Pierce County Library System
Information & Imagination

Family upstairs, The
(Jewell, Lisa)
"Soon after her twenty-fifth birthday, Libby Jones returns home from work to find the letter she's been waiting for her entire life. She rips it open with one driving thought: I am finally going to know who I am. She soon learns not only the identity of her birth parents, but also that she is the sole inheritor of their abandoned mansion on the banks of the Thames in London's fashionable Chelsea neighborhood, worth millions. Everything in Libby's life is about to change. But what she can't possibly know is that others have been waiting for this day as well--and she is on a collision course to meet them. Twenty-five years ago, police were called to 16 Cheyne Walk with reports of a baby crying. When they arrived, they found a healthy ten-month-old happily cooing in her crib in the bedroom. Downstairs in the kitchen lay three dead bodies, all dressed in black, next to a hastily scrawled note. And the four other children reported to live at Cheyne Walk were gone.

Feather thief, The: beauty, obsession, and the natural history heist of the century
(Johnson, Kirk W.)
On a cool June evening in 2009, after performing a concert at London's Royal Academy of Music, twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist boarded a train for a suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History. Home to one of the largest ornithological collections in the world, the Tring museum was full of rare bird specimens whose gorgeous feathers were worth staggering amounts of money to the men who shared Edwin's obsession: the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying. Once inside the museum, the champion fly-tier grabbed hundreds of bird skins--some collected 150 years earlier by a contemporary of Darwin's, Alfred Russel Wallace, who'd risked everything to gather them--and escaped into the darkness. Two years later, Kirk Wallace Johnson was waist high in a river in northern New Mexico when his fly-fishing guide told him about the heist. He was soon consumed by the strange case of the feather thief. What would possess a person to steal dead birds?

Fever, 1793
(Anderson, Laurie Halse)
Young Adult Fiction (243 pages) Recommended for Grades 6-9. The year is 1793 and fourteen-year-old Matilda Cook finds herself in the middle of a struggle to keep herself and her loved ones alive in the midst of the yellow fever epidemic. [Kit added 9/2009]

Fine, Fine School, A
(Sharon Creech)
Easy fiction (32 pages) Recommended for Grades PreK-3. When a principal loves his school so much that he wants the children to attend classes every day of the year, it's up to his students to show him free time is a good thing, too. [Kit added 11/2012]

First rule of punk, The
(Perez, Celia C. )
Recommended for Grades 4-7. Twelve-year-old Maria Luisa O'Neill-Morales (who really prefers to be called Malu) reluctantly moves with her Mexican-American mother to Chicago and starts seventh grade with a bang--violating the dress code with her punk rock aesthetic and spurning the middle school's most popular girl in favor of starting a band with a group of like-minded weirdos.

Fish in a tree
(Hunt, Lynda Mullaly)
Recommended for Grades 6-8. "Ally's greatest fear is that everyone will find out she is as dumb as they think she is because she still doesn't know how to read"-- Provided by publisher.

Five days at Memorial: life and death in a storm-ravaged hospital
(Fink, Sheri.)
Fink provides a landmark investigation of patient deaths at a New Orleans hospital ravaged by Hurricane Katrina-- and a suspenseful portrayal of the quest for truth and justice. After Katrina struck and the floodwaters rose, the power failed, and the heat climbed, exhausted caregivers chose to designate certain patients last for rescue. Months later, several health professionals faced criminal allegations that they deliberately injected numerous patients with drugs to hasten their deaths. Fink unspools the mystery of what happened in those days, bringing the reader into a hospital fighting for its life and into a conversation about the most terrifying form of health care rationing

Flat Stanley: His Original Adventure
(Jeff Brown)
Junior Fiction (72 pages) Recommended for Grades 1-5. After a bulletin board falls on Stanley while he is sleeping, he finds that being flat has its advantages. [Kit added 11/2012]

Fleishman is in trouble: a novel
(Brodesser-Akner, Taffy)
Dr. Toby Fleishman wakes up each morning surrounded by women. Women who are self-actualized and independent and know what they want--and, against all odds, what they want is Toby. Who knew what kind of life awaited him once he finally extracted himself from his nightmare of a marriage? Who knew that there were women out there who would actually look at him with softness and desire? But just as the winds of his optimism are beginning to pick up, they're quickly dampened, and then extinguished, when his ex-wife, Rachel, suddenly disappears. Toby thought he knew what to expect when he moved out: weekends and every other holiday with the kids, some residual bitterness, tense co-parenting negotiations. He never thought that one day Rachel would just drop their children off at his place and never come back.

Flight attendant: a novel
(Bohjalian, Chris)
Cassandra Bowden is no stranger to hungover mornings. She's a binge drinker, her job with the airline making it easy to find adventure, and the occasional blackouts seem to be inevitable. She lives with them, and the accompanying self-loathing. When she awakes in a Dubai hotel room, she tries to piece the previous night back together, counting the minutes until she has to catch her crew shuttle to the airport. She quietly slides out of bed, careful not to aggravate her already pounding head, and looks at the man she spent the night with. She sees his dark hair. His utter stillness. And blood, a slick, still wet pool on the crisp white sheets. Afraid to call the police -- she's a single woman alone in a hotel room far from home -- Cassie begins to lie. She lies as she joins the other flight attendants and pilots in the van. She lies on the way to Paris as she works the first class cabin. She lies to the FBI agents in New York who meet her at the gate. Soon it's too late to come clean, or face the truth about what really happened back in Dubai. Could she have killed him? If not, who did?