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What began as an exercise to work through daunting experiences would eventually become this powerful collection of essays about understanding Asperger Syndrome. Finding Kansas captures Aaron Likens' introspective journey from awkward early teens to roller-coaster 20s and onward to an empowering future.

To Aaron, Kansas represents a place where he is safe and confident. (Believe it or not, he's not from Kansas.) He was diagnosed with Aspeger's as a young man, so writing became a way for him to tease out how the disorder had played a role in his early behaviors and interactions. He analyzes

Sarah battles a crazy disease, the kind of mysterious disease with no definitive end. It’s a disease that requires a central line (a catheter placed into a large vein in the neck), the kind of disease that attacks nerves and turns the body into a battleground.

And while all these things are very critical in this memoir, the most important element is how the disease is presented to the reader. This book may be comprised of poems threaded with angst, humor and despair or it could be a teetering castle of prose blocks. Or perhaps it’s one long essay ravaged by the disease itself. The way this

I've been a fan of Amanda Palmer, her music and her personality, for a while now. I admire how open, honest, brash, and brave she is. The Art of Asking is based on a TED talk she gave in 2013, expanded here to talk about her life as an artist and musician along with musings on why it's important to ask for help, why we often find it difficult to ask, and why sometimes asking for help doesn't get us what we asked for. (If you listen to the audiobook, you also get Amanda singing with her ukulele and some bonus songs by her and some of her friends.)

This is one of those books that smacked me

Woodrell does an admirable job painting realistic, detailed, and vibrant characters.  Alma Dunahew works as a maid in West Table, Missouri for a wealthy family.  After her sister, along with 42 members of the town, are killed in an explosion at the local dance hall, Alma spends her life campaigning for and championing the truth.  This novel about a town ripped apart by tragedy, and the effect this tragedy has on the town throughout multiple generations, echoes former greats like Winesburg, Ohio and The Scarlet Letter.  I personally found the non-linear chronology sometimes hard to follow, but

Teeth, claws, horns. These are animal defenses we’re familiar with. What about slime? Toxic explosions? Blood shooting from an eye? Learn about these and other totally cool and utterly gross ways that animals protect themselves in Rebecca Johnson’s When Lunch Fights Back: Wickedly Clever Animal Defenses.

This is a short, intriguing book for older children and anyone interested in fun (and rather disgusting) facts about animals.

Rebecca Johnson has written numerous science books for children that are entertaining as well as informative, such as Zombie Makers: True Stories of Nature’s Undead a

A Hundred Pieces of Me is a bittersweet and inspiring story of loss, love, forgiveness, and finding what is important in life. Gina Bellamy has been through many struggles, and newly single, finds herself on her own. A divorcee and cancer survivor, Gina just wants to rebuild her life after her marriage falls apart. Starting from scratch in a tiny apartment, she decides to keep only one hundred things; one hundred pieces of herself. Dog-lovers will love the part that Buzz, Gina’s adopted rescue greyhound, plays in her path to healing. I highly recommend this book, and look forward to reading

Remember that time your Dad told you the implant in your brain didn’t just control your seizures, but that it had “something extra”? Me neither. But it’s a day Owen Gray will never forget.

You see, Owen is a medical Amp. Amps have Neural Autofocus Brain Implants; Reggies have none. Doctors have been implanting people young and old for eight years to cure things like ADD, Downs Syndrome, and traumatic brain injury. These implants irreversibly change neural circuits, and some Reggies now claim Amps are less-than-human. Discrimination and targeted hate-crimes ensue. Add in a zealous Senator, and

Following The Hidden Man and Breach of Trust, The Wrong Man is third in the Jason Kolarich mystery series. To help out a colleague, Kolarich agrees to defend a homeless Iraqi war vet on a charge of murder, fully expecting he will only be going through the motions. However, the more he digs into the case, the more he thinks his client is innocent. There is plenty of legal maneuvering but it doesn’t hinder the plot from moving along. This thriller is well paced, humorous and entertaining!

Evelyn Bucknow is at the center of everything. From her vantage point, the ten year old narrator of local author Laura Moriatry’s richly nuanced novel, The Center of Everything, sees all sides. She lives smack in the center of the United States with her single mother and disabled brother in a cheap apartment outside small-town Kerrville, Kansas. As she grows into a college-bound young adult, Evelyn witnesses the battle between her compassionately rebellious but immature mother and her loyal and stable but judgmental grandmother.

Escorting her mother to sign up for food stamps, Evelyn worries

William Styron was already an accomplished, award-winning author by the mid-1980s when he suffered a devastating episode of clinical depression. His novels The Confessions of Nat Turner and Sophie’s Choice had made him famous and respected in the literary world. Meryl Streep won an Academy Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of the protagonist in the film version of Sophie’s Choice. To someone who had never experienced clinical depression, Styron must have appeared on top of the world.

Styron’s descent into severe depression, for which he was eventually hospitalized, is chronicled in his

Two Serpents Rise, the second book in Max Gladstone's Craft Sequence, can be read independently of the other books, although I'm glad I read this after the first, Three Parts Dead. Both are great, but I liked Two Serpents Rise a wee bit more. I found the characters a little more developed and the plot a little more complex than Three Parts Dead. And I'm in awe of the way Gladstone melds Hardboiled Detective with Baroque Urban Fantasy, making a delicious mix of razor-sharp banter, knight-in-tarnished-armor thriller, poetic description, weird magic, and ornate worldbuilding.

In a world as

Having read all the Little House books many, many times, I was very excited when I heard about Pioneer Girl: the Annotated Autobiography. I would get to read the true story behind the beloved fictional narrative.

The book was full of surprises. First, it was much larger than I was anticipating—it would make a lovely coffee table book. Next, I discovered from the introduction that Laura Ingalls Wilder’s daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, played a huge part in the editing and publishing of the Little House Books, something I had never known. Finally, while it was enjoyable to read how closely the

Falling into Place is the story of Liz Emerson. Liz has just driven her car off an icy road and tumbled down a cliff. Everyone believes it was accidental. It wasn't. Liz planned her suicide in such a way that no one would know that she actually wanted to die. Even her best friends didn't know how unhappy she was, how much she loathed herself and her life. Liz is the pinnacle of popular at her high school. She is THE beautiful, mean girl. Liz has left immeasurable ruined reputations, relationships and lives in her wake. Some she has ruined through ignorance and self-centeredness, some she has

Molly is driving back, but she doesn't know from where. And she doesn't know to where.  All she knows is that she should be in school, but she's in her car instead. Suddenly she sees a motorcycle speeding up behind her. Somehow she knows that he is coming for her. She passes through the intersection as the light turns red. The motorcycle keeps coming; it runs the red light. A truck enters the intersection, catching the back tire of the motorcycle, sending is spinning.  The rider flies through the air, over Molly's car and lands on the asphalt right in front of her. She brakes, screaming. She

At the age of four, Mili was married to 12-year-old Virat Rathod. Now, twenty years later, Mili is still waiting for her husband to show up. In the meantime, Mili has traveled from India to Michigan in order to further her education to make herself a better wife. Little does she know, Virat has a life of his own. When that life is threatened, Virat sends his younger brother, Samir, to find Mili in America so she can sign papers annulling the marriage. However, the initial meeting between Samir and Mili does not go well and leaves each dependent on the other for reasons both transparent and

—An Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter novel—

Before there was Sookie Stackhouse, before the Twilight movies and Vampire Diaries, there was the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series. It is one of my favorite vampire series and, although this book is #22 in the saga, I still found it engaging enough to tough out reading 569 pages in a week.

 Affliction has everything: vampires, werewolves, zombies, ghouls and more.  Anita is a serious necromancer and vampire hunter living in St. Louis, but she never really mentions which side of the state line, Missouri or Illinois. Then throw in a love affair between

I love superheroes and I like them colorful, weird, larger than life, heroic and good, inspirational and insightful. I don't generally go for deconstructions of or dark takes on the genre. But I liked Vicious. A LOT. It strips down the idea that people with superpowers see themselves as above us mere mortals and it tears apart the whole Good vs Evil, black-and-white tradition of superheroes and supervillains, but it does it with compelling, charismatic characters and an exciting, enthralling plot.

Victor Vale and Eli Cardale are college roommates and best friends who become fascinated with

“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”  Most people know that these words were said by Neil Armstrong, the first human to set foot on the moon. Many books have been written and movies made about the early years of space travel and the first astronauts. Except for old articles in LIFE magazine, much less has been written about the wives of those astronauts.  Lily Koppel has addressed this lack of information in her book The Astronaut Wives Club. The book describes how the wives were expected to be the “perfect American wife.” Their own hopes, dreams and goals were to be

A group novel? Sounds like an exercise in egos, inner-circles, and bad writing to me. But I’d heard Kevin Rabas read his poetry, and read a little bit on my own as well. So, despite my reservations, I gave Green Bike a try and was pleasantly surprised.

Rabas, Graves, and Simmons started Green Bike as a private Facebook page using a green bike as a McGuffin. Rabas and Graves tell interweaving stories of girlfriends and boyfriends, lovers and professors. It's a slice of life in a college town and it’s a wonder, really. While Simmons' story remains independent of the other two, it is no less

What would happen if you had a mole of moles?  Or if everybody on planet Earth decided to jump up and down at the same time?  How high up would you have to drop a steak for it to be cooked by the time it hit the ground?  Former NASA scientist Randall Munroe has been amusing the internet with his stick figure drawings since 2005, mostly on the popular website xkcd.com, but the popular comics website is also home to a column where he answers hypothetical (and very often insane) questions about physics, space, chemistry and just about everything else.  

A compendium of the answers has now been

Ten strangers have come together on a remote English island under false pretenses. Each one bears a dark secret that they have hidden from the world. Stranded on the island and as the guests begin to die one by one, they discover that someone in the company has uncovered those secrets and is willing to make them pay.

Before this classic plot became prominent in both literature and film, it was brought to the forefront by Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None. Previously titled Ten Little Indians (changed and edited to make it more PC), it is not like any of the other Agatha Christie

Continuing the story of Celia West following the death of her superhero father and the retirement of the superheroes of her beloved city, Celia continues to look out for the best interests of her city and has carefully been watching the grandchildren of the superheroes waiting to see if there is a new generation of powerful superheroes in the making.  Two of these new superheroes may be her own daughters Anna and Bethy but so far they aren't exhibiting any signs of superpowers or at least they're not sharing with her if they are developing powers. 

Meanwhile, Anna is having trouble figuring

Leonard Marnham, an engineer employed by the British post office, has lived an extraordinarily sheltered life when he arrives in 1950s Berlin to work on a collaborative project between the British and Americans to tap into Soviet phone lines. His new job and colleagues, and living on his own for the first time, open him up to a wide variety of new tastes and experiences. As befits the Cold War setting,both his work and personal lives also consist of complex webs of secrecy, fear, mistrust, and paranoia. A British scientist even convinces him to try his hand at spying on their American partners

What more could you ask for in a book about people who love words and communication and the preservation of that communication? When I started reading The Word Exchange I had no access to a dictionary and definitely needed one. I almost gave up right away but decided to pick my adult children's brains and see if I could continue.  Nope, they didn't know those words either, so I continued to read.  I was fascinated by how the book drew me in and made me want to learn the meaning behind the words, but I definitely felt lost a time or two. The book begins with the story of Ana and her father

I am by no means a religious person. But I do appreciate spirituality and love people who actively live their proclaimed faith. Having read a spiritual memoir or two that didn’t quite deliver, I approached Mercy in the City somewhat tentatively. It turned out to be as surprisingly wonderful as I was skeptical.

“In a city with twenty-four-hour stores, eight million people, and infinite possibilities…” Weber chooses, in addition to giving up alcohol and sweets, to complete all the Corporal Works of Mercy for Lent.  Yes, in the heart of New York City a young practicing Catholic chooses mercy

Readers who first became aware of Emma Donoghue via her blockbuster 2010 novel Room might imagine that her current offering, Frog Music, is a break from form. In fact, it's Room that's more of an anomaly in the author's canon. Donoghue has often crafted her novels by fictionalizing and elaborating on scant historical records to create richly detailed historical novels. Her first major success was 2001's Slammerkin, which was inspired by a one paragraph account in a Welsh historical encyclopedia of a girl who was executed (hanged and then burned!) for murder in 1763. When asked why she'd done

I read How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read with my book club and, full disclosure, I was the only one who liked it.  Which made for a rousing discussion!

Author Pierre Bayard is a professor of French literature at a French university.  So, he’s French and his book has been translated into English for our reading pleasure.  Professor Bayard’s prose is academic.  He uses well-cited excerpts from classical literature to defend his points.  He talks about Themes and The Other and the ways readers interact with The Other, internally and externally.  While I generally read for diversion, I

Book Two of the Cousins O'Dwyer Trilogy finds the cousins and their friends planning their next move against the evil Cabahn.  This time the story focuses on Connor and his sister's best friend, Meara.  Following a surprise kiss which awakens unacknowledged feelings the two have for each other, things get interesting as each tries to deny the feelings they have and Cabahn uses their emerging romance to try to come between them.  Will love triumph over evil?  Don't miss this installment of  Shadow Spell. Also check out  Book Three, Blood Magick, which wraps up this trilogy.

This is the story of Paul Rosenberg, one of pre-World War II France’s most influential and knowledgeable art dealers, as told by his granddaughter, Anne Sinclair. Rosenberg was hailed as a pioneer in the world of modern art, exhibiting artists such as Picasso, Matisse, Braque and Leger at his Paris gallery. With the German occupation of France in 1942, Rosenberg, as a Jew, was forced to flee France, leaving his artwork behind to be confiscated by the Nazis. The story is historically significant, but it is also interesting to see the man and his life discovered and revealed through the eyes of

I have read every book in Daniel Silva’s Gabriel Allon series. Every time I read one, I wonder about the events that led to Gabriel being recruited by the Israeli intelligence service—the murder of 11 Israeli athletes by a PLO faction called Black September at the 1972 Munich Olympics. My curiosity led me to the book One Day in September, the facts behind the fiction.

The book describes not only the events that occurred at the Olympics but also the background of the Black September group, why and how it came into being, and a little of the Arab-Israeli history.  We are also given glimpses