Staff Picks
Stay in touch with the personal favorites of the KDL Staff. Each title is handpicked.

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When Will There Be Good News?: A Novel
Kate Atkinson

Presents a tale involving the unexpected intersection of three lives, including a woman whose life had been shattered thirty years earlier, an ex-detective on a crowded train, and a teenage girl who is called upon to test her preparedness.


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Chicken Cheeks
Michael Ian Black

Illustrations and simple text describe the back ends of various animals.


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Three Weeks to Say Goodbye
C.J. Box

Delighted when they finally achieve their dream of adopting a baby, Jack and Melissa are devastated when their daughter Angelina’s teenage birth father and her grandfather, a powerful Denver judge, set out to put aside the adoption and, realizing that there is something sinister about their motivations, risk everything to protect their child.


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A Stronger Kinship: One Town's Extraordinary Story of Hope and Faith
Anna-Lisa Cox

Presents the story of the nineteenth-century community of Covert, Michigan, describing how its mixed-race citizens lived in harmony and enjoyed completely integrated schools and churches and shared power and wealth between races.


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The Gargoyle
Andrew Davidson

Awakening in a burn ward after being horribly burned in a terrible car accident, the cynical narrator is visited by a beautiful and enigmatic sculptress of gargoyles who tells him that they had once been lovers in medieval Germany.


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Little Brother
Cory Doctorow

Having mastered the cutting-edge technologies of the networked world, seventeen-year-old Marcus and his friends cut school in search of high adventure and find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco and wrongfully incarcerated in a secret prison by a totalitarian Department of Homeland Security.


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Quiet Strength: The Principles, Practices, & Priorities of a Winning Life
Tony Dungy

A biography of the coach of the Indianapolis Colts and the first African American football coach to lead his team to a Superbowl victory concentrates on his religious life as well as his career in football.


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Take Big Bites: Adventures Around the World and Across the Table
Linda Ellerbee

The author presents a culinary and travel memoir in which she recalls the people she met in numerous other cultures, describes the foods she ate, and shares several recipes.


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The Other Queen: A Novel
Philippa Gregory

Presents a tale inspired by the story of Mary, Queen of Scots, in a work that follows the doomed monarch’s long imprisonment in the household of the Earl of Shrewsbury and his spying wife, Bess.


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North of Beautiful
Justina Chen Headley

Terra, a sensitive, artistic high school senior born with a facial port-wine stain, struggles with issues of inner and outer beauty with the help of her Goth classmate Jacob.


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The Third Angel: A Novel
Alice Hoffman

llows the lives of three women in love with the wrong men—Madeleine Heller, attracted to her sister’s fiancâe; Frieda Lewis, the muse to an ill-fated rock star; and Bryn Evans, engaged to be married but secretly obsessed with her ex-husband.


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Even Now (Lost Love Series #1)
Karen Kingsbury

When Emily Baker—a college freshman raised by her grandparents—takes her first internship as a journalist, she discovers a love story whose tragic ending came with her birth, drawing her to search for the mother she has never met.


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Headlong
Kathe Koja

Content with following all the rules at the Vaughn School and living what would be considered by most to be a perfect life, Lily Noble’s straightforward existence gets thrown for a loop when unconventional Hazel Tobias suddenly arrives and begins to show her everything that she’s been missing in the world.


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The Piano Teacher: A Novel
Janice Y. K. Lee

Hired by the wealthy Chen family as a piano instructor, Claire Pendleton is seduced by the social life of Hong Kong’s expatriate community and begins an affair with Will Truesdale, an enigmatic Englishman with a devastating past.


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Jellicoe Road
Melina Marchetta

Abandoned by her drug-addicted mother at the age of eleven, high school student Taylor Markham struggles with her identity and family history at a boarding school in Australia.


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Tiger Moon
Antonia Michaelis

Sold to be the eighth wife of a rich and cruel merchant, Safia, also called Raka, tries to escape her fate by telling stories of Farhad the thief, his companion Nitish the white tiger, and their travels across India to retrieve a famous jewel that will save a kidnapped princess from becoming the bride of a demon king.Safia tries to escape her fate as the wife of a cruel merchant by telling stories of Farhad the thief, his companion Nitish the white tiger, and their efforts to save a kidnapped princess from becoming the bride of a demon king.


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Princess Ben
Catherine Murdock

A girl is transformed, through instruction in life at court, determination, and magic, from sullen, pudgy, graceless Ben into Crown Princess Benevolence, a fit ruler of the kindgom of Montagne as it faces war with neighboring Drachensbett.


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Heart of Stone (The Negotiator Trilogy, Book 1)
C.E. Murphy

While jogging through Central Park after midnight, lawyer Margrit Knight stumbles upon a dark new world filled with magical beings, including a gargoyle named Alban who, suspected of murder, needs her help in proving his innocence.


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The Bitch Posse
Martha O'Connor

Inseparable friends in high school, a dysfunctional writer, a struggling family woman, and a mental hospital patient remember the 1988 confrontation that marked their lives and bound them together with a secret that never came to light.


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The Velveteen Principles for Women: How to Shatter the Myth of Perfection and Embrace All That You Really Are
Toni Raiten-D'Antonio

Helping women free themselves from sources of unhappiness, the author of The Velveteen Principles teaches women how to become genuinely real and live as the unique, valuable women they are meant to be.


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The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain (Caldecott Honor Book)
Peter Sis

Annotated illustrations, journals, maps, and dreamscapes take readers on an extraordinary journey of how the artist-author’s life was shaped while growing up in Czechoslovakia during the Cold War, as well as the influence of western culture through the influx of banned books, music, and news, in a powerful graphic memoir.


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The Temptation of the Night Jasmine
Lauren Willig

Returning to his English estate to avenge his mentor’s murder during the 1803 Battle of Assaye, the Duke of Dovedale infiltrates a secretive club where he encounters Lady Charlotte, who has loved him since childhood.


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Made from Scratch: Discovering the Pleasures of a Handmade Life
Jenna Woginrich

Recounting her own journey toward self-reliance, the author describes her escape from consumer-driven culture by moving from the city to a farmhouse in northern Idaho and offers practical suggestions for readers in any setting or of any experience on how to achieve one’s own self-reliance through the development of simple skills ranging from knitting to window-box gardens.


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