Top ten books about adopted and fostered children

Keren David's latest book Salvage is about siblings Aidan and Cass who were parted as young children.

One of the author's top ten books about adopted and fostered children, as shared at the Guardian:

Saffy’s Angel by Hilary McKay

Saffy doesn’t even realise that she was adopted by her aunt and uncle, until one fateful day when she looks at the paint chart where all the children’s names come from and realises that hers is not there. So begins a quest to discover her past, which takes her to Italy and uncovers some big secrets. First in the wonderful Casson family series.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

The top ten winters in literature

At the Guardian Richard Hirst tagged the top ten winters in literature, including:

The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard (1922)

There emerged towards the end of the 19th century a mini-industry based around polar exploration, and no voyage was complete without its heroes’ bestselling diaries and memoirs. The most enjoyable of these remains The Worst Journey in the World, a title which is no mere hyperbole. Apsley Cherry-Garrard, one of the survivors of Scott’s doomed 1910 expedition, wrote the book as a means of overcoming what would now be diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder. There is more than a touch of the absurd – the core of the narrative focuses on a perilous trek in search of a penguin egg – and in many ways Cherry-Garrard’s entirely needless suffering foreshadows that slouching towards Europe in the guise of the first world war. But what makes it such an engrossing read is his almost hallucinatory attention to detail: the frozen-rigid clothes limiting his movements, the blisters in his fingers turning to ice, and the maddening wide-open twilight of the Antarctic.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Worst Journey in the World is on Max Jones's top ten list of books about exploration, the Barnes & Noble Review's list of five top books on navigators, Ian Marchant's top ten list of books of the night, and the Barnes & Noble Review's list of five books on winter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eleven of 2014's best debut novels and story collections

Morgan Ribera rounded up eleven of 2014's best debut novels and story collections for Bustle. One title on the list:

Love Me Back by Merritt Tierce

Prepared to be wooed by the searing voice of Marie, the fiery but fragile narrator of Merritt Tierce’s first novel. Fierce, fearless, and unconventional, Tierce’s debut Love Me Back delivers a raw, startling portrait of the high-end service industry world through the eyes of one young woman on the brink of self-destruction. With lurid storytelling and seductive yet precise prose, Tierce turns a world we thought we knew into something strange, gritty, and wholly new.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten excellent books you might have missed in 2014

At The Christian Science Monitor Danny Heitman tagged ten excellent books you might have missed in 2014, including:

Blue Horses, by Mary Oliver

Oliver, a longtime New Englander now relocated to Florida, finds new territory to explore in these luminous poems about the natural world. A Transcendentalist in the Emersonian tradition, she reads her landscapes like Braille. Her poems so textured that they engage the fingertips as much as the eyes.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten teen books to save your life

Jennifer Niven's new novel is All the Bright Places.

At the Guardian she tagged her "top 10 lovely, tough, honest, and ultimately life-affirming YA books," including:

It’s Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini

Craig Gilner always thought he was brilliant and exceptional. Until he’s accepted at Manhattan’s elite Executive Pre-Professional High School, where he finds out he’s actually pretty average. Life as he’s always known it is over – suddenly his perfectly planned future seems improbable, maybe impossible. Craig stops eating and sleeping. And he tries to kill himself. He’s so rattled by the near-death experience, he checks himself into a mental hospital, where he attempts to put the pieces of himself and his life back together. Ned Vizzini tragically died of suicide in 2013, but what he’s created on these pages is a reassuringly funny, human, and touching tale of hope.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Page 69 Test: It's Kind of A Funny Story.

--Marshal Zeringue

The top ten stories of real-life peril

Emma Barrett is a Chartered Psychologist based in the United Kingdom. She is Honorary Researcher in Psychology at Lancaster University and is co-author, with Paul Martin, of Extreme: Why Some People Thrive at the Limits.

At the Guardian, Barrett and Martin tagged ten of their favorite books about and by people in extremes, including:

An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth by Chris Hadfield (Macmillan, 2013)

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield does a fine job of applying the lessons of space to everyday life on earth. Work hard, value learning, remember that the journey is worthwhile even if the destination seems unattainable, and keep things in proportion. And try to be nice. As Hadfield points out, “no one wants to go into space with a jerk”. Sound advice, indeed.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Page 99 Test: Extreme: Why Some People Thrive at the Limits.

--Marshal Zeringue

Fifteen of the spookiest books

One title on the Telegraph's list of the scariest books:

Heart-Shaped Box - Joe Hill (2007)

Like father like son... Joe Hill proved he is capable of writing tales as unsettling as those of his father Stephen King with this poltergeist caper about an ageing rock star who collects macabre memorabilia.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

The Christian Science Monitor's ten top nonfiction books, 2014

One of the ten nonfiction titles that the Christian Science Monitor’s book critics admired most in 2014:

Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy by Karen Abbott

Four women – two Union sympathizers and two proud Rebels – served their causes in surprising fashions during the US Civil War. Karen Abbott’s narrative gifts turn these real-life stories of espionage and remarkable derring-do into a true page turner.

Read about the other books on the list.

The Page 99 Test: Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top giraffes in children's books

Dianne Hofmeyr grew up on the tip of Southern Africa. An art teacher, she has written teenage novels and picture books, and has won the M-Net Award for fiction, as well as two IBBY Honor Books. Her books include Zeraffa Giraffa, The Faraway Island, The Star Bearer and The Magic Bojabi Tree.

At the Guardian she tagged ten top giraffes in children's books, including:

Abigail by Catherine Rayner

Abigail the giraffe, loves to count but is bedazzled by the stripes of the zebras and the splotches of the cheetah and utterly fails to count all their spots and stripes. But then she discovers there is one thing she is good at counting because of her very long neck – the stars. Beautifully illustrated across spreads that suggest the wide savannah and the large open night skies of Africa and where the size of Abigail is emphasised by having her half disappear off the page. Lovely splotchy end pages too.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five books that changed Carol Wall

Carol Wall was the author of Mister Owita's Guide to Gardening: How I Learned the Unexpected Joy of a Green Thumb and an Open Heart.

One of five books that changed her, as shared at the Sydney Morning Herald:

Washington Square
Henry James

What a great story—a masterpiece of storytelling. Not a single step is placed awry. I also found it amazing how much my students were drawn to the 1949 film adaptation, The Heiress, starring Olivia de Havilland. They would start off making snide remarks over being forced to watch an "old movie" in class. Invariably, they were racing to my classroom so that they could watch as much as possible during that day’s class time.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five books set on New Year’s Eve (and Day)

Jeff Somers is the author of Lifers, the Avery Cates series from Orbit Books, Chum from Tyrus Books, and We Are Not Good People from Pocket/Gallery. He has published over thirty short stories as well.

At The Barnes & Noble Book Blog Somers tagged five memorable books set on New Year’s Eve (and Day), including:

Bridget Jones’s Diary, by Helen Fielding

Let’s not dismiss this book—it’s a modern classic of its genre, and it’s easy to forget what a phenomenon it was back in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It’s also a book that begins on New Year’s Day and dives enthusiastically into one of the great inner monologues of modern literature, as Bridget worries, records, and contemplates the proper method of making and keeping resolutions almost from the book’s very first moment. Read it if you’re worried about breaking your New Year’s resolutions—it will remind that ultimately it probably doesn’t matter, as long as you enjoy the debacle.

Read about the other books on the list.

Bridget Jones's Diary also appears on Rebecca Jane Stokes's top eight list of books perfect for reality TV fiends, Melissa Albert list of six of the worst fictional characters to sit next to on a plane, Allegra Frazier's list of five top diary novels, Gigi Levangie Grazer's list of six favorite books that became movies, Caryn James's top five list of recent novels that channel classics, Sean O'Hagan's list of the ten best fictional hangovers in print, film and song, Christina Koning's list of the best of chick-lit, and a list of eight books for the broken-hearted.

Also see John Mullan's ten most notable New Years in literature.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top eleven mysteries of 2014

At MysteryPeople, Scott tagged his top eleven mysteries of 2014, including:

The Hollow Girl by Reed Farrel Coleman

The final Moe Prager novel deeply involves Coleman’s recurring theme of identity in a way that forces one of the most human private detectives ever put on the page to deal with his own concept of self. A pitch perfect swan song.

Read about the other books on the list.

The Page 69 Test: The Hollow Girl.

--Marshal Zeringue