Staff Favorites | Ritter Public Library

Description

From creator, Taylor Sheridan comes a prequel to Yellowstone. It follows the original Dutton family as they embark on a journey west through the Great Plains toward the last bastion of untamed America. It's a stark retelling of Western expansion, and an intense study of one family fleeing poverty to seek a better future in America's promised land Montana.

2) All the beauty in the world: the Metropolitan Museum of Art and me

Author

Bringley, Patrick

Formats:

Book, Audiobook CD, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle

Description

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An "exquisite" (The Washington Post) "hauntingly beautiful" (Associated Press) portrait of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and its treasures by a former New Yorker staff who spent a decade as a museum guard. Millions of people climb the grand marble staircase to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art every year. But only a select few have unrestricted access to every nook and cranny. They're the guards who roam unobtrusively in dark blue suits, keeping...

3) All the living and the dead: from embalmers to executioners, an exploration of the people who have made death their life's work

Author

Campbell, Hayley

Notes

The author reports on the many people who work with death daily, from the funeral director to the executioner. This novel is truly fascinating. If you have ever been curious about how the work is carried out or how it impacts the individuals that labor in these arenas, don't hesitate to check this title out! -Angela

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle

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"A deeply compelling exploration of the death industry and the people--morticians, detectives, crime scene cleaners, embalmers, executioners--who work in it and what led them there. We are surrounded by death. It is in our news, our nursery rhymes, our true-crime podcasts. Yet from a young age, we are told that death is something to be feared. How are we supposed to know what we're so afraid of, when we are never given the chance to look? Fueled by...

4) Annihilation

Author

VanderMeer, Jeff

Series

Southern Reach novels volume 1

Notes

Annihilation will pull you into its mysterious, atmospheric setting. Its unusual combination of scifi, thriller, and horror elements keeps this tightly-written novel propulsive and engaging. You'll walk away wanting to devour the rest of the series. The fourth and final entry in the series, Absolution, just released this fall. -Chloe

Formats:

Book, Audiobook CD, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle

Description

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Area X has been cut off from the rest of the world for years. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. Expeditions into Area X have ended in disaster or death. In Annihilation, the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy, we join the latest expedition. The group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and the narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the...

5) Assistant to the villain

Author

Maehrer, Hannah Nicole

Series

Assistant and the villain volume 1

Notes

What a fun fantasy read! -Emma

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle, Large Print

Description

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"ASSISTANT WANTED: Notorious, high-ranking villain seeks loyal, levelheaded assistant for unspecified office duties, supporting staff for random mayhem and terror, and other Dark Things In General. Discretion a must. Excellent benefits. With ailing family to support, Evie Sage's employment status isn't just important, it's vital. So when a mishap with Rennedawn's most infamous Villain results in a job offer--naturally, she says yes. No job is perfect,...

6) Avatar, the last airbender: The complete book 1 collection =Jiang shi shen tong

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After a lapse of 100 years, the Avatar-spiritual master of the elements has returned. And just in the nick of time. The Four nations (Water, Earth, Fire and Air) have become unbalanced. The Fire Nation wants to rule the world, and its first conquest will be the Northern Water Tribe. It's up to a 12-year-old Airbender named Aang to find a way to stop it. He is the Chosen One, who must forgo his selfish wandering to learn to master his latent powers...

7) Babel: or the necessity of violence : an arcane history of the Oxford translators' revolution

Author

Kuang, R. F

Series

Thorndike Press Large Print

Formats:

Audiobook CD, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle, Large Print

Description

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"From award-winning author R.F. Kuang comes Babel, a thematic response to The Secret History and a tonal retort to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell that grapples with student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of language and translation as the dominating tool of the British empire. Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal. 1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious...

8) Be not far from me

Author

McGinnis, Mindy

Formats:

Book, Audiobook CD, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle

Description

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Lost in the Great Smoky Mountains, rising high school senior Ashley Hawkins must fight for survival without any tools, growing in awareness that the world is not tame, and neither are people. When Ashley goes hiking in the Smokies with her friends for a night of partying, the falling dark and creaking trees are second nature to her. Catching her boyfriend with another girl, drunken rage sends Ashley running into the night, stopped only by a nasty...

9) Beetlejuice

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After Barbara and Adam Maitland are killed in a car crash, they find themselves trapped as ghosts in their beautiful New England farmhouse. Their peaceful 'existence' is disrupted when a yuppie family, the Deetz's, buy their house. The Maitlands are too nice and harmless as ghosts and all their efforts to scare the Deetz's away are unsuccessful. They decide to call to Beetlejuice, a people-exorcizing ghost, for help.

10) The Briar Book of the Dead

Author

Slatter, A. G

Formats:

eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle

Description

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Set in the same universe as the acclaimed All the Murmuring Bones and The Path of Thorns (one of Oprah Daily's Top 25 Fantasy Novels of 2022), this beautifully told Gothic fairy tale of ghosts, witches, deadly secrets and past sins, will be perfect for fans of Hannah Whitten and Ava Reid.
Ellie Briar is the first non-witch to be born into her family for generations. The Briar family of witches run the town of Silverton, caring for its inhabitants...

11) Bride

Author

Hazelwood, Ali

Series

Thorndike Press large print romance

Notes

Yes. A thousand times yes. Ali Hazelwood has yet to disappoint me! I wish it was a series! -Emma

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle, Large Print, Playaway

Description

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"A dangerous alliance between a Vampyre bride and an Alpha werewolf becomes a love deep enough to sink your teeth into in this new paranormal romance from the New York Times bestselling author of The Love Hypothesis. Misery Lark, the only daughter of the most powerful Vampyre councilman of the Southwest, is an outcast-again. Her days of living in anonymity among the Humans are over: she has been called upon to uphold a historic peacekeeping alliance...

12) The butcher of the forest

Author

Mohamed, Premee

Formats:

Book, eBook, Kindle

Description

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"At the northern edge of a land ruled by a merciless foreign tyrant lies a wild, forbidden forest ruled by powerful magic. Veris Thorn--the only one to ever enter the forest and survive--is forced to go back inside to retrieve the tyrant's missing children. Inside await traps and trickery, ancient monsters, and hauntings of the past"--

13) Calamity

Author

Fay, Constance

Series

Uncharted hearts volume 1

Notes

Humorous, sci-fi, action, romance with a found family? yes please! I really enjoyed this book and am so excited that it's apart of a series! -Emma

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle

Description

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"The captain of a ragtag mercenary ship is given an offer she can't refuse by the ruthless head of an intergalactic noble family. The only catch? She'll have to team up with his son--an upsettingly competent hardbody with his own agenda--to get her reward. She's got a ramshackle spaceship, a misfit crew, and a big problem with its sexy newest member... Temperance Reed, banished from the wealthy and dangerous Fifteen Families, just wants to keep her...

14) Canadian boyfriend

Author

Holiday, Jenny

Notes

I'm so impressed with this book and I wasn't expecting that. Going into this book, I figured it was going to be one big miscommunication trope and although it did feature a, in my opinion, SLIGHT miscommunication trope, it was so uniquely different!! I felt like these characters in this book actually acknowledged their mistakes and OWNED UP TO THEM. We're all human, we go through things, we make mistakes, but in all, we're learning, healing and doing our best! -Emma

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle

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"Once upon a time teenage Aurora Evans met a hockey player at the Mall of America. He was from Canada. And soon, he was the perfect fake boyfriend, a get-out-of-jail-free card for all kinds of sticky situations. I can't go to prom. I'm going to be visiting my boyfriend in Canada. He was just what she needed to cover her social awkwardness. He never had to know. It wasn't like she was ever going to see him again... Years later, Aurora is teaching kids'...

15) Check & mate

Author

Hazelwood, Ali

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle, Playaway

Description

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After chess led to the destruction of her family four years earlier, Mallory Greenleaf's focus is a dead-end job that keeps the lights on for her mother and sisters. When she plays in a charity tournament and wipes the board with current world champion Nolan Sawyer, the victory opens the door to sorely needed cash prizes. Mallory struggles to keep her family separated from the game, but she soon realizes that the games aren't only on the board. The...

16) Company

Author

Barry, Max

Formats:

eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle

Description

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Stephen Jones is a shiny new hire at Zephyr Holdings. From the outside, Zephyr is just another bland corporate monolith, but behind its glass doors business is far from usual: the beautiful receptionist is paid twice as much as anybody else to do nothing, the sales reps use self help books as manuals, no one has seen the CEO, no one knows exactly what they are selling, and missing donuts are the cause of office intrigue. While Jones originally

...

17) The coworker

Author

McFadden, Freida

Series

Thorndike Press large print thriller adventure and suspense

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, Large Print

Description

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"Dawn Schiff is strange. At least, everyone at work thinks so. She never says the right thing. She has no friends. And she is always at her desk at precisely 8:45 a.m. So when Dawn doesn't show up to the office one morning, her coworker Natalie Farrel--beautiful, popular, top sales rep five years running--is surprised. Then she receives an unsettling, anonymous phone call that changes everything. Now, Natalie is irrevocably tied to Dawn as she finds...

18) Diavola

Author

Thorne, Jennifer

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle

Description

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"Anna has two rules for the annual Pace family destination vacations: Tread lightly and survive. It isn't easy when she's the only one in the family who doesn't quite fit in. Her twin brother, Benny, goes with the flow so much he's practically dissolved, and her older sister, Nicole, is so used to everyone--including her blandly docile husband and two kids--falling in line that Anna often ends up in trouble for simply asking a question. Mom seizes...

19) Dragon Ball Z Kai: Season one, episodes 1-26

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Goku, Earth's greatest champion, bravely defends humanity against an invading race of warriors known as the Saiyans. When the mighty hero falls, his young son Gohan rises up to face the very villains who murdered his father. The battle rages through space to Planet Namek, where Gohan and his overmatched allies risk their lives to defeat the Saiyan warload Vegeta, and the monster known as Frieza!

20) The Dragon King's imperial wrath: falling in love with the bookish princess of the Rat Clan.1

Author

Shikimi, Aki

Series

Dragon King's imperial wrath volume 1

Description

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"Thirteen clans rule the land, and the Rat Clan is the weakest. Ruiying, the princess of the Rat Clan, is summoned to the land of the dominating Dragon Clan along with princesses from the other clans. The Dragon King seeks a bride, and they are all candidates! Yet instead of vying for the Dragon King's favor, Ruiying takes refuge in the palace's enormous library--a place she can read to her heart's content. It's there that the Dragon King discovers...