It's Only Human to Love JCPL's New Fiction Titles!

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Kids are people too. I know this to be a fact, because my seven year old granddaughter tells me so.

She is observant and comes up with some very thought provoking statements. When she was four years old and her baby brother, Eli, was born, in a very mature voice she said, “You know, baby Eli won’t be a baby forever.”

I acknowledged this fact by nodding my head just as seriously, and she continued by saying, “No, he won’t be a baby too much longer, because very soon, he’ll become human.”

Truer statements have never been made, because now two years old, Eli is very human; in fact, he’s so human that I think the term “terrible twos,” also thought up by a human, is an apt description of this miniature person named Eli.

Some days after nanny-grannying “baby Eli,” the human being in me needs a rest; and the best rest for me is to put my feet up and escape into a good book from my friends at JCPL. Here is a list of just a few new fiction titles for the human in me.

Fifteen years after the brutal murder of ten year old Jessica, a new killer has come to Christchurch; a killer with a list of everyone who was involved in solving Jessica’s murder so many years before. The crime scene was an old abandoned slaughterhouse with the ‘s’ painted over, hence dubbed the “laughterhouse.” Theodore Tate has never forgotten the brutality of his first case, and is now faced with a growing murder rate in his fair city. When Dr. Stanton, a man in the city with three young girls, reports his daughters missing, the race is on to catch the killer, before the impossible happens yet again in “The Laughterhouse” by Paul Cleave.

Successful Hollywood studio executive, Greyson Todd, plagued with bipolar disorder, takes a respite from his personal and professional life and gives free rein to the disease that has had a hold on him for over 20 years. Traveling the world, Greyson reflects back to his childhood and forward to the present as his life unravels, finally seeking help in a New York psychiatric ward in “Too Bright to Hear, Too Loud to See” by Juliann Garey.

Now in their forties, two women, each living on opposite coasts of the U.S., become connected by their ages and ever changing life situations as they face empty nests and husbands who are absent more than at home. When a shocking secret reveals itself, both women are blown out of the water and more dark truths are unearthed, and for the sake of their children and their future, both must learn to forgive in “Family Pictures” by Jane Green.

More than thirty years of marriage are threatened for Edie and Richard Middlestein, and their solid family life is falling apart, all due to Edie’s enormous girth. Obsessed with food, Edie’s life is literally on the line if she doesn’t rein in her constant obsession with food. When Richard can finally take it no longer, he abandons Edie. Each of their children and their children’s spouses, however, feel determined to take on the task of saving Edie and find that controlling the urges of another person are far from easy in “The Middlesteins” by Jami Attenberg.

Leaving it all behind at the end of the day to curl up with a good book seems like a fair way to treat the nanny-granny in me; the only dilemma I have now is which great, new fiction title to pick, and in that case, this nanny-granny may decide she needs them all, because, after all, I’m only human.