Tag: accidents

Well Met by Jen DeLuca

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Have you ever been to a renaissance faire? I spent quite a few summers growing up going to the local faire with my family. I was fascinated that there were people who made this their life for the whole summer, but had other lives outside of the faire. Faires serve as ways to experience the past, but with the knowledge that you can go back to your regular present life!

Well Met by Jen DeLuca takes the concept of past vs. present and runs with it. Willow Creek, Maryland is a small town where everyone knows everyone else. Trying to keep anything quiet can be pretty difficult, but there are charms to living in such a small area. Emily is having a hard time seeing the positives, but she’s working on it. Emily moved her entire life to Willow Creek to help her sister recover from a bad accident. Being dropped into this new life, she works hard to alleviate any stress on her sister by making lists to navigate her new life. Instead of working two jobs, Emily spends her days running her sister to appointments and chauffeuring her niece around.

Driving her niece to the high school one day, Emily soon finds herself volunteering for the local Renaissance Faire so that her niece can participate. Emily bumps into Simon, an irritating schoolteacher who is in charge of the volunteers. While they don’t initially get along, Emily is forced to keep working with Simon since the faire is a huge part of his family. The faire is very important to Simon and Emily’s joking approach to the whole experience, plus her insistence that some aspects of faire should change, only further work to irk and anger Simon.

Once faire begins however, Simon slips into a new persona. Gone is the stuffy English teacher and in his place lives a completely new, and likeable, person. This new Simon flirts openly with Emily as she works at the tavern in her revealing wench outfit. The drastic difference between the two confuses Emily. Is the attraction she’s feeling towards Simon at the faire real? Or is it just part of their characters, the part of faire that Simon is always telling them that they need to portray?

Emily is more confused than ever as she works to figure out what she is going to do after the summer is over and her sister has recovered from her accident. She was only supposed to stay in Willow Creek until her sister recovered, but the more time she spends in the community, and the more she gets to know Simon, the more Emily is thinking that she might want to make a permanent home in Willow Creek. But should she? What about Simon? Where will she stay? Will everyone in Willow Creek grow to accept her?

Charlatans by Robin Cook

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Medical school is daunting, add in the added responsibility you take on the further and further you go in teaching hospitals and even before residents are hired on as staff, they are forced to make tough decisions. Robin Cook’s newest medical suspense novel, Charlatans, deals with the tough calls that doctors have to make on a day-to-day basis and just who is around to make sure those doctors stay honest. No one knows this more than the newly minted chief resident at Boston Memorial Hospital, Noah Rothauser. His new super chief position means that he is now responsible for all the surgical schedules, the training of the new residents, and handling the Morbidity and Mortality conferences that happen every time a patient dies. Noah is hopeful that the recent updates to the BMH’s operating rooms will be positive and will decrease the number of deaths that happen during surgery. After all, Boston Memorial Hospital is a famed teaching hospital that is known for being at the top in terms of medical advances and is also known for hiring only the best of the best. Updating those operating rooms will only help, not hinder.

That’s what Noah thinks anyway. All is going well until the death of a healthy hospital employee during a routine procedure. An anesthesia error seems to be the cause of death, but Noah doubts that. He believes that Dr. William Mason, a world-class surgeon, juggled patients and made a fatal error during the surgery that cost the patient his life. Mason won’t go down without a fight however and blames the anesthesiologist, Dr. Ava London. Noah isn’t sure who to believe, but does his due diligence into the background of this case to find out what really happened.

Thinking this case is behind him, Noah tries to move on. More anesthesia-related deaths occur however, and Noah finds himself having to question everyone that was involved in each case. Secrets come out and Noah finds himself getting to know Dr. Ava London more closely as he works with her to find out what really happened to cause those deaths.

Noah has to figure out what happened quickly because he soon realizes that there is much more to Ava than he originally thought. His own job and credibility are soon put to the test. Noah’s search for the truth is at an all time high as he works to figure out who really is at fault surrounding those three deaths and who is really telling the truth. After all, we all have something to hide, don’t we?

This book is also available in the following formats:

All the Bright Places by Jennifer Niven

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all the bright placesAll the Bright Places by Jennifer Niven handles difficult topics for teens, from emotional problems and mental illness to death and suicide, but in such a way that everything is written eloquently and seriously, showing the consequences of all actions, no matter how big or small. Niven’s characters are beautifully written. The story really captures the heartbreaking yearning for everything to end up alright by showcasing a compelling search for hope when all seems lost.

All the Bright Places is told from the points of view of two high school students, Theodore Finch and Violet Markey. Theodore and Violet meet on the ledge of the bell tower at their school. Finch is fascinated with death, chronicling ways to kill himself. Something good stops him from hurting himself every time. Violet has a countdown until graduation, when she can finally leave Indiana and start a new life away from the aftermath of her older sister’s death.

That first meeting is the start of a very unlikely relationship between the freak, outcast boy, Finch, and the popular, yet damaged girl, Violet. This book weaves an exhilarating and  charming, yet simultaneously heartbreaking, love story between the two that immediately draws you in. When Violet and Finch then pair up on a class project to discover the natural wonders of their state, they learn more about each other than they initially thought. Death-fascinated Finch and future-focused Violet find hope and help by working with each other. Their lives will be forever changed.

This book is also available as an audiobook. If you use RiverShare OverDrive, our e-book and audiobook service, you can check out All the Bright Places as an e-book, as well as an audiobook.