fathers and sons

It’s a tale as old as time: teens going to parties far beyond their years. For this Johnson County reader, the interest in Jason Reynold's When I Was the Greatest lies in the microclimate of Bed-Stuy in New York City.

For Ali and his friends Needles and Noodles, an invitation to one of MoMo’s infamous parties must be accepted, for it may never come again. At fifteen, the boys don’t belong there, and they realize it in short order when a fight breaks out and they all, but especially Ali, end up on the most wanted list of some dangerous dudes.

The ensuing events bring Ali and his family closer

When Thomas Avery’s son, Daniel, is killed in the Pyrenees, Thomas leaves California to retrieve Daniel’s body.  Once he gets to France, Thomas discovers that Daniel was walking the Camino de Santiago, which is a pilgrimage that is, at its roots, spiritual but is taken for many other reasons.  For his own personal motives, which are both glaringly obvious and maddeningly discreet, Thomas decides to make the pilgrimage.

It felt as if the movie swooped in and folded itself around me.  The scenery was absorbing, Martin Sheen played a convincing and mesmerizing grief-stricken father and the music

When your first novel sells about fifteen million copies across the world, has been the number one bestseller in about 20 countries, has been translated into 36 languages, and gets made into a movie, starring, produced and directed by Robert Redford, is there a point to trying again? Seriously, if you were Nicholas Evans, author of The Horse Whisperer would you really think you could do it again?

Luckily for readers everywhere, Evans did try again. In each subsequent novel Evans succeeds in creating characters and stories that, while very different from Grace, her family, Pilgrim, and Tom

Master of the DeltaIn the early 1950s, Jack Branch returns to his home town of Lakeland to teach at the the local high school as his father did before him.   The Branchs are the aristocracy of this southern community and Jack has attended some the finest private schools and universities.   The Branchs see teaching  as the "noblesse oblige " to the community that has been the family home for more than a hundred years.  Jack is challenged by his  unmotivated students and attempts to engage them by introducing a course on evil.  He peppers his lectures with examples of horrid deeds from the past