Becky's 2012 Favorite Fiction

So here it is, the list of my favorites from the past year. It's not comprehensive; in fact, it doesn't include any nonfiction at all (but don't worry--Pete's put together a list of his favorite nonfiction titles from 2012). But these are the books I loved the most, out of the 100 or so that I managed to get through. What were your favorites this year?

The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker is--I kid you not--an end-of-the-world-coming-of-age story. Sounds like it shouldn't work? Well, it does. Julia is just 11 and trying to figure out her place in the terrifying social hierarchy of middle school when the apocalypse comes: a pronounced--and ongoing--slowing of the earth's rotation which causes days to stretch to 25, 30, 48, 96 hours and beyond. It's hard enough being a girl on the verge of puberty without having to deal with the end of the world. A wonderful, moving book that perfectly melds literary and post-apocalyptic fiction. (Fiction)

Lauren Groff's Arcadia chronicles the arc of a commune, from inception to inevitable dissolution and beyond. The voice of the novel, as well as its heart, soul, and moral compass, is Bit, the first baby born to the community. This story could be condescending, its characters mere stereotypes. But it's not and they aren't. Rather, it's a lovely, deeply moving, sensitive, and ultimately haunting novel of people and ideas. I couldn't stop thinking about Arcadia for weeks after I finished it. (Fiction)

Edward Schuyler, a sixty-two year old widower, is the available man of the title of Hilma Wolitzer's latest novel. Having reached the end of his first year of mourning, friends are now working their lists of single women and Edward is less than enthusiastic. An Available Man is a charming, funny little novel about friendship and love, and how you can't force either one. (Fiction)

 





Jess Walter has been producing excellent novels for over a decade, but this year's Beautiful Ruins is finally--finally!--exposing him to a wider audience. Read it, drink it in--it's a story that spans fifty years and two continents. Set partly in coastal Italy in the early sixties--during the tumultuous filming of Burton and Taylor's Cleopatra--and partly in contemporary L.A., it's a love story, it's a story about Hollywood, it's a story about making your way in the world. It's gorgeous! (Fiction)

The Twisdens are an upper-middle class New York couple who have everything they could possibly want. Great careers, an incredible brownstone, interesting friends. The only thing they can't achieve in a life filled with achievements is having a child and so, after exhausting fertility treatments in the U.S., they head to Eastern Europe for some non-FDA approved treatment. Breed, by Chase Novak, is an elegant, utterly disgusting, literary horror novel which introduces Rosemary's Baby to the age of Monsanto. Novak's prose is lush and evocative, just as you'd expect from the author who, under his real name Scott Spencer, gave us Endless Love and A Ship Made of Paper, among other lovely literary novels. (Horror)

Carry the One by Carol Anshaw is the dark, funny, and inutterably beautiful story of how a fatal accident influences the lives of everyone involved. It follows the fortunes of three siblings and their friends and lovers from the night of the accident--as several of them are leaving the wedding of another, more than a little under the influence--and over the course of the next twenty-five years. Carry the One could have been nothing but dark (and still been great, if only by virtue of Anshaw's crystalline prose), but it's so much more than that, as the three main characters grow--in ways both positive and negative, but always informed by the accident that triggers the story. (Fiction)

 

Imagine waking up in a different body every day. Each body's the same age as you, each body is located in a fairly tight geographical area, but other than that...you could be a girl or a boy, smart or not, rich, poor, cossetted, abused. That's the life A--only A--has had since birth. A has learned to adjust, to respect each body, each person's life, has learned not to grow attached...until it happens. Every Day by David Levithan is thoughtful, provocative, utterly beautiful. Read it and share it. (Young Adult)

 

 

The Fear Artist, Timothy Hallinan's fifth Poke Rafferty thriller, is his best yet. Tim's characters are perfectly rendered, warts, quirks, contradictions and all. The reader can see, taste, hear, and smell Bangkok, which is so vividly rendered it becomes a character in its own right. And then, of course, there's the story. It's political, it's personal, there's violence and beauty in equal measures. One of my favorite thriller writers has done it again. (Mystery)

A mugging which knocks an elderly lady to the ground and sends her to the hospital with a broken hip is how it all begins in Penelope Lively's luscious How It All Began.  Events ripple outward, encompassing people once, twice, thrice removed from Charlotte Rainsford, the pensioner in question. This year, reading Penelope Lively for the first time gave me my how-have-I-never-read-this-author-before moment. Her eye is keen, her prose is delicious, and we care about every single character, however minor.  (Fiction)

 

 

 

 

 

Jonathan Tropper's One Last Thing Before I Go is as gorgeous as they come. Drew Silver (called "Silver" by friends and family) is the kind of guy Tropper writes so well, a feckless man-child, complete with ex-wife and teen-age daughter, drifting until something comes along to shake up his world. In Silver's case the shake-up comes in the form of a damaged aorta. Absolutely nobody does it better, and this one is filled with angelic writing and beautiful insights. And did I mention that it's frequently laugh-out-loud funny? (Fiction)

 

 

The redshirts are those guys in science fiction shows on TV who don't have names and are always selected to be part of the away team or whatever dangerous activity is about to go down. You know, the guys who die so that the viewer knows exactly how dangerous and serious the situation is without the show having to kill off a regular character. John Scalzi's hilarious--and ultimately strangely moving--novel Redshirts is about what happens when those guys figure out what's going on. This one is great good fun! (Science Fiction)

 

 

 

As Some Kind of Fairy Tale by Graham Joyce begins a woman in her late teens or early twenties appears at the Martin's door on Christmas Day. She claims to be their daughter who disappeared twenty years earlier. She looks almost the same age she did when last seen, claims that for her only six months have passed, and says--although she steadfastly refuses to use the "f" word--that she's been among the fairies all this time. Is she crazy? Is she telling the truth? Is there more to our world than what we know? A gorgeous, lush read. (Dark Fantasy)

God as teenage boy? That's the premise of There Is No Dog by Meg Rosoff, a lovely, funny, clever novel which follows Bob (the aforementioned teenage god) as he falls painfully in love with a mortal girl. The characters, though drawn, for the most part, with just a few strokes, are yet believable. Rosoff's descriptions of the natural world (including Bob's many disasters) are rich and tasty. And the ending is a delight, with comeuppances distributed among those deserving and love to the rest. (Young Adult)

 

August Pullman is ten. He's entering the fifth grade but will be attending school for the first time, since his mom has always home-schooled him. Born with a double whammy of genetic malfunction, Auggie's face is severely disfigured, so much so he's had nearly thirty major surgeries in his few short years. Early in his first-person narrative Auggie says, "I won't describe what I look like. Whatever you're thinking, it's probably worse."

Wonder--which is, by the way, a wonder of a debut novel--takes the reader through Auggie's fifth grade year. Told from the varying points of view of Auggie himself, his sister Via, new to high school with issues of her own, and several of his new friends, the story beautifully portrays what it's like to be a kid who wants to be just another kid. Although I teared up or outright cried at least half a dozen times while reading Wonder, and although most grown-ups who read it will likely have a similar reaction, the middle-grade kids for whom the book is intended will probably just enjoy a good, well-written story they can relate to. Read this book no matter what your age, then pass it on to everyone you know. You'll all be better people for having read it. (Middle Grade)

 

 

 

New Releases September 4, 2012

All of the books discussed below are available at the Book Frog or online at the Book Frog's webstore. If you'd like to reserve a book at the store call us at 310-265-2665.

NONFICTION

No Easy Day, by the pseudonymous Mark Owen, a Navy Seal whose identity has already been outed by Fox News and the AP, is a firsthand account of the May 2, 2011 mission that killed Osama Bin Laden. The author has been threatened with legal action by the Pentagon, which was apparently not offered the opportunity to vet the title. The release date of this controversial book has been moved up twice from the original date of 10/16 (which date, by the way, will still see the release of Mark Bowden's (Black Hawk Down) book on the subject, The Finish: The Killing of Osama Bin Laden). We anticipate that this one will be in great demand.

Christopher Hitchens' posthumous Mortality is, reviewer and friend of Hitchens Christopher Buckley says in his review in this Sunday's New York Times Book Review:

"a slender volume — or, to use the mot that he loved to deploy, feuille­ton — consisting of the seven dispatches he sent in to Vanity Fair magazine from “Tumorville.” The first seven chapters are, like virtually everything he wrote over his long, distinguished career, diamond-hard and brilliant. An eighth and final chapter consists, as the publisher’s note informs us, of unfinished “fragmentary jottings” that he wrote in his terminal days in the critical-care unit of the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. They’re vivid, heart-wrenching and haunting — messages in a bottle tossed from the deck of a sinking ship as its captain, reeling in agony and fighting through the fog of morphine, struggles to keep his engines going"

Gretchen Ruben's previous book The Happiness Project has been a staple of self help and book discussion groups since its publication in 2009. That book was an account of her yearlong quest to become a happier person. Her new book, Happier at Home applies the same experiment to home life.
Former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan's book Interventions: A Life in War and Peace is about his forty years of UN service. Scott Simon interviewed him on Weekend Edition.

FICTION

It's been six long years since Zadie Smith's last novel On Beauty was published. Although the perpetually cranky Michiko Kakutani called NW, Smith's eagerly awaited new novel "clunky" and "a much smaller, more meager book than White Teeth" in her New York Times review, other sources have much different takes on it. Writing in The Guardian, Zenga Longmore says it's "Smith at her most eccentrically complex...hilariously funny yet often macabre."

Since his wild success with the male-bonding weepy memoir Tuesdays With Morrie Mitch Albom has made it his mission to produce a series of weepy appreciate-what-you've-got New Age parables in novel form. The Time Keeper looks to be no exception.

Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures by bookseller (!) Emma Straub is already an indie favorite, and the critics are agreeing. Entertainment Weekly gave this story of a fresh-faced young girl's arrival in Hollywood from Wisconsin in 1938 and the decades that follow an A-.

Tatjana Soli's first novel, The Lotus Eaters, the story of a female combat photographer in Vietnam, quickly became a staple on the book club circuit. The Forgetting Tree, also a big, sweeping story--this one about a California ranching family--will appeal to the same crowd. Publisher's Weekly says, "With her knack for beautiful prose and striking detail, this is a solid follow-up to her debut.

MYSTERY/HORROR

Breed is the first novel by Chase Novak, better known as Scott Spencer, the author of such lushly written literary fiction as Endless Love and A Ship Made of Paper. Novak acquits himself very nicely in his first stab at genre fiction the gorgeously grotesque Breed, kind of a Rosemary's Baby for the age of Monsanto. I gobbled it up and at the end was left with an unnatural hunger for Brood, its follow-up.

Randy Wayne White is known for his terrific Doc Ford series of crime thrillers set in the Florida Everglades. Gone introduces a new lead character, Hannah Smith, fishing guide and private investigator.

The Tombs is Clive Cussler's fourth Fargo Adventure

MIDDLE GRADE & YOUNG ADULT

Gods and Warriors, the first book of a new series by Michelle Paver, is sure to appeal to fans of Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and Heroes of Olympus series. Set in the mysterious Bronze Age, the action centers on a young goatherd, Hylus, whose sister has been kidnapped by the same warriors who are now hunting for him. Action packed and rich in historical detail. (10 and up)

Gary D. Schmidt is the Newberry Honor and Prinze Honor author of numerous books, including The Wednesday Wars and Okay For Now. His new book, What Came From the Stars ventures into fantasy, as a young boy grieving the loss of his mother finds an alien artifact which begins to transform him. (10 and up)

Elizabeth George is known for her elegant Inspector Lynley mysteries. The Edge of Nowhere marks George's first foray into young adult literature. The first of a sequence of novels set on Whidbey Island, just off the coast of Seattle, The Edge of Nowhere is a coming of age story that has elements of mystery, the paranormal, and romance. (12 and up)

Origin, a debut novel by Jessica Khoury is about Pia, who's lived all of her sixteen years in a sequestered enclave in the Amazon jungle. She's never had any contact with the outside world, and as the precious genetically engineered experiment of the group of scientists who've raised and taught her she's always lived a cossetted existence. When the outside world intrudes, Pia discovers that even mankind's most noble achievements can have a dark side. (12 and up)

PICTURE BOOKS

Llama Llama is one of my favorite contemporary picture book characters. The very real issues he faces--being scared and calling for his mama, getting cranky while out shopping, dealing with separation from his mama on the first day of school--are presented sweetly but uncloyingly, and the facial expressions author/illustrator Anna Dewdney wrings from her animal characters are perfect. In Llama Llama Time To Share, told in Dewdney's trademark sing-song rhyme, new neighbors come to visit and baby llama must learn to share his toys.

Patrick McDonnell, author and illustrator of both picture books and the beloved Mutts comics, comes out with a monster-themed book just in time for Halloween. Grouch, Glump, and little Gloom 'n' Doom think they're monsters. After all, they live in a monster castle overlooking a monster-fearing village. What happens when they meet a really, really big monster? Funny and sweet and only a little scary.

All of these books are available in store (most aren't out until Tuesday, September 4th, so be sure to check before coming in). You can call us at 310-265-2665 to reserve any titles you're interested in, or shop online at our webstore.


 



If You Like This...

Booksellers pride ourselves on being able to recommend books. Sometimes we make our recommendations based on what a person has liked in the past, and often it's a no-brainer: you liked The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo? You definitely want to try Liza Marklund or Henning Makell or Karin Fossum or Jo Nesbo. Sometimes you need to dig more deeply, ferretting out the information, for example, that even though the last book the reader loved was Confessions of a Shopaholic she's ready to move on to something meatier; if it seems like she needs to take little steps to get to the meat I might recommend Jennifer Weiner or Dorothea Benton Frank, women whose books are extremely accessible but more complex than your standard chick-lit. But if it seems like she's hungering for something more challenging then Anne Tyler or Lisa See or Carol Anshaw would be some of my go-to authors.

On more than one occasion I've had a grandmother looking for a gift for a grandchild whose first question is, "Do you have any Nancy Drew books?" Well, of course we do, and as we're standing in front of the Nancy Drew books chatting about how much we both enjoyed reading them as girls I'll ask some basic questions. How old is the child? What does she like? Often I'll learn that grandma hasn't seen the child in a couple of years, and, oh yes, she's sixteen. At that point we'll move out of the middle grade section and into the young adult section, and start talking about the rather more sophisticated titles that are likely to interest a sixteen-year-old in 2012. And then there's the flip side of that conversation, in which the parent of a nine- or ten-year-old has a kid who's wild to read The Hunger Games. But though there are certainly plenty of ten-year-olds mature enough to read Suzanne Collins' great young adult trilogy, I think most would far more enjoy reading The Underland Chronicles, her excellent series for middle grade readers.

A bookseller's dream is to be asked, "What do you recommend?" That's when we can shine. We talk up favorites old and new, we use our arsenal of open-ended questions to determine the direction in which we'll steer the customer, we place books in hands and encourage the reading of some sample pages.

Amazon, of course, has its famous algorithm which displays recommendations for a shopper based on titles she has browsed in the past. Taken at face value, it's a useful tool, but looked at more closely the Amazon algorithm is pretty much meaningless. I, for example, use Amazon exclusively for looking stuff up. New releases, weird titles that customers give me that I can't find anywhere else with the information provided (say what I might about the evil empire of Amazon, they have an amazing search function), out of print titles...but I rarely look up titles that I'm personally interested in, because it will be a cold day in hell before I make a purchase from Amazon. So the "inspired by your browsing history" and "related to items you've viewed" recommendations have next to no actual relation to anything I'd ever be remotely interested in.

But I digress.

I have to admit that my inspiration for this post came from research I was attempting to do for an endcap I was building, an "if-you-like-this" one focusing on Fifty Shades of Grey. I could come up with a few titles on my own--especially since our distributor and the publishers are now using similarity to Fifty Shades as a selling point even for backlist--but I wanted to see if there was anything else we had on the shelf that I could use.

So, this being the information age, I googled "similar to Fifty Shades of Grey," and came up with a website called Authors Like. Wow! This should be great, right? I type in the author's name, in this case E.L. James, and voila! I'm given a list of similar authors. So I did, excited to have found a new resource (because of course, we don't always have recommendations in our heads, and it's really nice to have a reliable, easy-to-use tool to help find them).

The first name on the list of authors recommended for fans of the B & D trilogy is Zane Grey. Yeah, the one who wrote westerns. Oaters. Books with no romance, and certainly no sex, at all.

The second name on the list...Shakespeare. The Bard of Avon. The fellow who gave us such characters as Hamlet, Juliet, Lear, Ariel, Desdemona, Prospero. Although I haven't read the collected works of E.L. James (or even a single work), as a bookseller of many years' experience--and an English major before that--I'm quite familiar with Shakespeare...and E.L. James, she's no Shakespeare.

I guess I intend this as a cautionary tale. Be careful who--or what--you take recommendations from. An actual living, breathing person is good. One who reads books is better. And an independent bookseller would be best of all. If you really feel the need to seek recommendations online, stay away from an entity that's trying to take over the world. Why not try one of the bookcentric social networking sites. LibraryThing is the best (though not the most well-known or popular) of these; it does use an algorithm for recommendations, but they are based on readers' realities and site member recommendations. LibraryThing also has going for it that it takes no advertising. GoodReads is the behemoth of book social networking, but its recommendations aren't as sophisticated as LibraryThing's, and it is pretty heavy on the ads (leading one to fear that their recommendations are, perhaps, driven by obligations to advertisors).

And of course, no matter what else you do, no matter who you take recommendations from, keep reading.

My top books to date in 2012:

• Carry the One, Carol Anshaw
• Arcadia, Lauren Groff
• Beautiful Ruins, Jess Walter
• One Last Thing Before I Go, Jonathan Tropper
• Some Kind of  Fairy Tale, Graham Joyce
• True Believers, Kurt Andersen

I'd be happy to tell you why I loved these books...and to recommend something else for you, as well.

Shop Online and Support Indies!

The Book Frog is so pleased to announce that--although our website (which is going to be fantastic) is still under construction--booklovers can now shop online and support us! If you click on the reading frog icon just to the right side of this page, you will be taken to our online store. Shop there, get great deals (including free shipping on orders greater than $25!), and support an indie bookstore.

Easy!

Do note, please, that when you shop our online store you're not actually seeing our store's inventory...I wish it were that huge! No, we use a service which allows our customers to access the Baker & Taylor database and take advantage of their tremendous warehousing capabilities. If you want to know what's on hand in the store, you'll need to come in or give us a call (310-265-2665).

Happy shopping!

New Releases July 17, 2012

August 5th marks the fiftieth anniversary of the untimely death of Marilyn Monroe, and this week brings the first wave of biographies and novels about the legendary actress.

MARILYN!

Keith Badman's Marilyn Monroe: The Final Years closely examines Marilyn's last two years, seeking to dispel rumors and set the record straight. Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox by Lois Banner examines the many dichotomies of which Marilyn was composed. J.I. Baker's The Empty Glass, the lone fiction title in this week's crop of Monroecentric works, weaves together historical fact and conpiracy theory to create a paranoiac thriller.

MYSTERY/THRILLER

It's a great week for thrillers! We, of course, are most excited about the release--finally!--of Timothy Hallinan's The Fear Artist, a Poke Rafferty thriller. If you haven't read Tim you absolutely must--his Bangkok-set series is one of the best around. Featuring ex-pat Poke Rafferty, an American citizen married to a Thai woman with whom he has adopted a former street kid, Miaow (who was, when the series started, an adorable, precocious little kid and is now an entirely-too-believable terrible tween), these novels are gritty and lyrical in equal measure. But this isn't the only reason the Book Frog is excited about this new release. We're thrilled to be welcoming Timothy Hallinan to our store on Saturday, July 21st at 2 p.m. for a book signing! Please join us--Tim's as fascinating as his books.

Daniel Silva is well-known for his series featuring art restorer, spy, and sometime assassin Gabriel Allon; The Fallen Angel, the latest, is set in Vatican City. And then there's James Lee Burke and his glorious Dave Robichaux novels set in the Louisiana bayou. Creole Belle picks up soon after the leave-you-hanging action of Burke's last book, The Glass Rainbow.

FICTION

Chris Bohjalian's latest, The Sandcastle Girls, moves between contemporary New York and Syria in 1915, as a young woman pursues her Armenian heritage. And Shine, Shine, Shine, by Lydia Netzer, is being called "A debut of singular power and intelligence...a unique love story, an adventure between worlds, and a stunning novel of love, death, and what it means to be human."

MIDDLE GRADE/YOUNG ADULT

The Land of Stories is Glee star Chris Colfer's debut novel. Intended for middle grade readers, it's the story of a set of twins with a magical book of fairy tales that allows them to enter the world of the stories. On a far more serious and mature note, James Preller's YA novel Before You Go follows a 16-year-old who's attempting to have a normal life in the extended wake of an accident that changed his life seven years earlier. And Small Damages, also for young adults and receiving lots of great press already, is about a high school senior thrown off course by pregnancy.

There are many, many more new releases this week, so if you don't see the one you're interested in here ask us. If we don't have it, we'll order it for you. And don't forget you can click on any of the titles in this blog post to purchase from our online store. You can also visit the store anytime by clicking on the frog reading logo on the right hand side of the home page of the blog.

New Releases July 10, 2012

It's a big week for new releases--great stuff from a wide range of authors, much of it hotly anticipated. Let's get to it.

FICTION

Stephen L. Carter is a professor at Harvard Law who writes novels (and nonfiction as well). His first novels (The Emperor of Ocean Park, New England White, Palace Council) were slow, stately mysteries set in the world of upper middle class African Americans on the East Coast. Carter's Jericho's Fall, an edge-of-the-seat spy thriller, took his readers on a different sort of reading journey. And his newest novel, The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln, is a work of alternative history which explores what might have happened if the Great Emancipator had survived Booth's assassination attempt. I have a copy queued up and I can't wait to see what happens!

In True Believers Karen Hollander, a successful lawyer and judge and now shortlisted as a nominee for the Supreme Court of the United States, is writing a memoir intended to tell everything there is to tell about her rather radical past. As she learns during the course of this riveting narrative, some people would rather the past remain buried and unknown. True Believers is a book about the power of literature and the importance of conviction...and it's kind of funny, too.

Ah, Carlos Ruiz Zafon. He writes like an angel, creating a world you never want to leave, one in which books are as important--and as powerful--as politics, sex, and money. The Prisoner of Heaven continues the story of Daniel Sempere, who is now happily married with a brand-new baby, Julian. There is, of course, a mysterious stranger--and very few do as much with this hoary trope as Ruiz Zafon!--and political intrigue. Ach, I'm getting myself all worked up just thinking about reading this one.

MYSTERY/THRILLER

There are a wide-range of mysteries out this week. We've got mainstream thrillers by Andrew Gross and James Patterson. We've got Some Kind of Peace, a dark, Scandinavian thriller by Swedish sisters Camilla Grebe and Asa Traff. And--the title I'm really looking forward to--The Other Woman's House, UK crime writer Sophie Hannah's sixth novel featuring detectives Simon Waterhouse and Charlie Zaile.

SCIENCE FICTION/FANTASY/HORROR

With Shadow of Night Deborah Harkness is releasing one of the most highly anticipated books of the summer. It's the follow up to last year's A Discovery of Witches, a classy tale of supernatural romance among academics at Oxford. The second installment of the All Souls Trilogy takes the main characters, lovers Diane Bishop and Matthew Clairmont, back to the Renaissance as they work to solve the mystery begun in the first book. Twilight too glittery and teen-angsty for you? Fifty Shades of Grey too graphic and fan-fictiony? Then why not give the elegant and intelligent A Discovery of Witches and its sequel a whirl?

I have been captivated by the dark fantasy of Graham Joyce since I read The Tooth Fairy back in the late nineties. Some Kind of Fairy Tale looks at the troubling reunion between a young woman, missing for twenty years but still looking the age she was when last seen, and the family left behind. If you've ever read Joyce, you'll know that where she was is not going to turn out to have been an ordinary kind of place...

Year Zero is, to put it bluntly, a hoot. Hilarious antic science fiction in the mode of A. Lee Martinez, it brings to earth a universe's worth of aliens in love with the musical output of our planet but unwilling to pay the massive fines for piracy they owe the people of Earth for bazillions of illegal downloads. 

Ben H. Winters's The Last Policeman is a pre-apocalyptic (an asteroid is hurtling toward the earth with a 100% chance of collision) police procedural. What's an eager young detective to do when he's trying to investigate a murder and no one cares? Terrifically effective and affecting.

YOUNG READERS

New installments in two popular middle grade series this week. The indomitable Sammy Keyes finds herself up against Santa Martina's self-appointed super hero, Justice Jack, as she tries to track down the missing Mrs. Wedgewood in Sammy Keyes and the Power of Justice Jack. And Eoin Colfer's The Last Guardian pits young criminal mastermind Artemis Fowl against an evil pixie.

As always, this is a mere smattering of the titles that came out this week. If you don't see the one you want, give us a call (310-265-2665), drop us a note (booksnob1@earthlink.net), or send us a message on Facebook, and we'll do our darnedest to get you what you want (what you really, really want).