Recommended Reads

Searching for your next book? Explore our reader resources to find that perfect book for you.

  • Novelist is an electronic readers' advisory resource that assists fiction readers in finding new authors and titles. It includes 90,000 full-text reviews, recommended reads, book discussion guides, readalikes, and more.

  • Goodreads is a social media and review site for books that helps users discover and share books they like. Users can create lists, read reviews, and interact with other users.

  • BookPage is a trusted source for book reviews, recommendations and author interviews. It’s a discovery tool for readers, highlighting the best new books across all genres

Our book rivers let you know about new items at the library.

New Items

Image for "The L.O.V.E. Club"

The L.O.V.E. Club

From the acclaimed author of Beating Heart Baby, an immersive novel following three estranged high schoolers who are pulled into a video game to pursue the disappearance of their friend

Three years ago, Elle (the “E” in the self-proclaimed L.O.V.E. Club) disappeared from Calendula, an affluent Chinese American suburb in inland California. Soon afterward, Liberty and Vera (“L” and “V”) moved away, leaving O alone with her grief, abandonment, and confusion. . . until Liberty and Vera return for their senior year of high school.

Though the L.O.V.E. Club’s three remaining members once bonded as outcasts and gamers, they can’t pick up the pieces of their friendship. But the girls are drawn back to their old clubhouse, where they discover, loaded for them to play, a new game created by none other than the missing Elle.

One click, and Liberty, Vera, and O are ported into Morning Glory, an ever-evolving botanical fantasy coded with their lived experiences, complicated history, and repressed insecurities. Unbeknownst to the others, O can’t remember the events surrounding Elle’s disappearance—but within the game, Elle has sent O a cryptic hint about Morning Glory’s real nature.

While Liberty and Vera defeat increasingly sinister bosses, O grapples with the secret knowledge that her deepest wish, to reunite with Elle, might just come true. But as the girls progress through Morning Glory, O begins to wonder how well she actually knew any of her former best friends and if she’s ready to confront the hard truths—and dangerous revelations—about Elle in her returning memories.

Immortal

Immortal Consequences: A Good Morning America YA Book Club Pick

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A Good Morning America YA Book Club Pick!

SIX RIVALS. ONE VICTOR. ETERNITY IS ONLY THE BEGINNING.

“A twisty and thrilling dark academia fantasy that will have you enthralled from the very first page.” —Ava Reid, #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Study in Drowning

Six students compete to change their fate at a darkly enchanted boarding school in purgatory where graduation is the only escape—and love can cross the boundaries between life and death.

This stunning hardcover edition will feature gorgeous, flower-patterned sprayed edges, colored endpapers, and an exclusive foil-stamped case!

Welcome to Blackwood Academy: the legendary school located on the fringes of the afterlife. Once a pupil enters the academy’s arched gates, there is no way out…except the Decennial, a cut-throat magical competition with only one victor.

This year, six of the Academy’s top students have been chosen to face the Decennial’s tests. Two academic archrivals, whose strange connection blurs the lines between obsession and hate. One girl driven solely by ambition, and another plagued by memories of the love she lost. And a charming playboy who never cared for anyone—until he met the academy’s newest student. But what none of them know? They aren’t the only ones playing Blackwood’s game.

Who will win, and who will fall? Only one thing is for certain: in this game, some fates are worse than death.

Book One of the Souls of Blackwood Academy Series

Accomplice to the Villian

Accomplice to the Villain

Don't miss out on the stunning DELUXE LIMITED EDITION while supplies last. This breathtaking collectible is only available on a limited first print run in the U.S. and Canada, a must-have for any book lover.

THE INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING SERIES

Once Upon a Time meets The Office in Hannah Nicole Maehrer’s laugh-out-loud viral TikTok series turned novel, about the sunshine assistant to an Evil Villain...and their unexpected romance.

REWARD OFFERED: Apprentice to The Villain wanted for treason (light), magical property damage (alleged), and one incident involving a weaponized scone (accurate). Frequently seen with a grumpy frog (crowned, judgmental). Answers to “Evie” or “Stop that.”

Evie Sage didn’t mean to become the right-hand woman to the kingdom’s most terrifying villain. One minute, she was applying for an entry-level position that promised “light paperwork and occasional beheadings,” and the next, she was knee-deep in magical mayhem, murder plots, and an entirely inappropriate crush on her brooding, sharp-jawed, walking disaster of a boss.

Now, with a magical prophecy unraveling, assassins showing up in the break room, and a suspicious amount of frogs wearing crowns, Evie has to figure out how to survive her job without setting the kingdom on fire—or her dignity, which is hanging by a very sarcastic thread.

Being evil-adjacent was never part of the five-year plan. But then again...neither was falling for The Villain.

A magical office comedy with grumpy bosses, snarky frogs, and definitely-not-feelings.

The Assistant and the Villain series is best enjoyed in order.
Reading Order:
Book #1 Assistant to the Villain
Book #2 Apprentice to the Villain
Book #3 Accomplice to the Villain

Image for "For Duck's Sake"

For Duck's Sake

Donna Andrews returns with her latest charming addition to the bestselling Meg Langslow mystery series.

Meg is in the backyard of the house her brother Rob, Delaney, and their new baby have moved into, supervising some workmen who are using a bulldozer to start digging out a duck pond. She wants to get away from her own house, which has become the staging site for Caerphilly's first Mutt March, which will be held the next day. Meg thinks it will be more peaceful at Rob's house--and it is until the bulldozers uncover a skeleton whose skull has a hole and a bullet rattling around inside. 

Meanwhile, Chief Burke begins searching the police records to see if he can identify any missing persons who would fit the bill. He doesn't turn down Meg's offer to help with his identification efforts, and she begins looking in the library and talking to old-timers. She's all the more eager to help because Iris Rafferty, who sold the house to Rob and Delaney and still lives in the mother-in-law suite, disappears the morning after the finding of the body... does her disappearance have anything to do with finding the body? Was it voluntary? Or was she kidnapped--possibly by the prowlers who are spotted lurking around the half-finished duck pond at night? Or do the prowlers have sinister designs on one or more of the dogs who will be marching in the parade?

Written with her classic cozy and investigative style, Donna Andrews is sure to delight in the latest in her Meg Langslow mystery series.

Departure 37

Departure 37

Horror meets coming-of-age in this thrilling novel in which forgotten Cold War mysteries make a terrifying reappearance, from a writer Stephen King has called “a master.”

On a clear October day, the American skies empty after hundreds of pilots refuse to fly, triggering a complete ground stop as authorities seek to explain an act of baffling coordination that the pilots insist was anything but planned. The pilots received disturbing, middle-of-the-night calls from their mothers, and each mother had a simple and urgent request: do not fly today.

There are a few concerning elements to the calls. None of the mothers remember making them—and some of the mothers are dead.

While the nation’s military chiefs and artificial intelligence experts mobilize in search of answers, a sixteen-year-old girl named Charlie on the coast of Maine watches a strange, silvery balloon drift across the water and toward her home—a place she loathes. Her father’s dream of opening a craft brewery on an old airfield has been a disaster, and all she wants is an escape back to Brooklyn.

She’s about to get much more than that.

Her new home is ground zero for a story that begins at a remote naval base in Indiana during the winter of 1962, when a physicist named Martin Hazelton discovered something extraordinary—and deadly. All Hazelton wanted was time to seek an explanation, but pressure from both American and Russian actors forced him into a perilous race.

Moving between the two characters and timelines, Scott Carson deftly weaves Cold War espionage with contemporary terror in a story that explains why #1 New York Times bestseller Joe Hill has declared himself “a fan for life.”

Image for "Butler"

Butler

THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER



"Salena Zito.... She understands you people and me better than we do." -- President Donald J. Trump



"You're going to learn things in this book. Beautifully written. Story after story after story." -- Mark Levin​



From the acclaimed journalist standing only a few feet away from the stage when the gunshots began is this gripping first-hand account of the near assassination of Donald Trump - and the inside story of Trump's heartland-fueled victory.

That day in Butler, had the wind gusted less, had Trump's head turned in a slightly different direction, or had the adrenaline-fueled heart of the shooter beat slower, America would have been plunged into chaos, possibly even civil war. As a local reporter with deep ties to the area, Salena Zito had been invited by the president to interview him at the Butler Farm Show Grounds. She was standing only four feet away from the presidential podium when the bullets started to fly. A campaign staffer tackled her to the ground.

Throughout it all, Salena never stopped reporting. She spoke by phone to Trump several times in the immediate aftermath and was granted access to community members, rally participants, family members and local law enforcement officials. "I rarely look away from the crowd," Trump told her in one of several of those conversations. "Had I not done that in that moment, well, we would not be talking today, would we?"

Known for her on-the-ground reporting on populism and rural America, Salena zooms out to tell the fascinating story of the battle for America's heartland and the issues that actually motivate voters. To understand how and why Trump won the 2024 election, you have to understand places like Butler. Big cities like Los Angeles, New York and D.C. don't decide who wins election cycles, but people in places like Butler, Pennsylvania sure do. President Trump gave the author extraordinary access for this book, including to his top aides, to his running mate JD Vance, to billionaire supporter Elon Musk, and even his security detail. 



There are moments that define America. The late afternoon hours of July 13, 2024 was one of them. This book is a narrative of that fateful day, the people of the heartland and the untold story of how the president found his way back into the heart of the electorate.