NBS recommends good leisure reads

Matched

By Ally Condie

P399

MANILA, Philippines - Cassia has always trusted the Society to make the right choices for her, so when Xander appears on-screen at her Matching ceremony, Cassia knows he is her ideal mate until Ky Markham’s face appears for an instant before the screen fades to black.

Dreamland

By Alyson Noel

P369

Riley’s finding that the afterlife can be a lonely place when all you do is focus on work. So she goes to the place where dreams happen, hoping to find a way to contact her sister, Ever. She meets the director, who tells her about the two ways to send dreams. As a Dream Jumper, a person can jump into a dreamer’s dream, share a message, and participate. As a Dreamweaver, an entire dream can be created in a studio and sent to the dreamer. But Dream weaving was outlawed decades ago, and the studio was boarded up. Thinking it’s her only way to reach out to her sister, Riley goes in search of the old studio. There she finds a ghost boy, who’s been creating and sending nightmares to people for years. In order to stop him and reach out to Ever, Riley is going to have to confront and overcome her own fears.

Robert Ludlum’s The Ares Decision

By Kyle Mills

P595

In northern Uganda, an American Special Forces team is decimated by a group of normally peaceful farmers. Video of the attack shows even women and children possessing almost supernatural speed and strength, consumed with a rage that makes them immune to pain, fear, and all but the most devastating injuries. Covert-One’s top operative, army microbiologist Colonel Jon Smith, is sent to investigate the attack and finds evidence of a parasitic infection that for centuries has been causing violent insanity and then going dormant. This time, though, it’s different. The parasite had been purposely kept alive and crudely transmitted in acts of terrorism. Now the director of Iranian Intelligence is in Uganda trying to obtain this biological weapon to unleash it on the West. Smith and his team are ambushed and cut off from all outside support just as they begin to suspect that forces much more powerful than the Iranians are in play, forces that can be traced to Washington itself.

The Race: An Isaac Bell Adventure

By Clive Cussler

P725

It is 1910, the age of flying machines is still in its infancy, and newspaper publisher Preston Whiteway is offering $50,000 for the first daring aviator to cross America in less than 50 days. He is even sponsoring one of the prime candidates (an intrepid woman named Josephine Frost) and that’s where Bell, chief investigator for the Van Dorn Detective Agency, comes in. Frost’s violent-tempered husband has just killed her lover and tried to kill her, and he is bound to make another attempt. Bell has tangled with Harry Frost before; he knows that the man has made his millions leading gangs of thieves, murderers, and thugs in every city across the country. He also knows that Frost won’t be only after his wife, but after Whiteway as well. And if Bell takes the case Frost will be after him, too.

The Best Of Me

By Nicholas Sparks

P549

In the fall of 1984, high school students Amanda Collier and Dawson Cole fell deeply, irrevocably in love. Though they were from opposite sides of the tracks, their love for one another seemed to defy the realities of life in the small town of Oriental, North Carolina. But as the summer of their senior year came to a close, unforeseen events would tear the young couple apart, setting them on radically divergent paths. Now, 25 years later, Amanda and Dawson are summoned back to Oriental for a funeral. Neither has lived the life they imagined and neither can forget the passionate first love that forever changed their lives. Forced to confront painful memories, the two former lovers soon realize that everything they thought they knew about themselves and the dreams they held dear was not as it seemed. And in the course of a single, searing weekend, they will ask of the living, and the dead: can love truly rewrite the past?

Modelland

By Tyra Banks

P675

No one gets in without being asked. And with her untamable hair, large forehead, and gawky body, Tookie De La Crème isn’t expecting an invitation. Modelland — the exclusive, mysterious place on top of the mountain — never dares to make an appearance in her dreams. But someone has plans for Tookie. Before she can blink her mismatched eyes, Tookie finds herself in the very place every girl in the world obsesses about. And three unlikely girls have joined her. Only seven extraordinary young women become Intoxibellas each year. Famous. Worshipped. Magical. What happens to those who don’t make it? Well, no one really speaks of that. Some things are better left unsaid. Thrown into a world where she doesn’t seem to belong, Tookie glimpses a future that could be hers if she survives the beastly Catwalk Corridor and terrifying Thigh-High Boot Camp. Or could it? Dark rumors like silken threads swirl around the question of why Tookie and her new friends were selected and the shadows around Modelland hide sinister secrets. Are you ready? Modelland is waiting for you.