Colorado State Library Book Club Project
Author
Description
"As gripping as it is prescient, Gangbuster is the first-ever history of the battle waged by one rookie District Attorney, Philip Van Cise, against the KKK, organized crime, and government corruption at the highest levels throughout the 1920s. One century later, in the face of contemporary society’s divisiveness and fearmongering politics, the personal courage of this maverick’s battle against underworld figures and a mainstream white supremacist...
Author
Appears on list
Description
"From her place in the store that sells artificial friends, Klara--an artificial friend with outstanding observational qualities--watches carefully the behavior of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass in the street outside. She remains hopeful a customer will soon choose her, but when the possibility emerges that her circumstances may change forever, Klara she is warned not to invest too much in the promises of humans. In this luminous...
Author
Description
A peculiar stranger enters a nameless town sometime in an unidentified future. He is searching for someone although unsure who. During his search, he becomes embroiled in the political and social shenanigans of the seemingly surreal townsfolk, visiting the town’s major institutions and unraveling some of its sacred cows.You can read this novel just for the laughs. You can read it for its wit, its wisdom, its lyricism and playful use of language....
Author
Description
"Jen has dumped Andy, and he's handling the breakup in exactly the way all his friends and family might have expected: very, very badly. Crashing at his mother's house and obsessively photographing his hairline, Andy embraces the rites and rituals of every breakup-the ill-advised decision to move onto a houseboat, the forced merriment of a lads' night out, the accidental late-night text to the ex-all resulting in a never-ending shame spiral. Even...
Author
Description
"Like Golden Hill, Cahokia Jazz inhabits a different version of America, and like Golden Hill it has a propulsive and brilliantly twisty plot set within a fully imagined world. Only this world is full of fog, cigarette smoke, dubious motives, danger, and dark deeds. And in the main character of Joe Barrow, we have a hero of truly heroic proportions, and a troubled soul to fall in love with. One snowy night at the end of winter, Barrow and his partner...
Author
Appears on list
Description
Charlie Reade looks like a regular high school kid, great at baseball and football, a decent student. But he carries a heavy load. His mom was killed in a hit-and-run accident when he was ten, and grief drove his dad to drink. Charlie learned how to take care of himself--and his dad. Then, when Charlie is seventeen, he meets Howard Bowditch, a recluse with a big dog in a big house at the top of a big hill. In the backyard is a locked shed from which...
Author
Appears on these lists
Description
"A suspenseful and entertaining debut thriller-and love letter to vintage horror movies-in which a teenager must overcome her own anxiety to protect the two children she's babysitting when strangers come knocking at the door. October 1993. One night. One house. One dead body. When single mom Eleanor Mazinski goes out a for a much-needed date night, she leaves her two young children-sweet, innocent six-year-old Ben and precocious, defiant twelve-year-old...
Author
Appears on these lists
Description
A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store's most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls' Day, but she simply won't leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading with murderous attention, must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year...
Author
Appears on list
Description
"Their love was supposed to last forever. But after two devastating tragedies, Yasmen and Josiah Wade realized love alone couldn't solve everything... or keep their marriage together. It's taken a year since their split for Yasmen to finally start feeling like herself again. To finally be able to breathe again. But the more she sees Josiah-whether it's parenting their two children or working together at the restaurant they co-own-the more Yasmen realizes...
Author
Appears on list
Description
"Will you, dear Shareholder, set Athena free? Athena Rao must reckon with the memory of her father, King Rao-literally. Through biotechnological innovation, he has given her his memories. His Dalit childhood on an Indian coconut plantation in the 1950s is as alive to her as her own existence in a prison cell, accused of her father's murder. Egocentric, brilliant, a little damaged, King Rao had a visionary idea: the personal computer known as the Coconut....
Author
Appears on these lists
Description
"Thelonious 'Monk' Ellison’s writing career has bottomed out: his latest manuscript has been rejected by seventeen publishers, which stings all the more because his previous novels have been 'critically acclaimed.' He seethes on the sidelines of the literary establishment as he watches the meteoric success of We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, a first novel by a woman who once visited 'some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days.' Meanwhile, Monk struggles...
Author
Appears on these lists
Description
A modern love story about two childhood friends, Sam, raised by an actress mother in LA's Koreatown, and Sadie, from the wealthy Jewish enclave of Beverly Hills, who reunite as adults to create video games, finding an intimacy in digital worlds that eludes them in their real lives, from the New York Times best-selling author of The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry.
Author
Appears on these lists
Description
"A quarter of a century after her first book, Thinking in Pictures, forever changed how the world understood autism, Temple Grandin-the "anthropologist from Mars," as Oliver Sacks dubbed her-transforms our understanding of the different ways our brains are wired. Visual thinkers constitute a far greater proportion of the population than previously understood, she reveals, and a more varied one, from the purest "object visualizers" like Grandin herself,...
Author
Description
John Grady Cole, a 16-year-old dispossessed Texan, crosses the Rio Grande into Mexico in 1949, accompanied by his pal Lacey Rawlins. The two precocious horsemen pick up a sidekick--a laughable but deadly marksman named Jimmy Blevins--encounter various adventures on their way south and finally arrive at a paradisiacal hacienda where Cole falls into an ill-fated romance.