requested items list – it certainly seems to be the season of the memoir this fall! And this time, it’s Britney Spears’ new book, The Woman in Me, that everyone wants a copy of. And on the fiction side, we have quite a few familiar names as the big authors release new books in time for holiday gift-giving. At the top of that list is Kristin Hannah’s The Women. Get on the waitlists ASAP, and while you wait, check out the similar titles we’ve picked out below!

The Women by Kristin Hannah

When twenty-year-old nursing student Frances “Frankie” McGrath hears these unexpected words, it is a revelation. Raised on idyllic Coronado Island and sheltered by her conservative parents, she has always prided herself on doing the right thing, being a good girl. But in 1965 the world is changing, and she suddenly imagines a different choice for her life. When her brother ships out to serve in Vietnam, she impulsively joins the Army Nurse Corps and follows his path.

As green and inexperienced as the men sent to Vietnam to fight, Frankie is overwhelmed by the chaos and destruction of war, as well as the unexpected trauma of coming home to a changed and politically divided America.

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Adult, Biography & Memoir, Fiction, Mystery, Nonfiction

While You Wait October 2023: Mother-Daughter Murder Night and Counting the Cost

Posted on October 6, 2023October 4, 2023 by Anneliese

This is a first for this series – the non-fiction book this month has more holds than any of the fiction books! Sometimes, to be honest, I have to scroll quite a ways down our list of most popular holds to find a non-fiction book. People just prefer fiction, I guess! But this month, Jill Duggar’s memoir has shot way up the library’s charts. And on the fiction side, we have a murder mystery that is also a Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick. Get on the holds list, and check out some readalikes while you wait!

Mother-Daughter Murder Night by Nina Simon

High-powered businesswoman Lana Rubicon has a lot to be proud of: her keen intelligence, impeccable taste, and the L.A. real estate empire she’s built. But when she finds herself trapped 300 miles north of the city, convalescing in a sleepy coastal town with her adult daughter Beth and teenage granddaughter Jack, Lana is stuck counting otters instead of square footage—and hoping that boredom won’t kill her before the cancer does.

Then Jack—tiny in stature but fiercely independent—happens upon a dead body while kayaking near their bungalow. Jack quickly becomes a suspect in the homicide investigation, and the Rubicon women are thrown into chaos. Beth thinks Lana should focus on recovery, but Lana has a better idea. She’ll pull on her wig, find the true murderer, protect her family, and prove she still has power.

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Adult, Biography & Memoir, Fiction, History, Nonfiction

While You Wait September 2023: The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store and American Prometheus

Posted on September 8, 2023September 7, 2023 by Anneliese

We’ve got some heavy hitters in the popular books this month. First up is the winner of the National Book Award, James McBride’s new novel The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. In non-fiction, we have a much older book – it’s rare to see a book from 2006 with so many requests! But when you look at the book, it’s very clear why; American Prometheus was Christopher Nolan’s inspiration for the new movie Oppenheimer.

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride

In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. When the state came looking for a deaf boy to institutionalize him, it was Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor at Moshe’s theater and the unofficial leader of the Black community on Chicken Hill, who worked together to keep the boy safe.

As these characters’ stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins of white, Christian America struggle and what they must do to survive. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town’s white establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community—heaven and earth—that sustain us.

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Adult, Contemporary, Fiction, Nonfiction, Science, Thrillers

While You Wait August 2023: Tom Lake and Outlive

Posted on August 4, 2023August 1, 2023 by Anneliese

Ann Patchett’s new novel is at the top of our most popular books this month. Set right next door in Northern Michigan, it’s a moving exploration of the relationship between generations, between parents and children, and of how the past informs our view of the present. In non-fiction, we have an investigation into the science of aging – not only how to live longer but how to live better.

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett

In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family’s orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.

Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart.

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Adult, Biography & Memoir, Fantasy, Fiction, History, Nonfiction

While You Wait July 2023: Fourth Wing and The Book of Charlie

Posted on July 14, 2023July 11, 2023 by Anneliese

Another couple of unique picks this month – seems like people are branching out in the summer, or publishers are branching out in the summer! The top fiction book looks to be an action-packed fantasy complete with war, dragons, and political intrigue. Then, on the non-fiction side, we have a book about the life-lived wisdom of 109-year-old Charlie: both the stories of his life and what he’s learned from those experiences.

Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros

Enter the brutal and elite world of a war college for dragon riders from USA Today bestselling author Rebecca Yarros.

Twenty-year-old Violet Sorrengail was supposed to enter the Scribe Quadrant, living a quiet life among books and history. Now, the commanding general—also known as her tough-as-talons mother—has ordered Violet to join the hundreds of candidates striving to become the elite of Navarre: dragon riders.

But when you’re smaller than everyone else and your body is brittle, death is only a heartbeat away…because dragons don’t bond to “fragile” humans. They incinerate them.

With fewer dragons willing to bond than cadets, most would kill Violet to better their own chances of success. The rest would kill her just for being her mother’s daughter—like Xaden Riorson, the most powerful and ruthless wingleader in the Riders Quadrant.
She’ll need every edge her wits can give her just to see the next sunrise.

Yet, with every day that passes, the war outside grows more deadly, the kingdom’s protective wards are failing, and the death toll continues to rise. Even worse, Violet begins to suspect leadership is hiding a terrible secret.

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Adult, Contemporary, Fiction, Historical, Mystery, Nonfiction, Romance, Thrillers

While You Wait June 2023: The Covenant of Water and Small-Town Wisconsin

Posted on June 9, 2023June 8, 2023 by Anneliese

It’s no surprise to find a novel that’s been chosen for Oprah’s Book Club at the top of our most-requested books, and that’s the case with The Covenant of Water. I was pretty surprised at our top nonfiction book, however – I don’t think I’ve ever seen a travel book so high up on the list before! It does make sense, however, given the time of year – this might be the perfect season to get out for some Wisconsin road trip fun.

The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese

Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water is set in Kerala, on South India’s Malabar Coast, and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning—and in Kerala, water is everywhere. At the turn of the century, a twelve-year-old girl from Kerala’s long-existing Christian community, grieving the death of her father, is sent by boat to her wedding, where she will meet her forty-year-old husband for the first time. From this unforgettable new beginning, the young girl—and future matriarch, known as Big Ammachi—will witness unthinkable changes over the span of her extraordinary life, full of joy and triumph as well as hardship and loss, her faith and love the only constants.

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Adult, Contemporary, Fiction, History, Nonfiction, Romance

While You Wait May 2023: The Five-Star Weekend and The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

Posted on May 19, 2023May 8, 2023 by Anneliese

Elin Hilderbrand has a new novel out, and that’s topping our fiction holds right now – not too surprising as she’s a very popular author! And on the non-fiction side, we have the dramatic story of an 18th-century shipwreck and the chaos that ensued after one group of survivors washed ashore… only to be followed six months later by a second group accusing them of murder!

The Five-Star Weekend by Elin Hilderbrand

Hollis Shaw’s life seems picture-perfect. She’s the creator of the popular food blog Hungry with Hollis and is married to Matthew, a dreamy heart surgeon. But after she and Matthew get into a heated argument one snowy morning, he leaves for the airport and is killed in a car accident. The cracks in Hollis’s perfect life—her strained marriage and her complicated relationship with her daughter, Caroline—grow deeper.

So when Hollis hears about something called a “Five-Star Weekend”—one woman organizes a trip for her best friend from each phase of her life: her teenage years, her twenties, her thirties, and midlife—she decides to host her own Five-Star Weekend on Nantucket. But the weekend doesn’t turn out to be a joyful Hallmark movie.

The husband of Hollis’s childhood friend Tatum arranges for Hollis’s first love, Jack Finigan, to spend time with them, stirring up old feelings. Meanwhile, Tatum is forced to play nice with abrasive and elitist Dru-Ann, Hollis’s best friend from UNC Chapel Hill. Dru-Ann’s career as a prominent Chicago sports agent is on the line after her comments about a client’s mental health issues are misconstrued online. Brooke, Hollis’s friend from their thirties, has just discovered that her husband is having an inappropriate relationship with a woman at work. Again! And then there’s Gigi, a stranger to everyone (including Hollis) who reached out to Hollis through her blog. Gigi embodies an unusual grace and, as it happens, has many secrets.

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Adult, Contemporary, Fiction, Nonfiction

While You Wait April 2023: Pineapple Street and Poverty, By America

Posted on April 21, 2023April 20, 2023 by Anneliese

I was not familiar with the author of this month’s top fiction book, Jenny Jackson, and taking a look, it looks like this is her debut novel! It’s pretty impressive to end up at the top of the most-requested list with your first book. And in non-fiction, we have a followup book to the popular Evicted by Matthew Desmond.

Pineapple Street by Jenny Jackson

Darley, the eldest daughter in the well-connected old money Stockton family, followed her heart, trading her job and her inheritance for motherhood but giving up far too much in the process; Sasha, a middle-class New England girl, has married into the Brooklyn Heights family, and finds herself cast as the arriviste outsider; and Georgiana, the baby of the family, has fallen in love with someone she can’t have, and must decide what kind of person she wants to be.

Rife with the indulgent pleasures of life among New York’s one-percenters, Pineapple Street is a smart, escapist novel that sparkles with wit. Full of recognizable, loveable—if fallible—characters, it’s about the peculiar unknowability of someone else’s family, the miles between the haves and have-nots, and the insanity of first love—all wrapped in a story that is a sheer delight.

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Adult, Fiction, Mystery, Nonfiction

While You Wait March 2023: I Have Some Questions For You and The Mountain Is You

Posted on March 17, 2023March 16, 2023 by Anneliese

Our popular non-fiction book this month is actually from 2020, proving the enduring appeal of self-help books. And in fiction, we have an author who hasn’t appeared in this series before, Rebecca Makkai – one of her previous novels, The Great Believers, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2019, however! Take a look at these books below as well as a few to tide you over during the wait in the queue.

I Have Some Questions For You by Rebecca Makkai

A successful film professor and podcaster, Bodie Kane is content to forget her past—the family tragedy that marred her adolescence, her four largely miserable years at a New Hampshire boarding school, and the murder of her former roommate, Thalia Keith, in the spring of their senior year. Though the circumstances surrounding Thalia’s death and the conviction of the school’s athletic trainer, Omar Evans, are hotly debated online, Bodie prefers—needs—to let sleeping dogs lie.

But when the Granby School invites her back to teach a course, Bodie is inexorably drawn to the case and its increasingly apparent ﬂaws. In their rush to convict Omar, did the school and the police overlook other suspects? Is the real killer still out there? As she falls down the very rabbit hole she was so determined to avoid, Bodie begins to wonder if she wasn’t as much of an outsider at Granby as she’d thought—if, perhaps, back in 1995, she knew something that might have held the key to solving the case.

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