SNEAK PEEK: We Could Be Heroes by Mike Chen

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26 January 2021

An emotional adventure about two misfits who have extraordinary powers, but have forgotten who they were before. The vigilante and the villain must team up to stop a mad scientist who threatens the city, while trying to figure out who they really are.

Jamie woke up two years ago in an empty apartment with no memory and only a few clues to who he might be, and also with the power to read other people’s memories. In the meantime, he’s become the Mind Robber, holding up banks for quick cash. Similarly, Zoe is searching for her past, and using her new extraordinary abilities of speed and strength…to deliver fast food. And occasionally beat up bad guys, if she feels like it.
When the two meet in a memory-loss support group, they realize they are each other’s best chance at discovering what happened to them. The quest will take them deep into a medical conspiracy that is threatening to spill out and wreak havoc on their city, and maybe the country. As the two get past their respective barriers, they’ll realize that their friendship is the thing that gives them the greatest power.

All That Is Bitter and Sweet, A Memoir by Ashley Judd – Memoir Monday

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Sheila English

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25 January 2021

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All That Is Bitter and Sweet, A Memoir by Ashley Judd. In 2002, award-winning film and stage actor Ashley Judd found her true calling: as a humanitarian and voice for those suffering in neglected parts of the world. After her first trip to the notorious brothels, slums, and hospices of southeast Asia, Ashley knew immediately that she wanted to advocate on behalf of the vulnerable. During her travels, Ashley started to write diaries that detailed extraordinary stories of survival and resilience.

But along the way, she realized that she was struggling with her own emotional pain, stemming from childhood abandonment and abuse. Seeking in-patient treatment in 2006 for the grief that had nearly killed her, Ashley found not only her own recovery and an enriched faith but the spiritual tools that energized and advanced her feminist social justice work.

Her story ranges from anger to forgiveness, isolation to interdependence, depression to activism. In telling it, she resoundingly answers the ineffable question about the relationship between healing oneself and service to others.

Praise for All That Is Bitter and Sweet

“Ashley Judd has given us magnetic and searingly honest portrayals of diverse women on screen. Now with the same honesty and magnetism, she brings us her true self on the page. From her childhood to her revolutionary empathy with women and girls living very different lives, her path will inspire readers on journeys of their own.”—Gloria Steinem

“Over the last decade I have watched my gifted, brilliant friend grow as an artist, but more importantly, as a wise, deeply empathetic woman. I have read the diaries that are the heart of this memoir since she began traveling the world, fearing for her safety and sanity, baffled why she chooses these grueling missions. All That Is Bitter and Sweet will be a revelation to readers, exposing Ashley Judd for what I have known for years she is: an amazing woman doing extraordinary work.”—Morgan Freeman

“All That Is Bitter and Sweet is all that is enlightening and inspiring. Ashley Judd has composed a memoir that teaches while it entrances and finds hope and faith in the most unlikely places. The book is full of real-life stories that reflect both the compassion of its author and the need for healing in the world.”—Madeleine K. Albright

SNEAK PEEK: The Girl From The Channel Islands by Jenny Lecoat

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Jocie McKade

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25 January 2021

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The Girl From The Channel Islands by Jenny Lecoat

A novel based on an incredible true story about a Jewish woman trapped on the German-occupied British Channel Islands during World War II, the man who loves her, and the friends who risk everything to hide her–perfect for fans of THE LOST GIRLS OF PARIS and THE GUERNSEY LITERARY AND POTATO PEEL PIE SOCIETY,

An extraordinary story of human triumph against impossible odds

The year is 1940, and the world is torn apart by war. In June of that year, Hitler’s army captures the Channel Islands–the only part of Great Britain to be occupied by German forces. Abandoned by Mr. Churchill, forgotten by the Allies, and cut off from all help, the Islands’ situation is increasingly desperate.

Hedy Bercu is a young Jewish girl who fled Vienna for the island of Jersey two years earlier during the Anschluss, only to find herself trapped by the Nazis once more–this time with no escape. Her only hope is to make herself invaluable to the Germans by working as a translator, hiding in plain sight wIth the help of her friends and community–and a sympathetic German officer. But as the war intensifies, rations dwindle, neighbors turn on neighbors, and Hedy’s life is in greater danger every day. It will take a definitive, daring act to save her from certain deportation to the concentration camps.

A sweeping tale of bravery and love under impossible circumstances, Hedy’s remarkable story reminds us that it’s often up to ordinary people to be quiet heroes in the face of injustice.

Wattpad Acquired By The South Korean Internet Conglomerate: Naver

By

Jocie McKade

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25 January 2021

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Wattpad Board of Directors Approves Agreement to be Acquired by Naver, the South Korean Internet Conglomerate and Home of WEBTOON™, a Leading Global Digital Comics Platform

The Board of Directors of Wattpad, the global multi-platform entertainment company for original stories and leading social storytelling platform, today announced its unanimous approval of a definitive agreement to be acquired by Naver, South Korea’s internet conglomerate and home of WEBTOON™, a leading global digital comics platform. Naver is expected to acquire Wattpad in a cash and stock transaction valued at more than an estimated USD $600 million, subject to customary adjustments and other terms.

The acquisition will allow Wattpad to continue to accelerate its international growth and success. The company will remain headquartered in Canada under the continued leadership of founders Allen Lau and Ivan Yuen.

As one of Korea’s largest publicly listed companies and a globally recognized technology powerhouse, Naver offers a world-class portfolio of search, e-commerce, fintech, communications / social networking, cloud service, content, and entertainment services and brands including Smart Stores, N Pay, WEBTOON, LINE, BAND, V Live, and Snow, among many others.

The move will align Wattpad, and its global community of more than 90 million people, with Naver’s WEBTOON™, a leading digital comics publisher with an average of 72+ million monthly active users. WEBTOON™ is home to some of the biggest names in webcomics, including Lore Olympus, Rachel Smythe’s Eisner Award-nominated series. WEBTOON Studios has worked with The Jim Henson Company; Crunchyroll; Vertigo Entertainment – the production company behind the IT franchise and The Lego Movie; Bound Entertainment – the global studio led by Snowpiercer and Okja producer Samuel Ha.

“Co-founders Allen Lau and Ivan Yuen, and the entire team at Wattpad, have created something special, and we are grateful to have Allen and Ivan continue to lead this fantastic company for us post-acquisition,” said Seong-Sook Han, CEO of Naver. “Wattpad’s vision to entertain and connect the world through stories fits perfectly with our vision for WEBTOON and Naver’s content brand. We’re thrilled to have them join the Naver family,” she added.

“Wattpad joining WEBTOON under the Naver umbrella is a big step towards us becoming a leading global multimedia entertainment company,” said WEBTOON founder and CEO, Jun Koo Kim. “Both Wattpad and WEBTOON care most about helping creators tell their story their way, and both represent world-leading collections of inspired, imaginative storytelling IP.”

“When we started Wattpad in 2006, we understood that technology would democratize storytelling and that stories are the atomic unit of every type of entertainment,” said Allen Lau, CEO & co-founder, Wattpad. “In 2021, when every form of entertainment is being transformed, we’ve built a platform that can fuel hits on screen and bookshelves, empowering and rewarding a new generation of diverse creators all over the world. Today’s news is about continuing Wattpad’s journey and taking our business to the next level. We’re thrilled about the prospect of joining the amazing teams at Naver and WEBTOON to continue our growth, help more writers make money, and bring new voices to screens and bookstores everywhere.”

Wattpad’s global community reached 90 million people in 2020 — including more than five million writers — who spend over 23 billion minutes a month engaged in original stories ranging from science fiction, to romance, fantasy, horror, and everything in between.

Wattpad stories have found enormous success on screens and in bookstores, and to date around 1,500 Wattpad stories have been published as books, or adapted for TV and film. Wattpad Studios, the company’s TV, film, and publishing division, has ushered in a new era of data and audience-driven entertainment all over the world. The company’s approach to finding and developing stories was awarded the prestigious Innovative Producer Award at the 2020 Banff World Media Festival. Wattpad Studios has established entertainment partnerships with some of the most important TV and film studios all over the world, developing TV shows and films across five continents, with companies like Bavaria Fiction (Germany), Mediawan (France), Wise Entertainment (Brazil), CBC (Canada), Picturestart (U.S.), MediaCorp (Singapore), and many others.

In 2019, Wattpad launched Wattpad Books, bringing diverse new voices to bookshelves everywhere. Wattpad Books has published 21 books to date.

Calls Across the Pacific by Zoe S Roy

By

Sheila English

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24 January 2021

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Fleeing the Cultural Revolution, Nina Huang says goodbye to her boyfriend and steals across the bay to Hong Kong, afterward immigrating to the U.S. and later to Canada. Twice she travels back to China to reunite with her mother as well as friends, and to see how Chinese society and politics are evolving. Nina puts herself in dangerous situations and to interview and record her contemporaries’ life experiences in China. She finds herself needing to escape from the red terror once again.

Calls Across the Pacific by Zoe S Roy.

Pulitzer Prize Winner Anthony Doerr To Publish New Novel::: Cloud Cuckoo Land

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Jocie McKade

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24 January 2021

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Scribner is thrilled to announce the publication of Cloud Cuckoo Land, the highly anticipated new novel from Anthony Doerr, whose critically-acclaimed 2014 novel All the Light We Cannot See has spent more than 200 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List, sold more than 5.5 million copies in North America across print, eBook, and audio formats and 9.3 million copies worldwide, and was the winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize. Cloud Cuckoo Land will be published on September 28, 2021.

Cloud Cuckoo Land follows three storylines: Anna and Omeir, on opposite sides of the formidable city wall during the 1453 siege of Constantinople; teenage idealist Seymour and gentle octogenarian Zeno, in an attack on a public library in present day Idaho; and Konstance, on an interstellar ship bound for a distant exoplanet, decades from now. A single copy of an ancient text—the story of Aethon, who longs to be turned into a bird so that he can fly to the paradise of Cloud Cuckoo Land—provides solace, mystery, and the most profound human connection to these five unforgettable characters. Like Marie-Laure and Werner in All the Light We Cannot See, Anna, Omeir, Zeno, Seymour, and Konstance are dreamers and misfits, on the cusp of adulthood, struggling to survive and finding resourcefulness and hope in the midst of peril.

“The world we’re handing our kids brims with challenges: climate instability, pandemics, disinformation,” said Doerr. “I wanted this novel to reflect those anxieties, but also offer meaningful hope, so I tried to create a tapestry of times and places that reflects our vast interconnectedness—with other species, with each other, with the ones who lived before us, and the ones who will be here after we’re gone. Along the way, Cloud Cuckoo Land became a paean to libraries large and small, and to our species’ extraordinary capacity to transmit stories from generation to generation. I’m thrilled to continue my 20-plus year relationship with the amazing Nan Graham and all the phenomenal people at Scribner and Simon & Schuster.”

“Anthony Doerr dazzles with every sentence, with his stunning imagination and boundless compassion. Cloud Cuckoo Land is about stewardship—of books, of the planet, of the human spirit,” said Nan Graham, Senior Vice President and Publisher of Scribner, and Doerr’s longtime editor. “Dedicated ‘to librarians then, now, and in the years to come,’ it is a novel to heal divides, a radiant light in our broken world—by a writer we have loved and published for more than twenty years.”

Anthony Doerr is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel All the Light We Cannot See, currently in development as a Netflix limited series. He is also the author of two story collections, Memory Wall and The Shell Collector; the novel About Grace; and the memoir Four Seasons in Rome, all published by Scribner. He has won five O. Henry Prizes, the Rome Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Story Prize. Doerr lives in Boise, Idaho, with his wife and two sons.

Public Libraries Check-Out Over 1-Million Digital Books

By

Jocie McKade

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24 January 2021

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Over 100 Public Libraries Exceed 1 Million Digital Book Checkouts in 2020

A record 102 public library systems from around the world empowered readers to borrow over 1 million ebooks and audiobooks from their digital collections in 2020. This represents the most systems ever to reach this milestone through OverDrive, the leading digital reading platform. Contributing factors include increased digital book usage due to the pandemic, elevated interest in social justice titles and BIPOC authors and strong circulation growth for children’s and young adult titles because of remote learning.

These 102 systems from the U.S., Canada, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand achieved the elite “Million Checkout Club” status with 29 reaching the milestone for the first time. Noteworthy achievements include Toronto Public Library attaining the highest number of checkouts in OverDrive history for the 8^th time (8 million), Santa Clara County Library (CA) attaining the highest year-over-year circulation growth (147%) of any Million Checkout Club library and Los Angeles Public Library earning the title of #1 library system in the U.S. for the second year in a row.

The complete list of Million Checkout Club libraries can be found here.

Weekend Crossword: Reader & Writer

By

Sheila English

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23 January 2021

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How good are you at crosswords? Challenge yourself to complete this crossword in the least amount of time! Online or Print

Reader & Writer Crossword

SNEAK PEEK: The Iron Queen Special Edition (The Iron Fey Book 3)

By

Jocie McKade

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23 January 2021

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The Iron Queen Special Edition (The Iron Fey Book 3) by Julie Kagawa

With more than one million books sold in North America and editions in 22+ countries worldwide, The Iron Fey series by Julie Kagawa is one of the biggest sensations to come out of Harlequin Teen/Inkyard Press. For fans of Sarah J. Maas, Cassandra Clare and Holly Black. The special edition repackages of the first four books will include bonus content.

Wicked faeries, betrayals and forbidden love… This special edition of The Iron Queen includes the bonus novella Summer’s Crossing and an excerpt from the new Iron Fey book, . The Iron Raven.

A storm is approaching, an army of Iron fey that will drag me into the core of a conflict so powerful, I’m not sure anyone can survive it.

Meghan Chase thought her time with the fey was over, that the sacrifices she had to make were done. But war is brewing as another Iron King rises to destroy the courts of Faery and corrupt the Nevernever forever. The age-old rivalry of the Summer and Winter courts must be put aside as the rulers prepare to face their mutual enemy…and Meghan must step up once more and finally claim her secret destiny. But first, she must make one final, heartbreaking sacrifice.

SNEAK PEEK: New Mysteries From Kensington Books

By

Jocie McKade

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23 January 2021

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Murder Can Haunt Your Handiwork – A Haunted Craft Fair Mystery #3
by Rose Pressey

In Rose Pressey’s third Haunted Craft Fair Mystery, a Gilded Age ghost helps psychic painter Celeste Cabot catch a killer during the Biltmore Estate’s annual craft fair in North Carolina…

Rising up against the beautiful backdrop of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Biltmore Estate is a magnificent mansion in Asheville, North Carolina, built as a summer home for George Washington Vanderbilt II–yes, of those Vanderbilts–during the Gilded Age. Nowadays, it’s the site of an annual craft fair. Unfortunately, it’s also about to become a crime scene…

Celeste is hard to miss as she pulls up with her pink and white Shasta trailer and adorable Chihuahua, Van Gogh–Van for short. But before she can show off her artwork at the fair, a tour guide is found strangled by a velvet rope barrier and a valuable painting goes missing. With a rogues’ gallery of sketchy suspects, Celeste welcomes the help of a pair of handsome detectives–and a ghost with a special interest in the case…

YOU CAN PURCHASE MURDER CAN HAUNT YOUR HANDIWORK AT:
Various Retailers

Absence of Alice – A Sarah W. Garage Sale Mystery #9
by Sherry Harris

For bargain hunter extraordinaire Sarah Winston, starting life over in Ellington, Massachusetts, has been a true trash-to-treasure success story, except when there’s a run on dead bodies…

Sarah’s latest client, Alice Krandle, is sure she has a fortune in antiques on her hands. She’s already gotten a generous offer for the whole lot before her garage sale has even begun, but she thinks she can earn more with Sarah’s expert help. The problem is that while Sarah’s sorting through items from decades past, her landlady, Stella, faces a clear and present danger.

Stella’s kidnapper has contacted Sarah with a set of instructions, and “Don’t call the police” is at the top of the list. But they didn’t say anything about Sarah’s friend Harriet–who happens to be a former F.B.I. hostage negotiator…

YOU CAN PURCHASE ABSENCE OF ALICE AT:
These Retailers

Murder with Oolong Tea – A Daisy’s Tea Garden Mystery #6
by Karen Rose Smith

In bestselling author Karen Rose Smith’s sixth delightfully devious Daisy’s Tea Garden Mystery, Pennsylvania Amish country’s favorite tea house proprietor, Daisy Swanson, finds herself going back to school expecting to serve tea–only to get a crash course in criminal justice!

The faculty of Willow Creek High School are having a get-together after the spring concert with refreshments provided, courtesy of Daisy’s Tea Garden. Oolong tea and chocolate biscuits are just what the staff needs to help them unwind from Althea Higgins’ demanding curriculum. Her lessons on such controversial subjects as school uniforms and under qualified substitute teachers are earning her an F from her colleagues.

But a failing grade was preferable to Althea falling victim to foul play. Daisy was there when her body was discovered in the school swimming pool, murdered by strangulation. Althea was certainly a strict, opinionated taskmaster, unliked by both teachers and students, but would any of them actually want to kill her? As Daisy starts asking questions, she gets a real education in Althea’s history, discovering more than enough enemies with more than enough motives to cancel her classes permanently…

YOU CAN PURCHASE MURDER WITH OOLONG TEA AT:
These Retailers