Meetings

The Adult Book Discussion Group will meet Wednesday October 6 at 3 pm to discuss "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee.

Knit-Wits: Our knitting group meets every Wednesday from 11:30 a.m. until 12:30 p.m. and Thursday from 6 p.m. until 7 p.m. Limber up your fingers, bring your project, start a new one or learn something fresh and exciting. For more information, call the Webb @ 726-3012. 

Friends of the Webb: Our support group meets the second Wednesday of each month. The next meeting will be Wednesday, Oct 6th at 10:30 a.m. in the library. Join at the library and come to the meeting.


New Materials

Adult

Don't Blink  by James Patterson.

New York's Lombardo's Steak House is famous for three reasons--the menu, the clientele, and now, the gruesome murder of an infamous mob lawyer. Effortlessly, the assassin slips through the police's fingers, and his absence sparks a blaze of accusations about who ordered the hit. Seated at a nearby table, reporter Nick Daniels is conducting a once-in-a-lifetime interview with a legendary baseball bad-boy. In the chaos, he accidentally captures a key piece of evidence that lands him in the middle of an all-out war between Italian and Russian mafia forces. NYPD captains, district attorneys, mayoral candidates, media kingpins, and one shockingly beautiful magazine editor are all pushing their own agendas--on both sides of the law. Back off--or die--is the clear message Nick receives as he investigates for a story of his own.Heedless, and perhaps in love with his beautiful editor, Nick endures humiliation, threats, violence, and worse in a thriller that overturns every expectation and finishes with the kind of flourish only James Patterson knows.

Body Work  by Sara Paretsky 
From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Paretsky's superb 14th novel featuring PI V.I. Warshawski (after Hardball) delves into Chicago's avant-garde art scene. At the trendy Club Gouge, where Warshawski is keeping an eye on Petra, a young cousin who caused trouble in the previous book, performance artist Karen Buckley (aka the Body Artist) invites members of the audience to step on stage to paint her nude body. The intricate design that one woman paints on Karen's back provokes a violent outburst from Chad Vishneski, a troubled Iraqi war veteran. When two nights later, someone shoots the woman who upset Chad outside the club, Chad is the logical murder suspect. Hired by Chad's estranged parents to clear his name, Warshawski straddles a minefield that reaches from the Windy City's neighborhoods to the Gulf War battlefields. Scenes with her aging neighbor and a new love interest give a much needed balance to the serious plot.

Young Adult


For the Win  by Corey Doctorow
From School Library Journal

Grade 10 Up Wei-dong, known to his Orange County family as Leonard, is addicted to guild game play with his Chinese colleagues. Mala and Yasmin, brilliant strategists, are gaming from an Internet cafe in the poor streets of Dharavi. Matthew and Lu are trying to establish their own freelance gold-farming operation in the rough city of Shenzhen. Guided from Singapore by the secretive Big Sister Nor, these young people are slowly coming together and forming a union to demand basic working conditions and protection from organized crime rackets. In order to prove their strength, these Webblies take over the three games owned by the Coca-Cola Company. Battling for real-world rights in a virtual environment, they must overcome corrupt cops, determined sys ops, and social indifference to beat the game. Doctorow is continually at the leading edge of electronic issues, rallying supporters to the causes of intellectual freedom, privacy, and social justice.

As Easy As Falling Off the Face Of the Earth  by Lynne Rae Perkins

From School Library Journal

Grade 7 Up This is a story of one misfortune after another. As the book opens, Ry, a 16-year-old Wisconsin resident en route to camp, is left behind in Middle-of-Nowhere, MT, as his stalled train pulls out and he recounts the events that led him to leave the train in the first place. Bad goes to worse: he loses a shoe and his phone charger, his grandfather back home is injured, and his parents are having their own misadventures in the Caribbean. A superhero of a fix-it guy named Del helps Ry to put his life back together. Along the way, readers learn that there is more to Del than initially meets the eye. The story is told in a traditional, episodic style, bouncing from one calamity to the next. The narration occasionally switches perspective to include the grandfather's tale of woe as well as well-drawn graphic-style portrayals of the family dogs' mishaps. The style is reminiscent of Chris Crutcher's, and the action is evocative of Gary Paulsen, but the freewheeling prose, quirky humor, and subtle life lessons are all Perkins's own.

Juvenile Fiction

Saving Sky  by Diane Stanley 
From School Library Journal

Gr 5-8–Living on a New Mexico ranch, Sky Brightman and her family are largely removed from the disturbing news of the war on terror and are sheltered from images of death and destruction as suicide bombers wage war on the United States. Then, when Kareem, a seventh-grade Middle Eastern classmate, is picked on by bullies, and his doctor father is detained by federal agents, Sky resolves to stand by the boy. In a scene that stretches credulity, Sky and her mother collaborate to remove Kareem surreptitiously from school. They safeguard him in their home and build a secret place for him in the barn in case he should need one. Kareem goes into hiding when suspicious Homeland Security agents come looking for him. In the meantime, an attack knocks out the power over a good portion of the country. When Homeland Security comes again, Kareem is spotted and knows he must turn himself in; the president has ordered the DHS to hold detainees until the war ends.

No Such Thing as Dragons  by Philip Reeve 
From School Library Journal

Gr 4-8–Reeve explores a more "realistic" vision of classic dragon tales in his newest novel. Ansel is a mute boy who is callously sold by his father to be a servant to an itinerant dragon hunter who is happy to have someone who can keep his secrets safe. Brock truly has secrets, and before long he reveals to Ansel that dragons do not really exist, and that he is, in fact, a charlatan who preys on the fears of villagers. However, a book with this title surely has to contain a dragon, and inevitably, Ansel and Brock must face off against the real thing. There is some graphic description of horses and a human being devoured by the dragon. The creature itself is portrayed somewhat sympathetically, as Ansel realizes it is just an animal. The real story, however, is how in the course of this quest, the boy is able to find his voice, both literally and figuratively. This is certainly different from anything that Reeve has done previously, but is still shot through with his trademark imagination and feel for action.

Books For Children

It's a book  by Lane Smith 
From School Library Journal

Gr 3-5–Smith jump-starts the action on the title page where readers meet the characters–a mouse, a jackass, and a monkey. The monkey's oval head creates an “o” in the word “book.” Slapstick humor ensues in an armchair face-off when one character, reared on a diet of Web 2.0 and gaming, cannot fathom what to do with a book and slings a barrage of annoying questions, “Can you blog with it? How do you scroll down? Can you make the characters fight?” Readers know who is speaking by each animal's unique font type and color, achieving economy and elegance on each page. Exasperated, Monkey hands over the volume. Life, death, and madness, all in a single illustrated page of Treasure Island, draw Jackass in. He responds with a knee-jerk reaction (“too many letters”) and hilariously reduces it to text speak, but his interest is piqued. He covets the book and readers watch him pore over it for hours.

Brontorina  by James Howe 
From School Library Journal

PreSchool-Grade 2 Howe weaves a well-spun tale about acceptance and pursuing one's dream. When Brontorina Apatosaurus appears at the door of Madame Lucille's Dance Academy for Boys and Girls, she faces what could be sure rejection. Young Clara and Jack tug at Madame to accept her, while naysayers jeer at her lack of proper shoes. Finally, Madame admits Brontorina, and humorous scenes show little boys and girls doing arabesques, relev&eacutes, and jet&eacutes, while enormous Brontorina gracefully crashes into the ceiling. Madame concludes that the new pupil is just too big. Brontorina turns to leave, a dinosaur-size tear falling from her eye. Then the teacher has a realization: The problem is not that you are too big. The problem is that my studio is too small, and the academy gets relocated and renamed. A quiet fusion of pathos, comedy, and passion is echoed in the painterly, softly textured, muted oil illustrations.
Help Me, Mr. Mutt: Expert answers for dogs with people problems by Janet Stevens and Susan Stevens From School Library Journal
Grade 2–4—With tongue firmly in cheek, the dynamic Stevens sisters have crafted a multilayered story that looks at various situations in the life of an average dog. Through a series of letters to Mr. Mutt, a doggie version of Dear Abby, the text invites readers to learn about the tribulations of "Underplayed in Utah" or "Famished in Florida" and the encouragement they garner from their correspondences. Each letter has its own distinctive style depending on the complaint and the writer's personality but all end with a postscript that refers to the treatment or behavior of cats in the household. Mr. Mutt ends each reply with his own postscript that refers to the cat that shares his home. Here, the book rises to another level of humor with the inclusion of additional commentary from "The Queen," the supremely superior feline who keeps Mr. Mutt in his place. The tension between them builds throughout the letters until a physical confrontation occurs near the end of the story. Mr. Mutt's replies to the dogs in distress include many sketches of "illustrated tips" as well as a variety of graphs to substantiate the advice. While the story will find fans in the primary grades, its most appreciative audience will be among more sophisticated readers who will recognize the amount of effort that went into this creative venture.