EFR REVIEWS

SNOW IN SUMMER With her black hair, red lips, and lily-white skin, Summer is as beautiful as her father's garden. And her life in the mountains of West Virginia seems like a fairy tale; her parents sing and dance with her, Cousin Nancy dotes on her, and she is about to get a new baby brother. But when the baby dies soon after he's born, taking Summer's mama with him, Summer's fairy-tale life turns grim. Things get even worse when her father marries a woman who brings poisons and magical mirrors into Summer's world. Stepmama puts up a pretty face, but Summer suspects she's up to no good - and is afraid she's powerless to stop her. ***WARNING: POTENTIAL SPOILERS BELOW *** ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ In this Appalachian re-imagining of the classic tale of Snow White, Jane Yolen introduces us to young West Virginia native Snow-in-Summer, named for the flowers that grow in front of her house. The story opens with Summer sharing the memory of attending her mother...

WESLEY JAMES  Quinn is having a rough summer. Her beloved grandmother has been put into a nursing home, her dad’s gambling addiction has flared back up, and now her worst enemy is back in town: Wesley James, former childhood friend and life ruiner. So when Wesley is hired to work with her at Tudor Tymes, a medieval England-themed restaurant, the last thing Quinn’s going to do is forgive and forget. She’s determined to remove him from her life and even the score for once and for all―by getting him fired. But getting rid of Wesley isn’t as easy as she’d hoped. When Quinn finds herself falling for him, she has to decide what she wants more: to get even, or to get the boy. ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ Quinn's not having her best year. Grandma's Alzheimer's is advancing so she recently had to be moved to a nursing home; dad's fallen off the wagon again with his gambling addiction (Quinn's parents ended up divorcing over this years earlier); and her once-friend-now-nemesis Wesl...

13 REASONS WHY You can’t stop the future.  You can’t rewind the past. The only way to learn the secret . . . is to press play. Clay Jensen returns home from school to find a strange package with his name on it lying on his porch. Inside he discovers several cassette tapes recorded by Hannah Baker—his classmate and crush—who committed suicide two weeks earlier. Hannah's voice tells him that there are thirteen reasons why she decided to end her life. Clay is one of them. If he listens, he'll find out why.                 Clay spends the night crisscrossing his town with Hannah as his guide. He becomes a firsthand witness to Hannah's pain, and as he follows Hannah’s recorded words throughout his town, what he discovers changes his life forever. ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ Clay Jensen thought he'd made a real effort to get to know classmate and co-worker Hannah Baker. While working together at the local movie theat...

TWO BY WOOLF NOTE -- Painting on this cover is 46 Gordon Square by Vanessa Bell , sister of Virginia Woolf A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ Originating from two college lectures Virginia Woolf gave in 1928, A Room of One's Own is a 1929 expansion of those ideas, given to the general public in book form... something you see quite a lot of these days with the popularity of published versions of commencement speeches given by celebrities! Woolf thinks on her time being an attendee of an Oxbridge University luncheon. During that visit, she also toured the British Museum in London, all the while pondering the topic of "Women and Fiction" she'd been asked to speak on. Woolf goes on to talk about the lost art of pursuing real truth and beauty that should be offered through the vehicle of fiction, and the idea of how "fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts, the better the fiction... so we are told." What one means by int...

BEOWULF TO VIRGINIA WOOLF ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ Originally published in the 1950s as a piece in Furioso Magazine , this parody work is a fun jaunt through notable moments in classic literature. While gathering information for a PhD thesis, college-age Myers, finding himself inspired by some of the funny little historical nuggets he was hitting upon, put together this little collection of humorous stories about famous authors and imagined alternate histories accompanied by parody artwork such as: * The famous portrait of Henry VIII identified as William Jennings Byron, while also suggesting in a footnote that Byron was a lycan! (Myers also does some interesting "re-telling of the history of Henry's daughter, Elizabeth I.) * Mona Lisa tagged as poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning * A country scene of the "Bucolic Plague" * A depiction of the "Invisible Spanish Armada" (a painting of an empty sea) * Keats, famous poet of "Ode to ...