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MAD HONEY: Mad Honey 🍯 by Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan is a great read about starting a new life and the things you choose to hide or share from you past, until tragedy brings out hidden secrets that you didn’t realize the people closest to you have. What a page turner! (Release date: Tuesday, October 4). - Yvette

LUCY BY THE SEA: Fans of Strout’s past novels about Lucy Barton will love this new entry about Lucy’s life. Lucy has left NYC with her ex-husband, William, as the COVID-19 pandemic begins. They go to the small town of Crosby, Maine where they will spend an extended lockdown. Full of Lucy’s insightful meditations on life, love, and the regrets she is just now experiencing about her life. - Robin

FARMHOUSE: I'm a longtime fan of Sophie Blackall so I was thrilled to get my hands on a signed copy of her brand new picture book, Farmhouse — a gift for my granddaughter! The art is fabulous, filled with extraordinary detail and so many beautiful images on each and every day. The story made me a bit weepy, it's every bit as good as my favorite classic Each Peach Pear Plum. You'll want to spend time with this special book, poring over each page, the lyrical text ringing in your ear as you read it to the little ones in your life. - Rosanna

ODDER: The newest from Katherine Applegate is one book that you can judge by its cover. The story is just as charming as the cover of the book. Learn about marine life through the delightful story told in verse about a spunky otter. 

NOTHING MORE TO TELL: No one does young adult thrillers better than Karen McManus and this one won't disappoint. When a high school teacher is found dead in the woods by three students, another student believes that there is more to it than what's in the police report from 4 years ago. It will keep you guessing until the last page. - Brianna

FAIRY TALE: This is a hero’s tale and a fantastic one, at that. Seventeen year old Charlie discovers an entrance to another world, where he goes in an effort to save his dying dog. King's book is filled with references to fairy tales and fantasy worlds. An excellent page-turning adventure. - Dorothy

LIKE A ROLLING STONE: For fans of Rolling Stone Magazine and the Woodstock generation this is a must read filled with juicy stories about all the musicians that graced the cover Wenner's storied magazine. A good dose of insightful social commentary rounds out this fantastic memoir. - Sally

Listening with Leslie

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow: A Novel

By: Gabriel Zevin

Narrated by: Jennifer Kim, Julian Cihi

Length: 13 hrs and 52 mins

If you are old like me, or even if you were born before 1985, you too may be bewildered and even troubled by the immense and ever-increasing popularity and profitability of video games. You too might have read articles attributing the rise in anti-social behavior and the fall in reading scores to too much time spent gaming. While I am not completely persuaded that video games are wholly good, I did begin to appreciate and even admire the world of game-making as depicted in Gabriel Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, finding it much more interesting and entertaining than I had expected. 

Marx and Sam, both mixed-race Asian American roommates at Harvard, team up with a true gaming genius Sadie to form a game-making partnership. These

three are much more than just technical experts, they are true artists who create

beautiful and deeply engaging worlds within worlds with complicated moral dilemmas, and story lines that show remarkable depth and maturity. It turns out that there are multiple categories of gamers in the larger video game world, and Marx, Sam and Sadie are what’s called “Literary Gamers,” for whom reading and playing games are the same, both developing imagination and empathy. The stories they create are highly literate and absorbing and require players to make difficult, ethically nuanced choices and then accept the consequences of the paths they choose. A self-described lifelong LiteraryGamer, Ms Zevin has shown us the virtues and benefits of time spent navigating a carefully constructed virtual world, replete with drama and pain and beauty like our human world. I came away thinking it’s not so bad for today’s anxiety burdened young people to take a break in a place where they can take risks, make mistakes, suffer the consequences and go back and try again.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is both well written and well narrated, and I highly recommend it.