Staff Picks
Check the blog every Wednesday for updates on what our staff is reading and watching and recommendations for our new and all-time favorite books and movies. What is your favorite book or movie? Post your answer in the comments section below. To see all previous Staff Picks posts, simply type "Staff Picks" in the search box at the top left of this blog and click the "search blog" button.

Loving Frank by Nancy Horan - recommended by Gayle and Lindy
"I have been standing on the side of life, watching it float by. I want to swim in the river. I want to feel the current." So writes Mamah Borthwick Cheney in her diary as she struggles to justify her clandestine love affair with Frank Lloyd Wright. Four years earlier, in 1903, Mamah and her husband, Edwin, had commissioned the renowned architect to design a new home for them. During the construction of the house, a powerful attraction developed between Mamah and Frank, and in time the lovers, each married with children, embarked on a course that would shock Chicago society and forever change their lives. In this groundbreaking historical novel, fact and fiction blend together. While scholars have largely relegated Mamah to a footnote in the life of America's greatest architect, author Nancy Horan gives full weight to their dramatic love story and illuminates Cheney's profound influence on Wright. Drawing on years of research, Horan weaves little-known facts into a narrative portraying the conflicts and struggles of a woman forced to choose between the roles of mother, wife, lover, and intellectual. Horan's Mamah is a woman seeking to find her own place, her own creative calling in the world, and her unforgettable journey, marked by choices that reshape her notions of love and responsibility, leads inexorably to this novel's conclusion. -Book Jacket.

All He Ever Wanted by Anita Shreve - recommended by Andrew
Etna Bliss just moved to the New England town where her uncle teaches college when her life is transformed in a single stroke. She is dining in a hotel downtown when a fire forces her to escape to the snowy streets outside. Amid the smoke and chaos of that night she is glimpsed, standing under a streetlight, by a man who was dining in the same room - a man who is so overwhelmed by the sight of her that he rebuilds his life around a single goal: to marry Etna Bliss. That man is Nicholas Van Tassel, and All He Ever Wanted is his account of how two lives changed from that tumultuous night forward. A proud and orderly man, Van Tassel is ill equipped to deal with the ferocity of love. But he is determined to have Etna, no matter what the cost. Riding a train south many years later, he unwinds his memories of the drama that followed and struggles to understand the mystery his life became on that night. -Book Jacket.

Slightly Dangerous by Mary Balogh - recommended by Gayle

Slightly Dangerous is the culmination of Balogh’s wonderfully entertaining Bedwyn series, in which each sibling in the aristocratic family finds the love of his or her life. Wulfric, the eldest brother, is known for his icy reserve, and, in fact, the formidable duke effectively stopped marriage-minded pursuits and was content with his mistress until she died. Invited to a house party, he unhappily finds himself in the company of Christine Derrick, the klutzy, impoverished widow of a viscount’s brother. Two more unsuitable lovers have never been imagined, but Balogh, famous for her believable characters and finely crafted Regency-era settings, forges a relationship that leaps off the page and into the hearts of her readers. The sixth title in a series would seem an unlikely point to begin, but Balogh includes the other five Bedwyn siblings and their loves in such a way as to delight readers familiar with them, and entice readers new to the series to read the previous installments. - Booklist Review.

MOVIE WATCH

Eastern Promises

Russian-born Nikolai Luzhin is a driver for one of London's most notorious organized crime families of Eastern European origin. The family itself is part of the Vory V Zakone criminal brotherhood. Semyon heads the syndicate and is the proprietor of a plush Trans-Siberian restaurant. But his friendliness at the restaurant masks a cold and brutal core. Fortunes are tested by Semyon's volatile son and enforcer, Kirill. But Nikolai's carefully maintained existence is jarred once he crosses paths at Christmastime with Anna Khitrova, a midwife at a North London hospital. Anna is deeply affected by the death of a teenager while giving birth to a baby. Anna resolves to try and trace the baby's lineage and relatives. The girl has a personal diary, but it is written in Russian. Anna's Russian-born uncle urges caution. Anna accidentally unleashed the full fury of the Vory. With Semyon and Kirill closing ranks and Anna pressing her inquiries, Nikolai unexpectedly finds his loyalties divided. Hanging in the balance is a harrowing chain of murder, deceit, and retribution. - Library Catalog.