Hilda C. Landers Library & Archives

Don’t read this book in the winter! I didn’t rate this as a Must Read mostly because of the theme of sexual perversion which seems to have carried over from the previous book, Hard Truth. Get back to the basics of just plain murder 😉 Anyway, Nevada Barr’s writing is superlative compared to other authors who crank out drivel several times a year. An excellent series of murder mysteries for anyone who is a fan of that genre!

Availability: COSMOS
Review Submitted by: J. Tyler Bell
Rating: Highly Recommended

Meet Estrella, a girl coming of age in rural California. Estrella and her family work as agricultural laborers in California. While California’s pastures of plenty paint a beautiful backdrop for the casual visitor, or more likely, the vast majority of Americans who buy the cheap produce shipped from the Central Valley to the four corners of the nation, the peach and grape orchards are the site of brutal labor conditions and little pay for Estrella’s family. The story of Estrella’s life takes shape for the reader out of fragmentary snippets of dialogue and scene-setting; the narrative constantly shifts perspective between characters in each scene.

In Under the Feet of Jesus, farm workers depend on their health, a running car, and abundant harvests in order to support their existence. All of these elements are uncertain and ultimately at the mercy of the natural world. Yet it is the un-natural human intervention of pesticide exposure which spurs the plot of Viramontes’ novel towards its enigmatic conclusion. Alejo, a teen who is friends with Estrella, is run down by a crop duster while stealing peaches from an orchard. Despite the high probability that the pilot of the duster would have been able to see Alejo running as fast as he could through the orchard, the plane’s shadow passes over Alejo “like a crucifix” before he is immersed in toxic spray. The disposable Alejo is poisoned, and falls to the care of Estrella’s family.

In order to save Alejo from the “daño of the fields,” Estrella must come to recognize Alejo will receive no help from the economic and political system which poisoned him in the first place. She’ll have to grasp the terrible tendrils of economic, racial, and environmental injustice in order to articulate her power within these unjust systems. In short, she’ll have to take action for herself, no matter the consequences to her own safety.

Under the Feet of Jesus is lean (only 176 pages in length) but rich in poetry, complex formal innovation, and weighty subject matter. Steinbeck fans will find some interesting allusions and inversions of The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden within Under the Feet of Jesus. With haunting, elegiac prose that highlights the natural beauty of California alongside the harsh poverty farm workers experience to this day, Viramontes matches Steinbeck stride for stride in this taught, powerful novel of the American West.

Availability: USMAI
Review Submitted by: Shane D. Hall
Rating: Peachy! Read Under the Feet of Jesus and realize how rotten that rating is.

The Five Chinese Brothers is a tale of five traitorous brothers, who must use their superpowers to escape or survive various forms of torture and/or execution the government subjects them to. Read to discover the astonishing conclusion to this age old tale.

Availability: USMAI and SMCM Library
Reviewed Submitted by: Matthew Lachkovic
Rating: Must Read

Published in 2009, The Windup Girl is the first novel by Paolo Bacigalupi. Winner of the Hugo and Nubela Awards (Sci-fi industry top prizes), The Windup Girl is set in a near-future Thailand. The kingdom of Thailand is a kind of fortress state, crouched in a defensive stance vis a vis the rest of the world. And not without reason; rogue diseases such as “blister rust,” “cibiscosis” and others only obliquely hinted at are poised to destroy Thai sovereignty. These diseases are both the unintentional, and quite intentional machinations of “calorie companies” (think Monsanto, Cargill, etc.) who have “taken over the world” by enslaving its peoples to genetically modified crops resistant to the latest competitive enterprise plagues. The plagues have greatly depleted natural biodiversity, and only those nations who have jealously cultivated and guarded seed banks have the bio-capital to engineer food and energy independence from the Iowa-based calorie companies. Bangkok runs expensive coal-fired fuel pumps to keep the city alive below rising seas, and the Environmental Ministry ruthlessly fights “Trade” and other foreign “invasives.”

Wind-Up creations, also called “New People,” are one such invasive. Like the androids and replicants typical to science fiction, these Wind-Up creations are human-like products of big industry and bioengineering. Emiko is the eponymous “Wind Up Girl,” and is the unwitting catalyst of the fast-paced political and environmental intrigue which propels the novel forward. Emiko was designed to be a sex-slave for a wealthy Japanese businessman who abandons her in Thailand (it’s too expensive to pay her passage back to Japan). In Thailand, Emiko is liable to be “mulched” by the zealous Environmental Ministry, and has to gain “employment” with a black-market sex club for protection from the Ministry. She is nightly assaulted and humiliated. While Emiko deplores her very existence, she struggles with her innate propensity to obey and please a master (traits supposedly lifted from Labrador retrievers in the gene-lab) and the indoctrination she received as a child. Emiko’s struggle to gain independence and safety ultimately breaks the fragile political and environmental truce the other characters strategize around for much of the novel, hurtling the nation and the characters towards an uncertain fate in a warming world.

The book is most distinctive and original in its conception of a post-fossil fuel, post-global turbo-capitalist future, and its interesting magic-realist moments (ghosts unable to reincarnate into a world too-full of suffering amble alongside living characters) are a cool genre-bending element. While Bacigalupi’s futuristic Thailand is rich in inventive detail, the fast-paced action and dialogue easily captivate the reader and keep you turning the pages so fast you won’t believe this beast of bookdom is over 450 pages. I shutdown my life to finish it in two days. Putting it down wasn’t an option.

If you wind up reading only one piece of genre fiction this summer, Bacigalupi’s Windup Girl should be it.

Availability: COSMOS
Review Submitted by: Shane D. Hall
Rating: Highly Recommended

A classic for the young adult fiction crowd. Reading this book is like taking an adventure. Throughout your adventure you make friends, learn new things and great evils. Take a chance and have an adventure.

Availability: COSMOS and SMCM Library
Review Submitted by: Andrew Lachkovic
Rating: Highly Recommended

Rikleen writes about how millennial, and the previous two generations interact in the workplace, particularly how they perceive each other. Rikleen especially focuses on showing us that these perceptions are often reflective of the generation viewing it, and that these perceptions are typically misunderstood. One of the first examples is how our (upcoming) generation is very much seen as “entitled” and lazy, however Rikleen goes on to describe how that isn’t true. Surprisingly good book.

Availability: USMAI and SMCM Library
Review Submitted by:  Matthew Lachkovic
Rating: Must Read

Anne Perry paints such realistic pictures regardless of the period she is writing about and this first novel of likable British characters who find themselves on the brink of war draws the reader into a very different world from what we have today–a world where war is unthinkable instead of almost commonplace. I wouldn’t call this light summer reading, but it certainly isn’t very taxing and does bog down at times. Still, the novel takes us back in time to a very different mindset and I found that curiously refreshing. Great for taking along on vacation!

Availability: COSMOS
Review Submitted by: Jane Kostenko
Rating: Highly Recommended

This book is an intriguing twist on an old story; how do you live a life where you can only remember the current day? However, as the story continues, you begin to realize there’s a dark secret being hidden from Christine by the one’s around her. Just when you think you’ve figured it out, even more secrets are revealed you begin to despite S. J. Watson (author) for what she’s doing to you.

Availability: USMAI and SMCM Library
Review Submitted by: Matthew Lachkovic
Rating: Highly recommended

 It is the fourth book in a series about a female bounty hunter, Stephanie Plum. The book is a fast paced light-hearted read, even though it contains dead bodies and explosions. It is not necessary to have read any of the other books as the author introduces the main characters as they appear.

Availability: COSMOS
Review Submitted by: Sue Banaszak
Rating: Highly Recommended

My Secret is a collection of numerous secrets sent to the infamous PostSecret, particularly presenting secrets of younger participants. Each secret lets one see into the soul of the sender, seeing their fears, worries, regrets and joys. With each page, you read a secret. Sometimes they seem strange, and sometimes the secret touches you. As you read, you will reveal secrets that will never be shared with anyone else and, once in a while, reveal secrets about yourself.

Availability: USMAI
Review Submitted by: Andrew Lachkovic
Rating: Recommended