Due to some technical difficulties, and my laptop making friends with a cup of tea recently, we were unable to bring you our regular Five Book Friday post as per usual, for which we heartily apologize.  To make it up to you, however, we are moving our previous post to Sunday, and including an extra recommendation for you, in the hopes that it will help your week get started on the right foot.  Here is the post as it should have appeared on Friday, with the additional recommendation at the end of the post.
~Arabella~

And a hearty congratulations to the winners of the 50th annual Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards!  The award, as you can probably tell, is sponsored by our very own Boston Globe, and is recognizes as one of the most prestigious awards for children’s and young adult literature.

The announcements were made a few weeks ago, in preparation for the formal awards ceremony in September.  This year, the award for fiction went to The Lie Tree, a Victorian murder mystery by Frances Hardinge.  The award for nonfiction went to Steve Sheinkin’s Most Dangerous: Daniel Ellsberg and the Secret History of the Vietnam War, a book which has been getting a good deal of positive attention these days, including receiving an excellence award from the American Library Associatioon.  The top picture book was Jazz Day: The Making of a Famous Photograph, by Roxane Orgill, which tells the story, in verse, of one of Esquire magazine’s most iconic photographs of jazz musicians from 1958.

Especially as this is a home-grown award, we’re thrilled to congratulate the winners of the Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards!  You can read all about the award, and more about this year’s winners at the award site.

Hey, and speaking of good books…let’s turn our attention away from the wearying world for a bit, and take a look at all the super-terrific tomes that have climbed up onto our shelves this week for your delectation:

Disappearance at Devil’s Rock: Stephen King said of Paul Tremblay’s first book “A Head Full of Ghosts scared the living hell out of me, and I’m pretty hard to scare”, which may be my favorite endorsement of the decade.  Now, Tremblay has returned with another book guaranteed to have you sleeping with a nightlight.  When Elizabeth Sanderson learns that her thirteen-year-old son has gone missing, she knows she is facing every mother’s worst fear.  But then, reports begin coming in that people are seeing shadows of her son around, and pages from his journal, which appear without reason, begin pointing to dark rituals, ancient superstitious, and horrible secrets that all originate at the last place Tommy was seen–Devil’s Rock.  Kirkus Reviews loved this eerie nightmare of a tale, saying “Tremblay expertly ratchets up the suspense until the tension is almost at its breaking point.”

Security: If this trippy little maze of a cover doesn’t draw you in, the highly imaginative, utterly quirky, and deeply literary nature of the description might just do the trick.  Gina Wohlsdorf gives us a new version of Manderely (those of you who have read Daphne DuMaurier’s classic will know precisely the baggage this name carries) in the shape of a glittering 20-story California hotel, about to open to the richest and most privileged of clientele, reading to offer them the absolute heights of luxury and security.  But someone inside Manderley is determined to see its doors never open, watching the staff through the ultra-modern security system.  And picking them off one by one, leaving the hotel’s manager, Tessa, to fight for her life, as the opulence of Manderely descends into a house of terror.  Booklist gave Wohlsdorf’s debut a starred review, declaring it full of “twists aplenty – oh, get ready for the twists. Security is perfectly tuned for blockbuster status: scary, gory, kinky, and experimental enough to push readers’ envelopes without going so far as to lose mainstream appeal. They don’t make a hotel big enough to house all the people who will want to read this…”

The Suicide Motor Club: Apparently, it’s Scary Books Week at the Library, because Christopher Buehlman is a leading light of Scary Stuff, and his books always claim our attention here.  This book unfolds along America’s highways, following the rusted, dented cars that travel in the twilight.  We’ve all seen them…but there are none who live to remember meeting the drivers.  Until now.  After escaping the mangled wreck that killed her family, one woman is on the hunt, her thirst for revenge so powerful that it has become something otherwordly.  And her vengeance will become legendary.  Buehlman is already a darling of the horror/Amerian gothic genres, which the Boston Herald summed up perfectly in their review, calling this book “Beautifully written…with a cast of Southern characters so real you can almost see the sweat roll down the page.”

Melville in Love: On to something a bit lighter, shall we?  From acclaimed biographer Michael Shelden comes the story of Herman Melville, up until very recently, an author who had received surprisingly little biographical attention (which is due in large part to his own reticence).  Sheldon, apparently, was able to dig around in the archives, unearthing new information on Moby Dicks‘s creator, and reveling a “secret affair” between Melville and a married woman named Sarah Morewood–and affair which, according to Shelden, gave him the courage and conviction to move away from the sensationalist novels he had been writing, and move towards writing what may well be the most famous American novel ever penned.  I’m always really skeptical about biographies with “shocking new discoveries” in them, as it’s exceptionally easy to sensationalize and aggrandize, especially when the person in question isn’t around to answer your accusations, but the reviews for Sheldon’s book have, thus far, been generally positive, with Kirkus saying that it “offers a provocative portrait of the canonical writer and his world.”

The Apache Wars: The Hunt for Geronimo, the Apache Kid, and the Captive Boy Who Started the Longest war in American History: Felix Ward was a half-Irish, half-Mexican adopted Apache, re-named Mickey Free, who was able to go between American soldiers attempting to police the south-western lands on which they intended to settle (current day Arizona and New Mexico, generally speaking), and the Native tribes who had lived there for generations–though often with mixed results.  In this sprawling and very-well researched work, Paul Andrew Hutton, Distinguished Professor of History at the University of New Mexico, provides not only Mickey Free’s remarkable adventures, but the American-Apache Wars, which began with his kidnapping, and lasted until nearly the turn of the twentieth century.  Hutton revels in details and personalities, bringing legends like Geronimo and the Apache Kid to life in a way that is both enormously informative and genuinely enthralling.  This book has been getting good reviews from academics and reviewers alike, with Pubisher’s Weekly calling it a “fascinating tale of conflict in the late 19th-century American southwest…Hutton moves beyond standard descriptions of battles between Apache warriors and American troops (though there are plenty of those) to paint a larger, more detailed picture of Southwestern life.”

Six Book Sunday Selection:

Infomocracy: For political junkies and those so weary of elections that they want to hide under the bed comes Malka Older’s debut novel about elections, technology, power, and corruption, set in a distant, but all-too-familiar future.  The book opens two decades after Information, a powerful search engine monopoly that brought an end to the age of nation-states, and reconfigured society into micro-states of 100,000 people.  And while this shift was intended to bring peace and harmony, during a particularly high-stakes election, Mishima, an informant for Information, begins to realize that there are plenty of powers working behind the scenes, eager and willing to do whatever it might take to rig the elections in their favor.  Older is not only a great story-teller, she is also a deeply insightful social critic, and this book could not come at a better time.  Her observations are spot-on, and her characters are wonderfully compelling, making for a first novel that works on a number of levels.  The website Electric Literature agreed, saying “With roots in noir and heels firmly planted in the present, Infomocracy shows a world that really isn’t too different from today. Malka Older has created a thrilling, breakneck novel with fully human characters. And it asks tough questions.”

Until next week, beloved patrons–happy reading!