The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness

Todd Hewitt is the last boy in Prentisstown, surrounded by men and the Noise they can’t help making since the Spackles attacked. There are no women—they all died of the same biological warfare that turned the men’s thoughts and feelings into a constant river of Noise. Todd was the last baby born before the women died off, and he lives in a dank, hopeless, shrinking town of anger and secrets hidden behind the Noise: like the secret of what happens when a boy becomes a man.

When Todd feels a Silence in the swamp just a month before his coming-of-age, he thinks it might be a Spackle hiding there, come back to attack again after years of retreat. But it’s something even stranger—a girl. This impossibility causes the lies that make up everything that Todd knows to start crumbling, and the violence rips his world apart. Todd flees with the girl, Viola, learning wonderful, startling truths about the outside world; but Prentisstown will not let them go, and it’s building an army to prove it.

The Knife of Never Letting Go definitely falls into the realm of speculative science fiction. It uses a future where human beings are colonizing the galaxy to explore the twists of the human brain that create ‘us’ and ‘them’, and to delineate how little things like anger and greed can twist the entire course of history. This is the first book in the Chaos Walking trilogy, followed by The Ask and the Answer and Monsters of Men. It’s sometimes categorized as young adult fiction due to the age of the protagonists, but don’t let that discourage you from reading it; Ness has a writing style that’s both lyrical and raw, and the plot and characterizations are more sophisticated than those of many an adult book.

Anya's Ghost by Vera Brosgol

Anya is a sullen teen who hates school and isn't very nice to her family and friends. She's sort of a portrait of me at sixteen, except with more cigarettes. And oh yes, a ghost.

Anya acquires the ghost when she accidentally falls down a well, where a girl named Emily died ninety years ago.

Emily the ghost seems lonely. She hangs around with Anya, asking questions and demanding attention, and soon she proves her worth by providing Anya with a lot of nice things. She's a friend and a supporter, and she helps Anya cheat on tests, and keeps watch while Anya sneaks cigarettes, and helps her manipulate a cute boy. Actually, you start to wonder if maybe Emily's not a very good influence on Anya after all.

Anya's Ghost provides a funny and real glimpse of high school life, with expressive drawings and a sweet, surprising ending. Neil Gaiman calls it a masterpiece, and I think it's pretty wonderful, too.

An Empty Death by Laura Wilson

An Empty Death is the second mystery in Laura Wilson’s series featuring Detective Inspector Ted Stratton. This atmospheric book is set in London circa World War II, where Stratton and his wife Jenny are bearing up as well as possible after their children have been evacuated to the countryside. Wartime rations, nightly blackouts, and the constant presence of loss wear them down, but their relationship is a touchstone for both of them and provides them with the strength to help others: Jenny volunteering long hours for the Red Cross and Stratton as a detective.

When a shell falls on the home of a neighbor, Stratton assists in the excavation, and is startled to find her still breathing and seemingly unharmed. Jenny and her sister Doris are drawn into providing shelter for the woman, whose trauma soon proves to be invisible but extremely severe. Meanwhile, the killing of a local doctor is the first in a series at the hospital, and Stratton must piece together clues and untangle motivations to track the murderer.

With a sympathetic villain, a surprise twist, and a well-developed detective, this historical mystery looks to be part of a very promising series. The first book is The Innocent Spy, although An Empty Death can stand alone.

Do you Kindle?

Kindle-compatible e-books are now available free from the library. Log in here with your library card number and PIN to start downloading.

Of course if you have another kind of e-book reader, like a Nook or a Sony, you've been able to download free e-books over a year now. You knew that, right?

More than ten thousand titles are available, free from the library, for you to start downloading and reading today.

For more information or for help downloading e-books from the Newport Library - even Kindle e-books! - give us a call at 541-265-2153.

Roadside America

I think I was nine when my family traveled across the Great Plains on a Greyhound bus. "Look at that," said my mom at one point, and outside the window I saw I majestic statue of a gigantic cow. We were in New Salem, North Dakota, and the sign said "World's Largest Holstein Cow." It was. I didn't stop giggling 'til Bismarck.

Ever since then I've enjoyed spotting such things - what are they called? Really big three-dimensional attractions? Roadside novelties?

Whatever you call them, I like them. I've seen a steakhouse in Florida with a giant bull pawing outside the front door. And not far from where I went to college in Sarasota stood a Tastee-Freez in the shape of a soft-serve ice-cream-cone. (Florida is a hotspot for roadside novelty spotting.) When I moved to Oregon, I was thrilled to see the dinosaurs of The Prehistoric Gardens, peeking out of the forest south of Port Orford.

No one seems to build anything that monumentally tasteless anymore, so such things are getting hard to find.

That's why I love Roadside America, a big glossy book filled with pictures of big fiberglass things: huge fish sculptures advertising bait shops; cafes whose signs are enormous coffee pots; at least three Italian restaurants, all shaped like leaning campanile, all called the Tower of Pizza.

Roadside America is a treasury of playful American kitsch, and I really enjoyed it. I spent a lot of time leafing through its pages, admiring the hubcap shops and fireworks stands, and remembering all the weird things I've seen.

Mourn Not Your Dead by Deborah Crombie

Senior policeman Alastair Gilbert has been bludgeoned to death, and no one is sorry, not even the Scotland Yard detectives sent to see justice done. Mourn Not Your Dead is a British mystery in the classic “village mystery” tradition, where the murder and its resolution lie entirely within the population of a small Surrey village. It’s number four in the Duncan Kincaid/Gemma James series, and my favorite one so far, as I read and listen my way through the series.

Superintendent Kincaid and Sergeant James have had dealings with Gilbert before; he had a reputation as a self-righteous martinet who enjoyed throwing his weight around, and both have seen the truth of it. But they are devoted to carrying out their duty as well as they can, even in a village where they find the suspects more appealing than the deceased. From the philosophical young video gamer to the psychoanalytical psychic with a witch’s nose, from the barman with a secret to the widow’s teenaged daughter, the characters are finely drawn and sympathetic.

The relationship between James and Kincaid adds another layer to the plot. The steady partnership that’s developed between them is threatened by their growing feelings for one another, and both are leery of the consequences in different ways. Is it more dangerous to turn away from love or to embrace it? This is a subtle thread throughout the book, echoed in the lives and issues of other characters.

Crombie’s masterful writing has received the Macavity Award and been shortlisted for the Edgar award. Each book can certainly stand alone, but if you prefer to start a series at the beginning, the first book is A Share in Death.

Sci-Fi or Speculative Fiction?

I’ve always thought the term, “speculative fiction” was a silly way to try and get readers to take science fiction seriously. But in the case of Tony Daniel’s 2001 novel, Metaplanetary, the term is apt. Cloaked in a classic space opera setting is a novel that dares to ask radical questions, posits far-out concepts, and challenges the reader to speculate on the nature and validity of their own biases and beliefs.

A thousand years from now, in an age where the biological and the algorithmic have merged, what does it mean to be human? Can wiping out an entire population of computer programs be considered genocide? And what about their children?

Ames, dictator of the inner planets of the solar system, is bent on adding the outer planets to his list of conquered territories. And he is willing to enslave or kill millions of virtual humans, known as free converts, to achieve those ends. As refugees, real and virtual, stream out towards the edge of the solar system, a young woman named Aubry joins up with a partisan group, The Friends of Tod, to stop Ames and liberate the free converts from their concentration camp on Mars. One of those free converts is her mother, Danis.

A simple plot synopsis hardly does justice to some of the compelling ideas and situations that inhabit this wildly inventive novel. A sequel, Superluminal, came out in 2004, and I’ve just started reading it. If you like your science fiction, dare I say, speculative, give Metaplanetary a try. You can reserve it here.