Staff Recommendations

An undercover MI6 agent is sent to Berlin in the midst of the Cold War to investigate the murder of his fellow agent.

The fantastic journey of Belle, a bright, beautiful, and independent young woman who is taken prisoner by a beast in his castle. Despite her fears, she befriends the castle's enchanted staff and learns to look beyond the Beast's hideous exterior and realize the kind heart and soul of the true Prince within.

When a wounded Union soldier is taken in by the headmistress of an all girls school in Virginia, he romances each of the women one by one with shocking consequences..

Michael Stone, husband, father and noted author, travels to Cincinnati to speak at a customer service conference. But once he's separated from the routine of his daily life, a chance encounter helps him to realize just what, and whom, he's been missing.

Based on the extraordinary true story of Operation Anthropoid, the code name for the secret Czechoslovakian mission to assassinate Nazi SS officer Reinhard Heydrich. Heydrich, the main architect behind the Final Solution to the Jewish question, was the Reich's third in command and the leader of Nazi forces in Czechoslovakia.

An American insurance lawyer is recruited by the CIA to rescue an American pilot detained in the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

The following children's nonfiction titles were chosen as CPL librarians' favorites of 2016. Check them out today!

A picture book biography of mathematician Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer, by the award-winning author/illustrator Fiona Robinson.

Shares the childhood of the famous artist as she apprenticed in her family's tapestry shop and was inspired by her mother's work as a weaver.

Also available in: e-audiobook

In 2009, the award-winning journalist Rebecca Traister started All the Single Ladies --a book she thought would be a work of contemporary journalism--about the twenty-first century phenomenon of the American single woman. It was the year the proportion of American women who were married dropped below fifty percent and the median age of first marriages, which had remained between twenty and twenty-two years old for nearly a century (1890-1980), had risen dramatically to twenty-seven. But over the course of her vast research and more than a hundred interviews with academics and social scientists and prominent single women, Traister discovered a startling truth: the phenomenon of the single woman in America is not a new one.

Also available in: e-audiobook

One Sunday afternoon in Southern California, Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating's christening party uninvited. Before evening falls, he has kissed Franny's mother, Beverly--thus setting in motion the dissolution of their marriages and the joining of two families. Spanning five decades, Commonwealth explores how this chance encounter reverberates through the lives of the four parents and six children involved. 

This sequel to A Darker Shade of Magic is fantasy based in a world where alternate, parallel Londons exist. Library Journal states: "Schwab's picturesque and fascinating follow-up to A Darker Shade of Magic takes readers back to the worlds of alternate Londons, magic alive, dead, and resurrected, and characters who shine through all of their shadows. Fans of the first book won't be able to put this one down."

The following titles are CPL Librarians' choices for the best picture books published in 2016. Check them out today!

1 big salad by Juana Medina

Juana Medina's ingenious illustrations nearly pop off the page in her new counting book, ONE BIG SALAD. One avocado deer saunters across the spread, two radish mice scurry by, until finally ten watercress seahorses swim onto the scene - all of the ingredients in one big salad!

ABC dream by Kim Krans

This stunning and innovative alphabet picture book will dazzle little ones and engage the adults who share it with them! Each page is dedicated to a letter, and clever alliterations are packed into each ink-and-watercolor spread.

Marie Laure lives with her father in Paris and is blind by age six. Her father builds her a model of their neighborhood, so she can memorize it and navigate the real streets. When the Germans occupy Paris, they flee to Saint-Malo on the coast. In Germany, Werner grows up enchanted by a crude radio he finds. He becomes a master at building and fixing radios, which wins him a place with the Hitler Youth. Werner travels throughout Europe, and finally to Saint-Malo.

Simon Watson, a young librarian, lives alone in a house that is slowly crumbling toward the Long Island Sound. His parents are long dead. His mother, a circus mermaid who made her living by holding her breath, drowned in the very water his house overlooks. His younger sister, Enola, ran off to join the circus six years ago. One day, an old book arrives on Simon's doorstep: a log from the owner of a traveling carnival in the 1700s, whose reports include the drowning death of a circus mermaid. Since then, generations of "mermaids" in Simon's family have drowned - always on July 24, which is only weeks away. Simon becomes increasingly worried about his sister. Could there be a curse on Simon's family?

Furiously Happy is about "taking those moments when things are fine and making them amazing, because those moments are what make us who we are, and they're the same moments we take into battle with us when our brains declare war on our very existence. It's the difference between "surviving life" and "living life". It's the difference between being "sane" and being "furiously happy."This is a book about embracing everything that makes us who we are - the beautiful and the flawed - and then using it to find joy in fantastic and outrageous ways.

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