Jordan

Bruna Guedes

Husain Kothari

FRNK

Uendi Prifti

Abdul Hasib

Loughlin Sullivan

Delaney Knopp

Auriel W

Blake Molmen

Dani Shahar

Luis Javier Campos nieto

After everything ends... who will you become?As the survivors continued to fight for their lives, seemingly insurmountable challenges push them to their limits. With every breath they take, their very existence is threatened.The search for safety, family, and food is a never-ending quest. If there is a safe-haven, will they get there before time runs out?The clock is ticking. How much time do they have before every last bit of hope is gone?

What if you woke up to the end of the world?  After losing her low paying job, Gwen Bell didn’t know how she was going to pay for her next months rent. But one morning, when she wakes up terribly ill, her life takes a terrifying turn she couldn’t have ever imagined.  The power is out. Her phone doesn’t work. And the sky is blood red.  When Jamie, the good-looking neighbor she barely knows stops by, she quickly learns that something has gone horribly wrong. Together Gwen and Jamie need to find a way to survive until help arrives. But what if there isn’t anyone out there to help?  Red Sky is a spine-tingling apocalyptic read that will have you turning pages long past your bedtime and worried about what could happen when you wake.

The Biodome has been liberated, the slaves have been freed, and a new democratic government has been formed. Yet tensions between the Pit and the Dome have never been higher. With the disappearance of Senator Jack Kenner, the old regime makes a political move to reestablish their government.  In the third book of the Sunset Rising trilogy, Sunny O’Donnell is determined to find Jack and bring him home. With the high-tech assistance of Doc, Sunny and her friends, Summer and Reyes, team up with the Nation to set out into a lawless post apocalyptic world. But as the ruthlessness of the recruiters unfolds amidst the discovery of betrayals within their own group, friends will become enemies and enemies will become friends on a journey that will lead to a New World Order.

Plunged into a free for all lifestyle with survival of the fittest the only law, it would be easy for Cole Evans and his family to remain in short-term survival mode, living in the moment. But, Cole refuses to lose his conscience—his humanity—and won't stop fighting for a better future.  After surviving a harsh Wisconsin winter only months after a lethal virus wiped out most of the population, strangers arrive from the East. They bring news that pushes them to leave the island and Cole leads his family on a dangerous, but necessary trek across the country to a new home and hopes of a permanent settlement. Their destination: Nevada and the Hoover Dam.  

A new threat emerges…  …from an unexpected source.  Lives hang in the balance.  As Maddie, Zack, and their group struggle to secure the cabin, the community grapples to find justice in a lawless world when a girl goes missing.  Amid turmoil and bloodshed, Maddie learns evil comes in all shapes and sizes.  No one can be trusted.  After Maddie and Zack find old enemies nearby, a decision must be made—hunker down and wait, or go on the offensive.  Which would you choose?  Filled with grief and guilt, Maddie must find a way to move forward and survive. As lives are lost will this become too much to bear?  On the road to reunite with Maddie and Zack, Beth’s trip takes a twisted turn. She won’t let a deviant group prevent her from reaching her children.  You will love Turmoil, the third heart-stopping post-apocalyptic thriller in the Days of Want series.  Get it now!

Family is all that matters when friend becomes foe—and the stakes are survival.  The world has become a dangerous place for Shane McDonald and his family since the solar storm wiped out the power grid. Tensions flare when it grows clear the dire situation will be prolonged and most are ill-prepared. Even the friendly small town of his prepper mother-in-law has drawn unwanted attention as word gets around about sharing their supply stores. And strangers begin to infiltrate the once peaceful Georgia community.  All Shane can think about is where his wife and son ended up in all the chaos as the hours stretch into days since they last communicated. Jodi is far too trusting a soul, her desire to help the downtrodden a dangerous commodity among desperate and increasingly hostile citizens.  But Jodi isn’t without resources when push comes to shove. When her son and cancer-stricken brother come under attack, she finds the strength to do what’s necessary to ensure their safety—and inadvertently draws the attention of a menacing gang. Now they must stay one step ahead of their pursuers in a race to reunite with family.  Before all hell rains down on them.  This novel contains violence.

A looming threat. A reporter on the edge.  Lainey starts her day like any other, preparing to host the midday news on a local TV station. When her younger sister calls, spouting off about an imminent terror attack, she’s skeptical. Midge might be a top-notch computer hacker, but that doesn’t mean she’s a reliable source.  An entire country thrown into chaos.  Keith takes his dog for a run and heads into work, expecting an uneventful eight-hour shift behind a video camera. When his ex-girlfriend busts into the boss’s office with news of not only a massive blackout, but potential nuclear bombs, he doesn’t believe it. A glimpse at her sister’s information changes everything.  Could you chase the story despite the risks?  Lainey and Keith are thrown together in a race-against-time to uncover the truth and broadcast the facts to the American people. They’ll have to trust each other, their instincts, and their wits to survive.  The attack is only the beginning.  Bear the Brunt is book one in Nuclear Survival: Western Strength, a post-apocalyptic thriller trilogy following ordinary people struggling to survive when a nuclear attack on the United States plunges the nation into chaos.

Don’t miss the third installment in Tarah Benner’s riveting dystopian saga!  When Lark, Soren, and Axel disappear from Kingsville, Bernie learns that her friends have been captured by Homeland Security. They’re being detained at Cheyenne Mountain Complex, an impenetrable government fortress where prisoners have been known to disappear.  Homeland Security wants information on GreenSeed, but Soren is still reeling from his discovery in Kingsville. He’s combative and inconsolable, while Axel is determined to block the government at every turn. Lark is desperate to negotiate their freedom, but she doesn’t know whom she can trust.  When the agents come to Lark with an offer, she’ll have to make a choice that carries monumental consequences: Risk her freedom in exchange for Soren’s and Axel’s, or sentence them all to a life behind bars.

Weaving a tapestry of fact and fiction, Sara Donati's epic novel sweeps us into another time and place...and into the heart of a forbidden affair between an unconventional Englishwoman and an American frontiersman.It is December of 1792. Elizabeth Middleton leaves her comfortable English estate to join her family in a remote New York mountain village. It is a place unlike any she has ever experienced. And she meets a man unlike any she has ever encountered - a white man dressed like a Native American, Nathanial Booner, known to the Mohawk people as Between-Two-Lives. Determined to provide schooling for all the children of the village, she soons finds herself locked in conflict with the local slave owners as well as her own family. Interweaving the fate of the Mohawk Nation with the destiny of two lovers, Sara Donati's compelling novel creates a complex, profound, passionate portrait of an emerging America.

The Appalachian Trail stretches from Georgia to Maine and covers some of the most breathtaking terrain in America—majestic mountains, silent forests, sparking lakes. If you’re going to take a hike, it’s probably the place to go. And Bill Bryson is surely the most entertaining guide you’ll find. He introduces us to the history and ecology of the trail and to some of the other hardy (or just foolhardy) folks he meets along the way—and a couple of bears. Already a classic, A Walk in the Woods  will make you long for the great outdoors (or at least a comfortable chair to sit and read in).

At one time Corrie ten Boom would have laughed at the idea that there would ever be a story to tell. For the first fifty years of her life nothing at all out of the ordinary had ever happened to her. She was an old-maid watchmaker living contentedly with her spinster sister and their elderly father in the tiny Dutch house over their shop. Their uneventful days, as regulated as their own watches, revolved around their abiding love for one another. However, with the Nazi invasion and occupation of Holland, a story did ensue. Corrie ten Boom and her family became leaders in the Dutch Underground, hiding Jewish people in their home in a specially built room and aiding their escape from the Nazis. For their help, all but Corrie found death in a concentration camp. The Hiding Place is their story.

Will the dam hold?Julie Wallace has always wanted to write. Trying to escape the Great Depression, Julie’s father buys The Alderton Sentinel, a small-town newspaper in flood-prone Alderton, Pennsylvania, and moves his family there. As flash floods ominously increase, Julie’s investigative reporting uncovers secrets that could endanger the entire community.Julie, the newspaper, and her family are thrown into a perilous standoff with the owners of the steel mills as they investigate the conditions of the steelworkers. Battle lines are drawn between the steel mill owners and their immigrant laborers. As The Sentinel and Julie take on a more aggressive role in reforming these conditions in their community, seething tensions come to a head.When a devastating tragedy follows a shocking revelation, Julie’s courage and strength are tested. Will truth and justice win, or will Julie lose everything she holds dear?

This astonishing true story is the tale of a young American man who was sent to the Soviet Union with his parents by the Ford Motor Company to set up an auto plant. He was eventually thrown into Soviet prisons and could not return to America until forty-five years later. During his life in and out of Russian prisons, he met and fell in love with a beautiful Russian gymnast who followed him into exile and lived with him and their child for a year in Siberia, in a caved chopped out under the ice. Theirs is the compelling story of a romance destined to thrive under even the most desperate conditions. It was 1938 when Victor Herman was inexplicably thrown into prison, after he had become a celebrity in the Soviet Union, having won acclaim as "the Lindbergh of Russia" for his flying and world-record-breaking parachute jumps. But what happened to him was a common nightmare during the Stalin years: those who survived imprisonment and torture were sent north to hard labor in the icy forests and mines, or into exile. Victor was one of the few who survived ~ From Back Cover

When Germany invaded Poland, Stuka bombers devastated Warsaw—and the city's zoo along with it. With most of their animals dead, zookeepers Jan and Antonina Zabinski began smuggling Jews into empty cages. Another dozen "guests" hid inside the Zabinskis' villa, emerging after dark for dinner, socializing, and, during rare moments of calm, piano concerts. Jan, active in the Polish resistance, kept ammunition buried in the elephant enclosure and stashed explosives in the animal hospital. Meanwhile, Antonina kept her unusual household afloat, caring for both its human and its animal inhabitants—otters, a badger, hyena pups, lynxes.With her exuberant prose and exquisite sensitivity to the natural world, Diane Ackerman engages us viscerally in the lives of the zoo animals, their keepers, and their hidden visitors. She shows us how Antonina refused to give in to the penetrating fear of discovery, keeping alive an atmosphere of play and innocence even as Europe crumbled around her.

An unforgettable story of courage and romance. Will Valancy Stirling ever escape her strict family and find true love?Valancy Stirling is 29, unmarried, and has never been in love. Living with her overbearing mother and meddlesome aunt, she finds her only consolation in the "forbidden" books of John Foster and her daydreams of the Blue Castle--a place where all her dreams come true and she can be who she truly wants to be. After getting shocking news from the doctor, she rebels against her family and discovers a surprising new world, full of love and adventures far beyond her most secret dreams.

A moving love story set in the Canadian wilderness, Mrs. Mike is a classic tale that has enchanted millions of readers worldwide. It brings the fierce, stunning landscape of the Great North to life—and tenderly evokes the love that blossoms between Sergeant Mike Flannigan and beautiful young Katherine Mary O'Fallon.

This book needed a lot of editing. It was repetitious and monotonous. Her voice did not seem very genuine. It's kind of hard to explain, but sometimes it just didn't seem like a woman's point of view. For example, she rarely/never? talked about the emotional relationship with her husband. Instead, even when she was starving and fighting exposure and exhaustion in the extreme, every time she thought of her husband, it was sexual. The way she immediately started fantasizing about Chief Wildcat was very Harlequinesque. Also, in some parts the way she thought about her children didn't seem natural--forced or too theatrical. On the other hand, I really identified with her experience of childbirth. Her reasoning for escaping was very believable and the story of her survival is compelling, but to read every single detail of her ordeal was not enjoyable. This book ended up being more of a page-skipper (I wanted to know how it ended, but didn't want to read to it) rather than a page-turner.

A poignant coming-of-age novel set in a Welsh mining town, Richard Llewellyn's How Green Was My Valley is a paean to a more innocent age, published in Penguin Modern ClassicsGrowing up in a mining community in rural South Wales, Huw Morgan is taught many harsh lessons - at the kitchen table, at Chapel and around the pit-head. Looking back on the hardships of his early life, where difficult days are faced with courage but the valleys swell with the sound of Welsh voices, it becomes clear that there is nowhere so green as the landscape of his own memory. An immediate bestseller on publication in 1939, How Green Was My Valley quickly became one of the best-loved novels of the twentieth century. Poetic and nostalgic, it is an elegy to a lost world.Richard Dafydd Vivian Llewellyn Lloyd (1906-1983), better known by his pen name Richard Llewellyn, claimed to have been born in St David's, Pembrokeshire, Wales; after his death he was discovered to have been born of Welsh parents in Hendon, Middlesex. His famous first novel How Green Was My Valley (1939) was begun in St David's from a draft he had written in India, and was later adapted into an Oscar-winning film by director John Ford. None But the Lonely Heart, his second novel, was published in 1943, and subsequently made into a film starring Cary Grant and Ethel Barrymore. As well as novels including Green, Green My Valley Now (1975) and I Stand on a Quiet Shore (1982), Llewellyn wrote two highly successful plays, Poison Pen and NooseIf you enjoyed How Green Was My Valley, you might like Barry Hines' A Kestrel for a Knave, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.'Vivid, eloquent, poetical, glowing with an inner flame of emotion'The Times Literary Supplement

French writer, politician, diplomat and historian (1768-1848)

This semester I am requiring my students to read The True Story of Hansel and Gretel, a novel takes place in Poland during World War II. The good news is that my students love the book; in fact, several of them are reading ahead.	The shocking fact, the bad news, is what they don’t know. It is not just knowledge of history that they lack; it is knowledge of basic geography.	God bless PowerPoint and blackboard.	To be fair, my students do ask intelligent questions, yet the lack of basic knowledge is shocking. At times, I feel like I am teaching a culture and history course in addition to a reading skills course.	Now, I don’t think it is the students’ fault. I think the fault lies with the schools as well as parents and special interest groups. Here’s why.	There is a group called PABBIS (Parents against Bad Books in Schools). I disagree with them on so many different levels, but their website does have two good features. It actually quotes the material they find objectionable, and it has a complete list of banned and challenged books (as recent as 4-5 years ago).	The Devil’s Arithmetic is on that list by the way.	Everything by Stephen King makes the list. Everything by Dahl, Blume, Block. There are a few Black Stallion books on the list as is Black Beauty, Harry Potter, His Dark Materials, Three to Tango, The Diary of Anne Frank, The Lorax, and Shakespeare.	In other words, pretty much anything good.	Lately, history and science text books have been subjected to strange changes (i.e. as in Texas) and warning labels (usually about evolution).	In terms banning and challenging books, I might under the idea if the book was being assigned at an inappropriate grade level, say Beloved to first graders. Why an exceptional first grader might not have a problem with such a book, there are several things wrong, in general, about such assignment, least of which is the subject matter. Yet, I have never heard of such an assignment. Age appropriateness isn’t really the issue. It seems to rest on what might offend any group, anywhere.	Take, for instance, The Diary of Anne Frank. This book has been banned, challenged, and rejected by parents and text book committees because of the sex and tragedy of the story.	Raisin in the Sun has been banned and challenged because it’s pornographic. (Can someone please, please show me where?).	I can certainly see why The Devil’s Arithmetic is banned. It is the mention of a wedding.	Blatantly heterosexual.	Okay, it’s most likely due to the violence (it’s about the Holocaust) and the ending. Romeo and Juliet was dissed by a teacher who said it was a blatant endorsement of heterosexual love (so I guess teen suicide is okay).	BUT, Yolen’s magnificent book is exactly the type of book that should be used in schools.	Let’s face it, the wrong text book and/or the wrong teacher can make history very boring, and sometimes people just don’t like learning about history for a variety of reasons. This is the reason why good historical fiction should be used in schools. A good historical novel can get a reader interested in a period, in an event, in a person. This true, to a degree, of such less accurate work than The Devil’s Arithmetic. 300 caused some people to become interested in the Spartans, Titanic in the actual ship. In terms of books, vampire novels and historical fiction, such as The Other Boleyn Girl also cause readers to become interested in the actual events or myths that the novel is based on. Curiosity and a desire to learn are fueled by a variety of things; interest is one of them.	The Devil’s Arithmetic is precisely the type of book that for young readers can help history seem more real and, perhaps, get a reader interested in history. Yolen does not talk down to her readers, her main character is sympathetic, an older sibling, and because Yolen doesn’t pull her punches, it is a real history, not a feel good history. This makes the story far more compelling and interesting. The story is told actively and quickly. Words are not wasted. The reader learns but is not lectured to and screamed at.	Because of this reality and vividness, parents object to the story, and this raises the question of whether teachers and parents should sugarcoat history. It’s true that are plenty of novels and movies that present history in a more flattering light (look at the perfect teeth, the clean bodies, the small pox vaccination scars). A reader can quite easily find it in any average romance novel. Such writing does serve a sense of purpose, escapism, and there is nothing wrong with that.	But that is not education.	Is this what parents want a school to be?	I hope not. I suppose it is easy for me to comment on appropriateness and the evil of banning because I don’t have a child, and I was raised in a house where you were encouraged to read what you wanted. I see, however, the effects of banning and challenging which are a total lack of knowledge or, worse, a lack of interest about a subject because the subject has been taught in such a sterile environment, so devoid of any color or shading, where everything is the color and taste of sugar; where everyone in the world has always treated everyone with respect and love, where women always had the right to vote, and slavery only existed in North and South America, and was totally destroyed by the American Civil War.	Good literature, of which The Devil’s Arithmetic is a prime example forces its readers to examine their own knowledge and lack of knowledge, forces readers to think about their own responses, notions, and stereotypes. Good literature teaches or enlightens the reader even if the reader already knows. It is a bond between writer, book, and reader that is no less real than those ties of family and society that provide the excuse for book banning.

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