This is just the kind of book that would have made my mother’s eyes twinkle with laughter. Ernest Pettigrew, a widower, is the quintessential old school British gentleman — sardonic, quick in wit, and impeccable in manners. Ensconced in the village of Edgecomb St. Mary in Sussex, England, he somehow never imagined that his "ossified existence of sixty-eight years" would take a delightful turn with Mrs. Ali, a dignified, well-read Pakistani shop keeper who recently lost her husband. Mrs. Ali and Major Pettigrew are not expecting much from life at this stage in their lives and this newfound friendship is something altogether promising and delightful — if not surprising. In this village, where you may be judged for the cookies that you bake or the climatis that you grow, their attraction is getting unwarranted attention from both their neighbors and families. After all, the class delineation still haunts England, much more than the remnants of their former colonies.

Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, a debut novel by Helen Simonson, is just a delightful read. One gets a feeling that Simonson gleefully created all these endearing characters (even the nasty ones) and let them loose in this village. There is Roger, the Major’s pretentious son, and his American girlfriend who just wants to cash in on the real estate developments of the village. When the Major objected to his son buying a cottage from a racist, Roger commented, "It’s called the real world. If we refused to do business with the morally questionable, the deal volume would drop in half and the good guys like us would end up poor. Then where would we all be?" To which the Major replied, "On a nice dry spit of land known as the moral high ground."

Simonson’s elegant writings with splashes of satire and humor make this book a refreshing summer read. It certainly makes us believe in the possibilities of love, of romance no matter how late in life, and of the transforming power of courtesy and kindness.

Cristina J. Lozare – Central Library

The Guild is an online series written by Felicia Day that premiered in July 2007. Season 4 episodes are currently being released weekly on MSN Video. Initially developed as a sitcom pilot, the show was instead produced to be shown online, with short episodes combining to tell a complete story. The Guild tells the story of the Knights of Good, an online-gaming guild who collaborate in an unnamed massively-multiplayer online role-playing game. We quickly learn from observing Codex (Day) that the game is the guild members’ alternate, preferred reality. The real world, though, has an annoying habit of intruding, and the first season begins when Zaboo (Sandeep Parikh) appears at Codex’s door under the impression that they’re dating. Things are really turned upside-down when Bladezz (Vincent Caso) behaves badly in-game, and the guild arranges an unprecedented real-world meeting at Cheesybeards to discuss the matter. The drama, tension, and abundant humor in the show develop as we watch the group attempt to function and interact to resolve their problems in the real world.

Originally produced as a web series, and released in six-minute online episodes, seasons one and two of the show are packaged together on DVD, with extras including audio commentaries, script PDFs, and interviews with the cast and crew. The production and marketing of The Guild has broken new ground, with Day and others using technology to forge direct connections with the audience. Felicia Day is active on Twitter (@FeliciaDay), and has produced a number of special videos to bring attention to the show, including Do You Want To Date My Avatar, a prelude to the release of season three. The Guild is one of the media highlights of the past couple of years — a can’t-miss experience! Watch seasons one and two on DVD and catch up with season three and the new season four online.

John Jewitt – Savage Branch

Teen summer readers highly recommend these titles:

American Born Chinese by Gene Yang
This book is a graphic novel, in which there are many different stories going on in one book. There are humans, monkey, monsters and much more. Read the book to find out. I really liked this book, because it was a comic, which made it easy and fun to read. This book is great!

- Irma M.

Princess of the Midnight Ball by Jessica Day George
In the country of Westfalin, the twelve princesses are supposedly cursed. All the princes who attempt to find out why the princesses’ slippers are all worn out after every third night are killed in unfortunate accidents or duels. The princes cannot find the solution even though the king has offered the hand of one of his daughters if the mystery is solved. Unfortunately, the girls are not talking. Galen is a young soldier returning from the war, his parents dead. He seeks work with his aunt and uncle, the king’s gardeners. He begins work as an under-gardener. He asks the king for permission to try and solve the mystery. Quietly, he follows the princesses through a secret passageway to King Under Stone’s realm, where they attend the “Midnight Ball” every night. Galen watches them dance until dawn, working out a plan to free the princesses (especially Rose). On the third day, King Under Stone finds out that some stranger is in his realm, finding some nightshade on the floor. The princesses are taken and do not return to the palace above, and the palace turns frantic. Still underground, Galen kills King Under Stone by stabbing him with a branch of one of the silver trees in the forest behind the gates. King Under Stone is killed, and his oldest son, Illikin, becomes the new King Under Stone. Illikin is killed in the same manner as the first King Under Stone, and the next brother is the King. Galen uses a black wool chain and a silver crucifix to lock the realm of King Under Stone from the regular world. They all return to the palace happily. This book was exciting, action-packed, and great! The events have you on the edge of your seat, and you can’t put the book down.

- Suzie B.

You can read more reviews by our teens here!

High and mighty Olive Kitteridge of Crosby, Maine is the one neighbor you go out of your way to avoid at all costs. You’ll even hide in the cat food aisle of the local Puffin Stop (when you don’t even own and quite detest cats) until the outrageously intrusive Olive — carnivore of the weak, spineless, dumb, and shallow — thunders past to harangue someone else.

In Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout’s elegant novel of thirteen stories spanning thirty years, retired schoolteacher Olive is at once contentious, vengeful, and wildly emotional. But she is also courageous, funny, an astute savior of broken hearts, and in each tale figures proportionately into the troubled lives around her.

Especially rending is the tale of a former student who has returned to Crosby for the sole purpose of taking his life and extinguishing such a palpable grief that readers will find themselves (thanks to Strout’s amazing craft) helplessly inconsolable — until the bizarre moment that the intuitive Olive blazes onto the scene.

In another, Strout turns playful as Olive’s emotionally stunted middle-age son prepares to marry a crass woman with no soul. When Olive overhears the cosmopolitan bride-to-be mocking Olive’s provincial outfit, she is at first wounded to the core — and then, in fine Olive retaliation, decides to steal one of the bride’s going-away shoes.

In the final story, widowed and at the tail end of midlife, Olive finds herself grudgingly helping a neighbor she cannot abide — an arrogant man wealthy enough to own a third of Maine — but not a Mainer in the least. Now, if it were not for his blazing blue eyes…

Olive Kitteridge is not unlike its rugged, mid-coast Maine setting; interrupted when you least expect it by wind, wave, solitary pitch pines, and wild roses. And readers will recognize that life is like that, too.
 
Aimee Zuccarini – East Columbia Branch

In The Road Home, novelist Rose Tremain stays faithful to real life in her flesh-and-blood creation of 43-year-old Lev. Lev is an Eastern European dreamer and widower with a young daughter, a hopelessly superstitious mother, and an irrepressible pal named Rudi, whose voracious (but misconstrued) appetite for everything “West” has him selling, in one very funny scene, the coat off his back and seven bottles of vodka for an ancient sky-blue "Tchevi" Phoenix with some serious transmission issues.

Lev, though, is more pragmatic — especially since the saw mill at Baryn closed. When he goes off to London in search of work, he schools himself to expect little and yet, what he finds shocks him. Here are the harried, often insensitive, and (from the viewpoint of someone coming from a land of nothing) grossly self-indulgent men and women of Rudi’s fanciful West – and none, Lev discovers to his dismay, look at all like his frame of reference: the actor Sir Alec Guinness.

Disoriented, bereft, and soon on the brink of collapse, Lev finds himself in a men’s washroom sobbing as the memory of his dead wife comes to him unbidden. “Why master feelings that, in this unreal world he’d just entered, felt real and true?” Tremain asks this question as Lev endures both emotional compromise and the struggle to keep a toe-hold on dignity – the plight of all immigrants.

When he finally lands a job as dishwasher in an upscale restaurant, his luck seems to be turning. Fascinated with the fast and furious kitchen drama surrounding him, Lev begins to realize a way out of his frustrating existence – but not until he is willing to let go of palpable memories. He meets this challenge with the help of his philosophizing Irish landlord, a Moslem kabob seller (who is certain that virgins are waiting for him in Heaven when he extends a kindness to Lev), and Ruby, a senior “living well beyond her shelf life," who recognizes in Lev a man deserving of dreams. Readers will agree, treasuring all of Tremain’s characters. But Lev they will cheer for!

Aimee Zuccarini – East Columbia Branch

Did you ever wish Dostoevsky had written Crime and Punishment with Raskolnikov dressed as Batman? Have you ever thought that Waiting for Godot could be improved with Beavis and Butthead? Have you ever awoken, dripping with fear, from a nightmare in which Garfield plays a rather convincing Mephistopheles?

Then R. Sikoryak’s Masterpiece Comics might be just right for you! As the cover suggests, this over-sized, hardbound title is "where classics and cartoons collide!" Sikoryak takes the best of literature, from Shakespeare, to Brontë, to Hawthorne, and rewrites the classics as newspaper and pulp comics. So, Wuthering Heights becomes "The Crypt of Brontë," like Tales from the Crypt, and the Book of Genesis becomes "Blonde Eve," like Blondie.

This book could have been a remarkable failure, but Sikoryak is such a talented adapter and artist that both the literary sources and the comics’ artists are respected in their imitation. The perfectly mimicked visuals guide the condensed stories along, synthesizing "high art" with "low art." Moreover, the satirical contrast between the "funny paper" characters and their imitating roles as great figures of literature provides plenty of laughs for fans of either medium.

But aside from all the potential analysis you could glean from Masterpiece Comics, it’s mostly a funny little book. It’s short enough to read in an afternoon and colorful enough to give to any teen as a primer for future literary ventures. Who knows? You may even find yourself thinking about Charlie Brown and Peanuts as a Kafkaesque adventure in existential crises.

Khaleel Gheba – Miller Branch

Gilda Joyce is my kind of girl. Some might describe her as "quirky," but that’s too easy. I like to think that Gilda is more of a combination of Olivia and Harriet the Spy. Gilda loves her typewriter, which was given to her by her late father. She also loves dressing up in outrageous outfits, and trying to communicate with "the spirits" — an activity she took up after her father died. Gilda somehow manages to talk her way into (and sometimes out of) the strangest situations. She invites herself into the home of a distant relative in San Francisco, simply because she told people she would be going to San Francisco over the summer. It turns out this relative has a mystery he needs solving! Well, Gilda thinks it needs to be solved. This can’t be a coincidence! (Or maybe it could.)

Something I love about Gilda is the way she thinks. She’s a dramatic optimist, something the world needs more of. This book is light, but not fluffy; funny, not absurd; and sweet, not saccharine. Gilda also appears in several fantastic sequels by author Jennifer Allison, including Gilda Joyce: The Ladies of the Lake, Gilda Joyce: The Ghost Sonata, and the latest in the series, Gilda Joyce: The Dead Drop, which features Gilda traveling to D.C.’s own International Spy Museum. Pick these books up when you want a fun series to get you through the lull of your favorite author taking three years to come out with a new book.

Jennifer Smith – Glenwood Branch

"There are some people with a gift for conviction — a talent for cutting a line through the jumbled phenomena of world affairs and saying, I’m in: this is my position. All of the Litvinoffs had it to some extent. It was a genetic thing, perhaps."

The Litvinoffs of New York have always prided themselves on being radically chic and believers of many causes. Joel, the patriarch and the family’s unifying force, is a lawyer famous for defending accused terrorists and radicals. His wife of 40 years is Audrey, an Englishwoman who is vividly described as a "middle-aged termagant." Their daughter Karla, a social worker trapped in a slightly disappointing marriage, feels unattractive and bears patiently her mother’s wisecracks about her weight. Their younger daughter Rosa is flirting with Orthodox Judaism and goes after it in such an awkward, charming way in spite of ridicule from her parents, who are contemptuous of any organized religion.

When Joel suffers a massive heart attack, the women in his life struggle to redefine themselves and their relationship with each other. Heller has the gift of letting her characters, faults and all, come alive and interact with the reader. The Litvinoff women are fascinating in a weird way — the kind of dinner guests who will stare you down and argue all the way to dessert. Audrey muses in one poignant scene: "How had she ended up like this, imprisoned in the role of a harridan? Her anger had become a part of her. It was a knotted thicket in her gut, too dense to be cut down and too deeply entrenched in the loamy soil of her disappointments to be uprooted."

The Believers is Zoe Heller at her best — witty, intelligent, acerbic and funny. Heller may not be known for her lovable characters, but they surely are memorable. Her novel What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal, about an obsessive English teacher, became a movie. She believed that the "point of fiction is not to offer moral avatars but to engage with people whose politics or points of view are unpleasant or contradictory." Be prepared to be entertained with this book. I surely was.

Cristina J. Lozare – Central Library

I’m a person who likes to make up things to worry about. What if one day I turned invisible? What if I were stranded on a deserted island with nothing but my wits to keep me alive? What would I do if I were trapped in a horror film? Fortunately, author Seth Grahame-Smith has the answer to this last obsessive question of mine.

How to Survive a Horror Movie teaches you everything you might ever need to know about how to recognize that you are, indeed, in a horror film, the different types of incredibly horrible things that could potentially happen to you, who to stick close with (and of course, who to avoid), and more. This book takes a great look at the themes in horror films, and it pokes fun at it while still holding horror in reverence. Grahame-Smith teaches you what to do if you did something last summer, how to react if there are children in your corn, and that you should always travel on planes with a suitcase full of mongooses (lest there be snakes on your flight). Grahame-Smith is an expert on zombies, as he also wrote Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

How to Survive a Horror Movie is for horror film buffs, the curious, and the obsessive worrier.

Jennifer Johnson – Glenwood Branch

Most stories are told with a beginning, middle, and end. Over the course of a novel, problems arise and are solved; characters learn something about themselves; the world resumes its rhythms with the closing of the final page. But then there’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Thomas Pynchon’s “novel” spans over 700 mind-boggling pages and won the National Book Award in 1974, but, after reading it, I cannot say what this book is really about.

In the heat of World War II, as A-4 rockets rain down on London, dream-reading bureaucrats, sadistic Pavlovian scientists, ghostly mediums, and lustful American liaison Tyrone Slothrop live and work under the threat of the Rocket, the tyranny of instantaneous annihilation. Meanwhile, in the defeated German state, known as the Zone, all chaos has broken loose. The “schwartzgerat,” a prototypical piece of a lost rocket, is missing and Slothrop is dedicated to finding it. But what exactly is it? And why are suicidal African commandos, power-hungry Russian spiritualists, smuggler pornographers, and the twisted agents of the British command searching for it too?

This is not an easy book to describe, much less to read. Pynchon’s narrative rarely stays in one location, style, or perspective for more than a page. On top of that, Slothrop, the closest thing we have to protagonist, is never really the center of the story, as the cast totals hundreds by the book’s end. And I haven’t even mentioned the many times that Pynchon will break into song, mid-scene. But in the mess, there is a tremendous beauty. Both the moments of clarity and the confusion are written in wondrous prose, astounding in detail, heart-wrenching in delivery. I cannot think of another novel that can go from maddening sadness to apocalyptic hilarity in the span of a single page, but Pynchon accomplishes this. Paragraphs will trail through your mind, haunting you for months after finishing this book.

Although the narrative is proudly puzzling and consistently offensive, Gravity’s Rainbow rewards those who are willing to forsake narrative cohesion in order to explore the treacherous, delirious Zone. The 1974 Pulitzer board didn’t call it “unreadable, turgid, overwritten and obscene” for nothing.

Khaleel Gheba – Miller Branch