LibGuides: What's New: What's New

Summer Beach Reads

The Second Chance Year

Sadie Thatcher's life has fallen apart in spectacular fashion. In one fell swoop, she managed to lose her job, her apartment, and her boyfriend--all thanks to her big mouth. So when a fortune teller offers her one wish, Sadie jumps at the chance to redo her awful year. Deep down, she doesn't believe magic will fix her life, but taking a leap of faith, Sadie makes her wish, opens her eyes, and . . . nothing has changed. And then, in perhaps her dumbest move yet, she kisses her brother's best friend, Jacob. But when Sadie wakes up the next morning, she's in her former apartment with her former boyfriend, and her former boss is expecting her at work. Checking the date, she realizes it's January 1 . . . of last year. As Sadie navigates her second-chance year, she begins to see the red flags she missed in her relationship and in her career. Plus, she keeps running into Jacob, and she can't stop thinking about their kiss . . . the one he has no idea ever happened.

Starter Villain

Inheriting your uncle's supervillain business is more complicated than you might think. Particularly when you discover who's running the place. Charlie's life is going nowhere fast. A divorced substitute teacher living with his cat in a house his siblings want to sell, all he wants is to open a pub downtown, if only the bank will approve his loan. But becoming a supervillain isn't all giant laser death rays and lava pits. Jake had enemies, and now they're coming after Charlie. His uncle might have been a stand-up, old-fashioned kind of villain, but these are the real thing: rich, soulless predators backed by multinational corporations and venture capital.

Witch of Wild Things

Sage Flores has been running from her family - and their 'gifts' - ever since her younger sister Sky died. Eight years later, Sage reluctantly returns to her hometown. Like slipping into an old, comforting sweater, Sage takes back her job at Cranberry Rose Company and uses her ability to communicate with plants to discover unusual heritage specimens in the surrounding lands. What should be a simple task is complicated by her partner in botany sleuthing: Tennessee Reyes. He broke her heart in high school, and she never fully recovered. Working together is reminding her of all their past tender, genuine moments - and new feelings for this mature sexy man are starting to take root in her heart. With rare plants to find, a dead sister who keeps bringing her coffee, and another sister whose anger fills the sky with lightning, Sage doesn't have time for romance. But being with Tenn is like standing in the middle of a field on the cusp of a summer thunderstorm - supercharged and inevitable.

A Quantum Love Story by Mike Chen
Call Number: PS3603 .H4535 Q36 2024
Grieving her best friend's recent death, neuroscientist Mariana Pineda’s ready to give up everything to start anew. Even her career— it's her last week consulting at a top-secret particle accelerator. Except the strangest thing happens - a man stops her and claims they've met before. Carter Cho knows who she is, why she's mourning, why she's there. And he needs Mariana to remember everything he’s saying. Because time is about to loop. In a flash of energy, it’s Monday again. Together, Mariana and Carter enter an inevitable life, four days at a time, over and over, without permanence except for what they share. With everything resetting—even bank accounts—joy comes in the little things: a delicious meal, a tennis match, giving a dog his favorite treat. But just as they figure out this new life, everything changes. Because Carter's memories of the time loop are slowly disappearing. And their only chance at happiness is breaking out of the loop—forever.
Smoke Kings by Jahmal Mayfield
Call Number: PS3613 .A95585 S66 2024
ISBN: 9781685891114
Nate Evers, a young black political activist, struggles with rage as his people are still being killed in the streets 62 years after Emmett Till. When his little cousin is murdered, Nate shuns the graffiti murals, candlelight vigils, and Twitter hashtags that are commonplace after these senseless deaths. Instead, he leads 3 grief-stricken friends on a mission of retribution, kidnapping the descendants of long-ago perpetrators of hate crimes, confronting the targets with their racist lineages, and forcing them to pay reparations to a community fund. For 3 of the group members, the results mean justice; for Nate - pure revenge. Not all targets go quietly into the night, though, and Nate and his friends' world spirals out of control when they confront the wrong man. Now the leader of a white supremacist group is hot on their tail as is a jaded lawman with some disturbingly racist views of his own. As the 4 vigilantes fight to thwart their ruthless pursuers, they re forced to accept an age-old truth: 'Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.' Smoke Kings is a powerful and propulsive novel with a diverse and unforgettable cast of characters. Like Steph Cha's Your House Will Pay it explores decades of racial tensions through a fictional landscape where the goal of the oppressed is no longer equality but rather vengeance.
The Book of Doors by Gareth Brown
Call Number: PR6102.R6847 B66 2024
Cassie Andrews works in a New York City bookshop and lives an ordinary life. Until the day one of her favorite customers dies right in front of her. Cassie is devastated. She always loved his stories, and now she has nothing to remember him by but the last book he was reading - the Book of Doors. Inscribed with enigmatic words and mysterious drawings, it promises Cassie that any door is every door. You just need to know how to open them. But then she meets Drummond Fox, a librarian who keeps watch over a unique set of rare volumes. With only her roommate Izzy to confide in, she has to decide if she will help the mysterious and haunted Drummond protect the Book of Doors—and the other books in his secret library’s care—from those who will do evil. Because only Drummond knows where the unique library is and only Cassie’s book can get them there.

Nuts and Bolts by Roma Agrawal
Call Number: T173.8 .A37 2023
Some of humanity's mightiest engineering achievements are small in scale--and, without them, the complex machinery on which our modern world runs would not exist. In Nuts and Bolts, structural engineer Roma Agrawal examines seven of these extraordinary elements: the nail, the wheel, the spring, the magnet, the lens, the string, and the pump. Tracing the evolution from Egyptian nails to modern skyscrapers, and Neanderthal string to musical instruments, Agrawal shows us how even our most sophisticated items are built on the foundations of these ancient and fundamental breakthroughs. She explores an array of intricate technologies--dishwashers, spacesuits, microscopes, suspension bridges, breast pumps--making surprising connections, explaining how they work, and using her own hand-drawn illustrations to bring complex principles to life.
The Six by Loren Grush
Call Number: TL789.8 .U5 S59 2023
When NASA sent astronauts to the moon in the 1960s and 1970s the agency excluded women from the corps, arguing that only military test pilots--a group then made up exclusively of men--had the right stuff. It was an era in which women were steered away from jobs in science and deemed unqualified for space flight. Eventually, though, NASA recognized its blunder and opened the application process to a wider array of hopefuls, regardless of race or gender. From a candidate pool of 8,000 six elite women were selected in 1978--Sally Ride, Judy Resnik, Anna Fisher, Kathy Sullivan, Shannon Lucid, and Rhea Seddon. In The Six, journalist Loren Grush shows these brilliant and courageous women enduring claustrophobic--and sometimes deeply sexist--media attention, undergoing rigorous survival training, and preparing for years to take multi-million-dollar payloads into orbit. Together, the Six helped build the tools that made the space program run.
Celtic Mysticism by Tracie Long
Call Number: BL900 .L66 2023
Connect more meaningfully to the cultural wisdom and occult knowledge of the rich and thriving Celtic world. Reclaim ancestral traditions and older ways of connecting with the earth and spirituality by going straight to the heart of mystical traditions. Celtic Mysticism explores the folk magic that has thrived in the British Isles for thousands of years. With this guidebook for both newcomers to magical practice and those searching for a concise reference to a long history, discover how to honor your connection to nature and the rhythms of the seasons in the Celtic way. Explore the history behind Celtic practices, rituals, and spells and then engage with them firsthand, forming a deeper bond with Mother Earth.