Pierce County Library System
Information & Imagination

Hatchet
(Gary Paulsen)
Junior Fiction (195 pages) Recommended for Grades 5-12. After a plane crash, thirteen-year-old Brian spends fifty-four days in the wilderness, learning to survive with only the aid of a hatchet given him by his mother, and learning also to survive his parents' divorce. [Kit added 11/2012]

Heart of palm
(Smith, Laura Lee)
Utina, Florida, is a small, down-at-the-heels southern town. Once enlivened by the trade in Palm Sunday palms and moonshine, Utina hasn't seen economic growth in decades, and no family is more emblematic of the local reality than the Bravos. Deserted by the patriarch years ago, the Bravos are held together in equal measure by love, unspoken blame, and tenuously brokered truces. The story opens on a sweltering July day, as Frank Bravo, dutiful middle son, is awakened by a distress call. Frank dreams of escaping to cool mountain rivers, but he has only made it ten minutes from the family restaurant he manages every day and the decrepit, Spanish-moss-draped house he was raised in, and where his strong-willed mother and spitfire sister, both towering redheads, equally matched in stubbornness, are fighting another battle royale. Little do any of them know that Utina is about to meet the tide of development that has already engulfed the rest of Northeast Florida. When opportunity knocks, tempers ignite, secrets are unearthed, and each of the Bravos is forced to confront the tragedies of their shared past

High achiever: the incredible true story of one addict's double life
(Jenkins, Tiffany)
"When word got out that Tiffany Jenkins was withdrawing from opiates on the floor of a jail cell, people in her town were shocked. Not because of the twenty felonies she'd committed, or the nature of her crimes, or even that she'd been captain of the high school cheerleading squad just a few years earlier, but because her boyfriend was a Deputy Sherriff, and his friends--their friends--were the ones who'd arrested her. A raw and twisty page-turning memoir that reads like fiction, High Achiever spans Tiffany's life as an active opioid addict, her 120 days in a Florida jail where every officer despised what she'd done to their brother in blue, and her eventual recovery. With heart-racing urgency and unflinching honesty, Jenkins takes you inside the grips of addiction and the desperate decisions it breeds. She is a born storyteller who lived an incredible story, from blackmail by an ex-boyfriend to a soul-shattering deal with a drug dealer, and her telling brims with suspense and unexpected wit. But the true surprise is her path to recovery. Tiffany breaks through the stigma and silence to offer hope and inspiration to anyone battling the disease--whether it's a loved one or themselves."--Amazon

Hillbilly elegy: a memoir of a family and culture in crisis
(Vance, J. D.)
The Vance family story began with hope in postwar America. J.D.’s grandparents were “dirt poor and in love” and moved north from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually one of their grandchildren would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that J.D.’s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, never fully escaping the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. With piercing honesty, Vance shows how he himself still carries around the demons of his chaotic family history. A deeply moving memoir, with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.

Hippos are huge
(London, Jonathan, )
Juvenile Non-Fiction (29 pages) Recommended for Grades K-3. Overview: Hippos may make you laugh, but watch out! An acclaimed naturalist takes an exuberant look at these massive, swift, and super dangerous animals. What's the deadliest animal in Africa? It's not the lion or the crocodile-it's the hippopotamus! Hippos have razor-sharp tusks, weigh as much as fifty men, and can run twenty-five miles per hour! Follow these hefty hulks as they glide underwater, play tug-of-war, swat balls of dung at one another, and nuzzle their young in the mud. Just don't get too close-they could chomp you in two! [Kit added 1/2018]

Homework Machine, The
(Dan Gutman)
Junior Fiction (146 pages) Recommended for Grades 4-6. Four fifth-grade students, a geek, a class clown, a teacher's pet, and a slacker, as well as their teacher and mothers, each relate events surrounding a computer programmed to complete homework assignments. [Kit added 09/2009]

Housekeeping
(Marilynne Robinson)
The murder of a nobleman in eighteenth-century England leaves a grieving sister and little else. However, when Lady Farrell's husband is suspect in the murder of her brother, she seeks the help of Dr. Silkstone. Dr. Silkstone is a pioneer of forensic detection whose methods have left him an outsider. He agrees to examine the corpse but the keenest blade he will need is his intellect. [Fiction 219 pages] [Added 11/13

Huntress, The: a novel
(Quinn, Kate)
Stranded behind enemy lines, brave bomber pilot Nina Markova becomes the prey of a lethal Nazi murderess known as the Huntress and joins forces with a Nazi hunter and British war correspondent to find her before she finds them.