Jenna's Staff Picks


Showing 1 - 20 of 115  There are a total of 115 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "The 7 1/2 deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle"
Star rating for The 7 1/2 deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle
Average Rating:
3.7 stars
Description:
"The rules of Blackheath: Evelyn Harcastle will be murdered at 11:00p.m. There are eight days, and eight witnesses for you to inhabit. We will only let you escape once you tell us the name of the killer. Understood? Then let's begin... Every day Evelyn Hardcastle will die. Every day until Aiden Bishop can identify her killer and break the cycle. But every time the day begins again, Aiden wakes up in the body of a different guest. And some of his hosts...
Book cover for "The acrobat"
Star rating for The acrobat
Description:
"'Everyone wants to be Cary Grant,' mused the world's most famous leading man. 'Even I want to be Cary Grant.' Who was Cary Grant, really? Who was he meant to be? Who in the end did he want to become? It is 1959, the year of his greatest successes but also at the zenith of a charmed career, and the 55-year-old man who calls himself Cary Grant is on a deep journey into the self. Introduced to the wonders of LSD as part of his therapy at The Psychiatric...
Book cover for "Affluenza"
Star rating for Affluenza
Description:
We tried to warn you! The 2008 economic collapse proved how resilient and dangerous affluenza can be. This book can safely be called prophetic in showing how problems ranging from loneliness, endless working hours, and family conflict to rising debt, environmental pollution, and rampant commercialism are all symptoms of this global plague. The new edition traces the role overconsumption played in the Great Recession, discusses new ways to measure...
Book cover for "All good people here"
Star rating for All good people here
Average Rating:
3.6 stars
Description:
"Everyone from Wakarusa, Indiana, remembers the infamous case of January Jacobs, who was discovered in a ditch hours after her family awoke to find her gone. Margot Davies was six at the time, the same age as January--and they were next-door neighbors. In the twenty years since, Margot has grown up, moved away, become a big-city journalist-- but she's always been haunted by the fear that it could've been her. And the worst part is, January's killer...
Book cover for "All hallows"
Star rating for All hallows
Average Rating:
2.5 stars
Description:
"It's Halloween night, 1984, in Coventry, Massachusetts, and two families are unraveling. Up and down the street, secrets are being revealed, and all the while, mixed in with the trick-or-treaters of all ages, four children who do not belong are walking door to door, merging with the kids of Parmenter Road. Children in vintage costumes with faded, eerie makeup. They seem terrified, and beg the neighborhood kids to hide them away, to keep them safe...
Book cover for "And then there were none"
Star rating for And then there were none
Average Rating:
4.2 stars
Description:
A killer stalks a group of ten total strangers on an isolated island off the Devon coast, in a story of murder and retribution set to a sinister nursery rhyme.
Book cover for "Architects of an American landscape"
Star rating for Architects of an American landscape
Description:
"As the nation recovered from a cataclysmic war, two titans of design profoundly influenced how Americans came to interact with the built and natural world around them through their pioneering work in architecture and landscape design. Frederick Law Olmsted is widely revered as America's first and finest parkmaker and environmentalist, the force behind Manhattan's Central Park, Brooklyn's Prospect Park, Biltmore's parkland in Asheville, dozens of...
Book cover for "Astor"
Star rating for Astor
Average Rating:
3.9 stars
Description:
"From 1783, when German immigrant John Jacob Astor first arrived in the United States, until 2009, when Brooke Astor's son, Anthony Marshall, was convicted of defrauding his elderly mother, the Astor name occupied a unique place in American society. The family fortune, first made by a beaver trapping business that grew into an empire, was then amplified by holdings in Manhattan real estate. Over the ensuing generations, Astors ruled Gilded Age New...
Book cover for "Atomic habits"
Star rating for Atomic habits
Author:
Average Rating:
4.1 stars
Description:
James Clear presents strategies to form good habits, break bad ones, and master the tiny behaviors that help lead to an improved life.
Book cover for "Bird by bird"
Star rating for Bird by bird
Author:
Average Rating:
3.6 stars
Description:
A step-by-step guide to writing and managing the writer's life covers each portion of a written project, addresses such concerns as writer's block and getting published, and offers awareness and survival tips
Book cover for "Birnam Wood"
Star rating for Birnam Wood
Average Rating:
3.3 stars
Description:
"Booker winner Catton (The Luminaries) returns with a tragic eco-thriller of betrayed ideals and compromised loyalties involving a collective of guerilla gardeners in New Zealand. The group, Birnam Wood, sets its sights on a farm in Korowai National Park after a landslide maroons the isolated township of Thorndike, and three personalities vie for control. As matriarch Mira Bunting, 29, uses a series of aliases to scout and buy the land, her duplicity...
Book cover for "Black candle women"
Star rating for Black candle women
Average Rating:
2.7 stars
Description:
"A warm and wry family drama with a magical twist about four generations of Black women, a family curse, and one very complicated year of heartache, miscommunication, and learning to let go. Generations of Montrose women--Augusta, Victoria, Willow--have lived together in their quaint two-story bungalow in California for years. They keep to themselves, never venture far from home, and their collection of tinctures and spells is an unspoken bond between...
Book cover for "Braving the wilderness"
Star rating for Braving the wilderness
Average Rating:
3.8 stars
Description:
A life-changing book that uses new research to challenge old beliefs about belonging.
Book cover for "Bringing down the duke"
Star rating for Bringing down the duke
Average Rating:
4.3 stars
Description:
England, 1879. Annabelle Archer, the brilliant but destitute daughter of a country vicar, has earned herself a place among the first cohort of female students at the renowned University of Oxford. In return for her scholarship, she must support the rising women's suffrage movement. Her charge: recruit men of influence to champion their cause. Her target: Sebastian Devereux, the cold and calculating Duke of Montgomery who steers Britain's politics...
Book cover for "Case histories"
Star rating for Case histories
Series:
Average Rating:
3.7 stars
Description:
The first book in Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie Mysteries series, called "The best mystery of the decade" by Stephen King, finds private investigator Jackson Brodie following three seemingly unconnected family mysteries in Edinburg. Case one: A little girl goes missing in the night. Case two: A beautiful young office worker falls victim to a maniac's apparently random attack. Case three: A new mother finds herself trapped in a hell of her own making...
Book cover for "The chaos machine"
Star rating for The chaos machine
Author:
Average Rating:
3.3 stars
Description:
The gripping and galling inside story of how Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social networks preyed on psychological frailties to create the algorithms that drive everyday users to extreme opinions and, increasingly, extreme actions. The companies' founding tenets, combined with a blinkered focus on maximizing engagement, have led to a destabilized world for everyone.
Book cover for "The Christmas guest"
Star rating for The Christmas guest
Average Rating:
2.3 stars
Description:
Ashley Smith, an American art student in London for her junior year, was planning on spending Christmas alone, but a last-minute invitation from fellow student Emma Chapman brings her to Starvewood Hall, country residence of the Chapman family. The Cotswold manor house, festooned in pine boughs and crammed with guests for Christmas week, is a dream come true for Ashley shar mesmerized by the cozy, firelit house, the large family, and the charming...
Book cover for "Cinema speculation"
Star rating for Cinema speculation
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
"In addition to being among the most celebrated of contemporary filmmakers, Quentin Tarantino is possibly the most joyously infectious movie lover alive. For years he has touted in interviews his eventual turn to writing books about films. Now, with Cinema Speculation, the time has come, and the results are everything his passionate fans--and all movie lovers--could have hoped for. Organized around key American films from the 1970s, all of which he...
Book cover for "The Cloisters"
Star rating for The Cloisters
Average Rating:
3.7 stars
Description:
"When Ann Stilwell arrives in New York City, she expects to spend her summer working as a curatorial associate at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Instead she finds herself assigned to The Cloisters, a gothic museum and garden renowned for its medieval art collection and its group of enigmatic researchers studying the history of divination. Desperate to escape her painful past, Ann is happy to indulge the researchers' more outlandish theories about...
Book cover for "Come closer"
Star rating for Come closer
Author:
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
A recurrent, unidentifiable noise in her apartment. A memo to her boss that's replaced by obscene insults. Amanda--a successful architect in a happy marriage--finds her life going off kilter by degrees. She starts smoking again, and one night for no reason, without even the knowledge that she's doing it, she burns her husband with a cigarette. At night she dreams of a beautiful woman with pointed teeth on the shore of a blood-red sea. The new voice...