NCW Libraries

"A painful truth of family life: the most tender emotions can change in an instant. You think your parents love you but is it you they love, or the child who is theirs?" --Joyce Carol Oates, My Life as a Rat Which should prevail: loyalty to family or loyalty to the truth? Is telling the truth ever a mistake and is lying for one's family ever justified? Can one do the right thing, but bitterly regret it? My Life as a Rat follows Violet Rue Kerrigan,...

"A young royal from the far north, is sent south for a political marriage in an empire reminiscent of imperial China. Her brothers are dead, her armies and their war mammoths long defeated and caged behind their borders. Alone and sometimes reviled, she must choose her allies carefully. Rabbit, a handmaiden, sold by her parents to the palace for the lack of five baskets of dye, befriends the emperor's lonely new wife and gets more than she bargained...

The celebrated Uruguayan writer relays the personal pain and extensive social damage brought on by authoritarian repression and exile. Through a novel voicing the profound disruptions to human relations under a regime of military dictators, Benedetti, an exile himself, denounces the political authorities and empowers the people with a passionate hope for their country and the message that spring never fails to follow even the most oppressive of winters....

Ghosts are converging on the cursed Mount Tonglu for a massive battle royale, the sole survivor of which may become a Ghost King, a being of unimaginable power. Xie Lian is sent to secretly infiltrate and try to prevent this--by destroying any ghosts strong enough to stand a chance. His heavenly powers are weakened near the cursed mountain, but he has one trump card on his side--Hua Cheng, who has survived Mount Tonglu before. As they struggle against...

Gods should never meddle in the affairs of mortals, but Xie Lan is not one to follow the rules when lives are at risk. He spits in the face of heaven and its laws and descends in a fury to save his country from drought and civil war. Yet this golden child gets a harsh dose of reality when he discovers just how little one individual--even a god--can do to save a crumbling nation. As the people reject and betray him, one young soldier stands by Xie...

"Born the crown prince of a prosperous kingdom, Xie Lian was renowned for his beauty, strength, and purity. His years of dedicated study and noble deeds allowed him to ascend to godhood. But those who rise may also fall, and fall he does--cast from the heavens and banished to the world below. Eight hundred years after his mortal life, Xie Lian has ascended to godhood for the third time, angering most of the gods in the process. To repay his debts,...