New Arrivals In The Parent Teacher Section!

The library has added several titles to the Parent-Teacher section located downstairs in the library in the shelving unit across from the videos. These are the books with the dark green dots on their spins. Take some time to check out these new titles the next time you're in the library!

We have added the following titles from the Everything You Need To Know About ... Homework: A Desk Reference For Students And Parents for the fourth to sixth grade levels; all titles are written by Anne Zeman and Kate Kelly.

Science; PT/500/Zem
English; PT/372.6/Zem
World History; PT/909/Zem
American History; PT/973/Zem
Geography; PT/910/Zem
Math; PT/510/Zem

New Arrivals In Juvenile And Young Adult Fiction!

The library has added titles to its Juvenile and Young Adult fiction sections located downstairs in the library. Check out these new titles on your next visit!

Juvenile Fiction
Animal Ark: Mustang In The Mist by Ben M. Baglio; J/Fic/Bag

YA Fiction
Sunrise, Summer, and Between Sundays by Karen Kingsbury; YA/Fic/Kin
Trusting Him by Brenda Minton; YA/Fic/Min
See No Evil by Gayle Roper; YA/Fic/Rop
Sophie's Dilemma by Lauraine Snelling; YA/Fic/Sne

New Arrivals In DVD's and CD's!

The library has added some titles to its CD and DVD sections located downstairs. We hope you'll check out these titles during your next visit to the library!

DVD
The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada
The Simpsons Movie

CD
Hillbilly Deluxe Brooks & Dunn
Best Of Bowie David Bowie

The Messengers

The Messengers is a horror movie that stars Kristen Stewart, Dylan McDermott, Penelope Ann Miller, and John Corbett. The movie tells the story of Jess and her family who have moved from the big city to basically the middle of nowhere so that her father can try to make a go of a sunflower farm (yes, you read that right--a sunflower farm!). It is the new start that the family apparently so desperately needs. Before long Jess and her younger brother discover that the farmhouse is haunted with scary ghosts who may or may not wish the family harm.

I'm not really sure where to start with this movie. The film makes it obvious that Jess and her family share a troubled history that has created thick tension among its members. The nature of this history and the subsequent tension is alluded to and eventually explained towards the end of the film. However, the vibe that the family gives off on screen is that it's a blended family. For example, the tension between Jess and her mother seems more like the tension that would exist between a daughter and her stepmother, and this is reinforced by the more comfortable, less tension filled interactions between Jess and her father. There is also the large age difference between Jess who is 15 or 16 and her brother who is only about three years old. Obviously, the whole family dynamic distracted me throughout the film while I tried to figure them out.

The movie itself provides several thrills, chills, and scares. Ultimately, the movie was unoriginal plotwise, and there were plotholes that were never fully explained to my liking. The haunting itself and its cause and timing and the people involved aren't satisfactorily explained. If you are a die hard horror fan, you might want to check this movie out the next time you're in the library. It's located in the DVD section at the Matthews Public Library. Otherwise, you might want to try another scary movie.

--Reviewed by Ms. Angie

Lady In The Water

Lady In The Water is the most recent film by director M. Night Shyamalan. It stars Paul Giamatti and Bryce Dallas Howard. When this movie hit theaters, critics and reviewers were quick to pan it, and it was not a success at the box office. Honestly, I don't understand what all the ill will toward the movie was about. I enjoyed the movie--it pulls the viewer in to the story and doesn't let go until the end.

The movie is based on a bedtime story the director told his children and the movie itself feels like a bedtime story with its weird creatures, fantastical journey and archetypal characters. The odd camera angles and scene compositions add to the strangeness and mystery of the story in which the superintendent of an apartment building finds a sea nymph living in his building's pool. He is forced to band together with an unlikely group of tenants to protect this sea nympth from sinisterly scary creatures and help her find her way home. However, he must first find the right tenants for thier pre-destined roles that are vital to successfully getting the sea nympth home.

Ultimately, this movie is a weird fairy tale/bedtime story with a touch of humor and thrills. It is different from Shyamalan's other work, but it doesn't disappoint. If you enjoyed his other films, you will enjoy this one. This movie is available in the DVD section at the Matthews Public Library. I hope you'll check it out the next time you're in the library.

--Reviewed by Ms. Angie

Tagged--But Now You're "It"!

There's a "tag game" making the rounds on YouTube in which someone tags you at the end of thier video of Five Facts, and then it is your turn to share five fun facts about yourself and then tag five more people. We were tagged by a subscriber in Britain last week, and we have finally uploaded our video entitled "Tagged--But Now You're "It"!". We are sharing some fun facts about the library that you probably have not heard before and at the end we are tagging some people from our subscription list. It was a fun video to make, and it is probably my favorite video so far. I hope you'll check it out, and maybe even check out some other videos from the tag game. You can view our video here or at http://youtube.com/matthewslibrary.

We hope you enjoy "Tagged--But Now You're 'It'!"

New Arrivals In Books On CD!

The library has added several new popular titles to our books on CD section that located along the wall between books on tape and paperbacks. Titles are listed alphabetically by author last name and are located at call numbers CD/122 through CD/134.

Mister B. Gone by Clive Barker
Book of the Dead by Patricia Cornwell
The Chase by Clive Cussler
Protect and Defend by Vince Flynn
The Ghost by Robert Harris
20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill
Taken by Storm by Tami Hoag
Slam by Nick Hornby
Rhett Butler's People by Donald McCaig
The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta
Dark of the Moon by John Sandford
Crocodile on the Sandbank by Elizabeth Peters
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner

Check out these titles the next time you're in the library!

Keturah and Lord Death by Martine Leavitt

I will tell you a story that is all of those things, a story of magic and love, of daring and death, and one to comfort your heart. It will be the truest story I have ever told. Now listen, and tell me if it is not so.

I was sixteen years old the day I was lost in the forest, sixteen the day I met my death.

--from pages 9 and 10, Keturah and Lord Death

Oh, the books I've been reading lately. They are sad, sad, tragic tales that make my heart hurt... but they are written so beautifully, and it is often stories such as these that stay with me long after I've read the last page. I am referring to the previously reviewed Any Bitter Thing and the currenly reviewed Keturah and Lord Death, both of which I read over the past four days.

This books tells the (fairy) tale of Keturah, who is herself a skilled tale teller. Keturah repeatedly bargains for her life and the lives of those she loves with Lord Death by charming him with her gift for storytelling. She wins a twenty four hour reprieve from death to find her one true love and marry him; if she can do this, she can live longer than just one more day.

The fairy tale feel of the story is reinforced by the author's writing style that lends itself well to the fairy tale. The story itself is suspenseful, beautiful, heart pounding and heart breaking.

I hope you'll check it out the next time you're in the library where it is located at YA/Fic/Lea. It can also be requested from Lebanon Community Library and Richland Community Library.

--Reviewed by Ms. Angie

Any Bitter Thing by Monica Wood

I land directly on the yellow line--lined up neatly, head to toe--and rattle loose. The road feels forgiving and cool. Something breaks inside me, not only bones. I am thirty years old, with a husband and a good job and a best friend and students who need me and a hole in my life that I fall straight through.

Impossibly, I hear it all. The fading trail of the escaping Neon. The silence of my body laid upon the yellow stripe, waiting not to be revived but resurrected. Prone, waiting, in the middle of the road. The panicked engine sound weakens with distance, and I wait.

--from page 10, Any Bitter Thing, large print edition

Any Bitter Thing by Monica Wood is as heart breaking and tragic as it is beautiful. All of these things magnified by the beauty of the author's poetic writing as she tells the story of Lizzy Mitchell and her fractured childhood, past and family.

Lizzy's parents die when she is young, leaving her in the care of her uncle, a priest for a small Maine parish. She is nine when this idyllic childhood ends and is irrevokably tainted by the abuse accusations made by a bitter old parishioner. Lizzy is sent off to boarding school. Her uncle is sent off for "treatment" and soon a grieving Lizzy receives the news that her beloved uncle has died. Twenty years later when she is struck by a car and left for dead, a series of revelations is set into motion that reveal a series of old, shocking misunderstandings and betrayals that served to effectively end her childhood in Maine, sever all ties with the uncle she loved, and alter her life forever. Lizzy and her family embark upon a journey whose end will again forever alter their lives and relationships with each other.

You will not want to put this book down even as its events and revelations make your heart hurt for the tragedy that Lizzy had to survive and whose reverberations continue to shake her world down to its foundations. I highly recommend this book. It is available upon request through Interlibrary Loan.

--Reviewed by Ms. Angie

John Tucker Must Die

John Tucker Must Die stars Jesse Metcalfe, Brittany Snow, Ashanti, Sophia Bush, and Arielle Kebbel. Although this movie can easily be classified and dismissed as a "teen comedy movie," one shouldn't write it off solely for this reason because the movie lives up to being as funny as its previews suggest.

John Tucker is the star of the basketball team, and, as a result, he can date any girl in the school. Frequently he does so and often dates more than one girl at the same time. The girls he dates have no idea that he's dating them simultaneously. This continues until three of the girls meet up and put the pieces together. A fourth girl joins their group (who has not previously dated John Tucker) and gives them the idea to take out their rage on John Tucker instead of each other. John Tucker has no idea he has these four girls setting him to take a big fall. Hilarity and hi-jinks ensue throughout the movie as the girls try and fail a number of times to take John Tucker down a peg before finally hitting on an elaborate plan to humiliate and humble John Tucker before the entire high school once and for all. This movie offers several original, laugh out loud moments.

I highly recommend you check this movie out sometime when you're in the library. It will soon be available on shelf in the DVD section of Matthews Public Library.

--Reviewed by Ms. Angie

Pulse

The movie is called Pulse. Now that I think about it, I'm not really sure why it was titled this, but there it is. It stars Kristen Bell (of Veronica Mars fame) and Ian Somerhalder (of Lost fame). According to the DVD box, the dead have found a way to communicate with the living through electronics like computers, cell phones, etc. They can use this technology to reach out and touch the living and this is not a good thing. However, the movie itself never fully explains that the scary, gray beings who "come through" are dead people who just want to live again (as proclaimed by a preview); the characters in the movie only refer to these beings as "they" or "them."

Ultimately the film runs in a unexpected direction in that by the end of the movie, the scale of the impact of the dead taking over the airwaves is much more global than originally predicted. In some ways Pulse reminds me of zombie movies, which is, again, not what I anticipated. Finally, I was not satisfied with the ending. This is a case in which the ending greatly influenced how I felt about the entire movie: not good. I think I mentioned this in an earlier posting; sometimes the ending can really make or break a book or a movie for me. This was one of those cases.

Make no mistake; this is a scary movie, and if you enjoy apocalyptic, oh-my-god-we're-all-gonna-die-because-the-world-is-ending movies, you will not be disappointed in this one. One other disclaimer: if you are technology phobe or believe that tin foil protects your brain waves from the little green men in the sky, you do not want to, and probably should not, view this movie.

This movie is available upon request from Annville Free Library.

--Reviewed by Ms. Angie