Special Collections

Girls Made of Snow and Glass

by Melissa Bashardoust

Sixteen-year-old Mina is motherless, her magician father is vicious, and her silent heart has never beat with love for anyone―has never beat at all, in fact, but she’d always thought that fact normal. She never guessed that her father cut out her heart and replaced it with one of glass. When she moves to Whitespring Castle and sees its king for the first time, Mina forms a plan: win the king’s heart with her beauty, become queen, and finally know love. The only catch is that she’ll have to become a stepmother.

Fifteen-year-old Lynet looks just like her late mother, and one day she discovers why: a magician created her out of snow in the dead queen’s image, at her father’s order. But despite being the dead queen made flesh, Lynet would rather be like her fierce and regal stepmother, Mina. She gets her wish when her father makes Lynet queen of the southern territories, displacing Mina. Now Mina is starting to look at Lynet with something like hatred, and Lynet must decide what to do―and who to be―to win back the only mother she’s ever known…or else defeat her once and for all.

Entwining the stories of both Lynet and Mina in the past and present, Girls Made of Snow and Glass traces the relationship of two young women doomed to be rivals from the start. Only one can win all, while the other must lose everything―unless both can find a way to reshape themselves and their story.

Date Added: 05/17/2018

Loonglow

by Helen Eisenbach

Young New Yorkers negotiate challenging relationships in this &“sharp, witty and touching&” novel of friendship, sex, and love (Time Out). Manhattan offers the promise of escape for an aimless young man from Memphis. When Clay Lee comes to town hoping to take refuge from family ghosts, he has no idea that a fleeting encounter with an impossibly beautiful woman will upend his life. What begins as a brief obsession becomes the catalyst for exploring the meaning of love itself—in ways Clay could never have anticipated. As he attempts to get his hard-won lessons into focus—and print—he enters a world he didn&’t know existed.   Wry New York book editor Louisa Mercer has a puzzle she can&’t solve: Her love affair with the dazzling, mercurial Mia D&’Allesandro has imploded for reasons she can&’t pinpoint, and she can&’t seem to break its spell. When Louey discovers a manuscript with more than a few direct applications to her own life, her collaboration with its author transforms them both.   With New York City as its glittering backdrop, Loonglow explores the exhilarating and heartbreaking turns that life delivers to both the victors and the victims of love.

Date Added: 05/17/2018

The Ladies

by Doris Grumbach

A tender and imaginative retelling of the adventures of two of history&’s most compelling women In 1778 Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby left County Kilkenny for Wales to live together as a married couple. Both well born, highly educated Irish women, the Ladies of Llangollen, as they came to be known, defied all eighteenth-century social convention and spent half a century together in a loving relationship. Removed from the intrusive gaze of the world, the fictional Eleanor and Sarah retreat to their shared home to study literature and language and enjoy their solitude. In an imagined account, Doris Grumbach brings this gripping chronicle to new audiences. With a keen sense of the rhythms and routines of longtime partnership, Grumbach breathes vivid life into this fascinating story of a passion both shocking and steadfast.

Date Added: 05/17/2018