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Featured Books for the week of August 8, 2022

The Book of Magic, master storyteller Alice Hoffman brings us the conclusion of the Practical Magic series in a spellbinding and enchanting final Owens novel brimming with lyric beauty and vivid characters. The Owens family has been cursed in matters of love for over three-hundred years but all of that is about to change. The novel begins in a library, the best place for a story to be conjured, when beloved aunt Jet Owens hears the deathwatch beetle and knows she has only seven days to live. Jet is not the only one in danger—the curse is already at work.

 

Finding Paradise – Barbara Dunlop. Accomplished Los Angeles lawyer Marnie Anton has always been sensible, but when her friend Mia Westberg asks for help with a ridiculous matchmaking project, she can’t say no. The idea of transporting city girls into the small town of Paradise, Alaska, is so crazy it just might…work? Against her best judgment, she tags along. Having grown up in a family of intimidating men, Marnie developed a preference for the urbane lawyers and clients in her life in LA. But when she meets a mountain of a buff Alaskan man with an intriguing snake tattoo, intimidated is definitely not the first thing she feels.

The Invention of Miracles: Language, Power, and Alexander Graham Bell’s Quest to end Deafness. – Katie Booth. We think of Alexander Graham Bell as the inventor of the telephone, but that’s not how he saw his own career. As the son of a deaf woman and, later, husband to another, his goal in life from adolescence was to teach deaf students to speak. Even his tinkering sprang from his teaching work; the telephone had its origins as a speech reading machine. Katie Booth has been researching this story for more than fifteen years, poring over Bell’s papers, Library of Congress archives, and the records of deaf schools around America. But she’s also lived with this story for her entire life. Witnessing the damaging impact of Bell’s legacy on her family would set her on a path that overturned everything she thought she knew about language, power, deafness, and the telephone.

On Borrowed Time: North America’s Next Big Quake – Gregor Craigie. For more than a decade, Gregor Craigie interviewed scientists, engineers, and emergency planners about earthquakes, disaster response, and resilience. He has also collected vivid first-hand accounts from people who have survived deadly earthquakes. His fascinating and deeply researched book dives headfirst into explaining the science behind The Big One — and asks what we can do now to prepare ourselves for events geologists say aren’t a matter of if, but when.

Lore by Alexandra Bracken is a stand-alone urban fantasy novel that follows the titular character and her friends as they struggle to survive the Agon hunt, where gods and humans alike are in constant mortal danger.

The Case of The Burgled Bundle – Michael Hutchinson. The National Assembly of Cree Peoples has gathered together in the Windy Lake First Nation, home to the Mighty Muskrats—cousins Chickadee, Atim, Otter, and Sam. But when the treaty bundle, the center of a four-day-long ceremony, is taken, the four mystery-solving cousins set out to catch those responsible and help protect Windy Lake’s reputation!

Creatures of the Flood – Erin Hunter. The pandas of the Bamboo Kingdom have never forgotten the great flood that ended the peaceful life they’d always known. But for three young creatures born that day, the flood marks not an end, but a beginning—the beginning of their struggles to find a place in very different worlds.