Blog Entries

Everybody Counts is so much more than just a children’s counting book!  The colorful illustrations on each page portray a variety of people in both humorous and grave everyday situations.  Each picture counts an increasing number of people; four in a band; twelve at a birthday party; thirty in a park, etc., but this is only one aspect of the book.  There is also a clever puzzle to be solved.
 

Part Soviet history, part family biography, Alex Halberstadt’s Young Heroes of the Soviet Union: A Memoir and a Reckoning is a thought-provoking look at how trauma can echo down generations. For Halberstadt, born in Moscow in the 1970s, the past has always hung over his family’s lives like an ever-present specter. His paternal grandfather was one of Stalin’s last surviving bodyguards and a major in the KGB, a job that made him culpable in some of the brutal crimes carried out by the State.

In this story by Patrick Ness, we follow young Todd Hewitt as he and his dog Manchee flee through swamps and forests, over hills and through plains, searching for an unknown place of safety, with nothing to his name but a small bag and a knife. Stumbling upon Viola, a lost girl from The Old World, the two are on the run from Todd's old settlement, and more specifically from its large army that is out to capture him.

The walking dead are tearing through the world.  An unlikely man with the gift – or curse? – of immunity, and an equally unlikely group of survivors struggle to remain uninfected.  The group – a convict, a Sasquatch-sized mute genius, and a young girl – must pull together to fight off thousands of slow-walking, brain-eating zombies, and hundreds of their much faster and smarter cousins, the “runners,” in order to find some semblance of a normal life.  Unfortunately, the walking and running dead aren’t the only dangers in this world.
 

Meg Rhys is a textbook example of a “spinster librarian”. In her forties, she spends most of her time in the local history stacks of the Brooklyn Public Library, and the rest of the time living hermetically in her apartment with her dead sister’s cat and her dead sister’s ghost, staunchly resistant to any suggestions of change. Enter Ellis Williams, a charming library patron seeking assistance in figuring out whether his family’s home might have a ghost of its own.