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Graceling takes readers inside the world of Katsa, a warrior-girl in her late teens with one blue eye and one green eye. This gives her haunting beauty, but also marks her as a Graceling. Gracelings are beings with special talents—swimming, storytelling, dancing. Katsa's Grace is considered more useful: her ability to fight (and kill, if she wanted to) is unequaled in the seven kingdoms. Forced to act as a henchman for a manipulative king, Katsa channels her guilt by forming a secret council of like-minded citizens who carry out secret missions to promote justice over cruelty and abuses of power.

Combining elements of fantasy and romance, Cashore skillfully portrays the confusion, discovery, and angst that smart, strong-willed girls experience as they creep toward adulthood. Katsa wrestles with questions of freedom, truth, and knowing when to rely on a friend for help. This is no small task for an angry girl who had eschewed friendships (with the exception of one cousin that she trusts) for her more ready skills of self-reliance, hunting, and fighting. Katsa also comes to know the real power of her Grace and the nature of Graces in general: they are not always what they appear to be.

Graceling is the first book in a series, and Kristin Cashore’s first work of fiction. It sets up a vivid world with engaging characters that readers will certainly look forward to following beyond the last chapter of this book. (Ages 14 and up) --Heidi Broadhead

After a close encounter with a bomb, Detective Superintendent Andy Dalziel recuperates at the Avalon Clinic in the quaint seaside resort of Sandytown. But soon he begins to suspect that those outside the convalescent home have just as many problems as the residents.

There's a psychiatrist with more to hide than his patients, a pair of powerful landowners with very different plans for putting the resort on the map, a Chinese acupuncturist with a Yorkshire accent, a skinny-dipping baronet and his ice-box sister, and a man from Dalziel's past who ought to be dead.

When someone actually does turn up dead, and under the most macabre circumstances, Chief Inspector Peter Pascoe is called onto the scene. Together again, Dalziel and Pascoe investigate a baffling and complex case as further corpses make it increasingly hard for Sandytown to justify its claim to be "Home of the Healthy Holiday." But it's certainly been put on the map. . . .

This book is a tribute to every dog who has made it to that time of life when the hearing and eyesight begin to go, when the step becomes uncertain, but when other, richer traits ripen and coalesce. It is when a dog attains a special sort of dignity and a charm all his own.

If you've known a favorite old dog, you'll find him or her on these pages. Your dog might go by a different name and have a different shape, but you'll recognize him or her by the look in an eye or the contours of a life story. There is the dog who thinks he is a house cat; the herder, the fetcher, the punk and the peacock, the escape artist, the demolition artist, the patrician, the lovable lout, the amiable dope, the laughable clown, the schemer, the singer, the daredevil, the diplomat, the politician, the gourmand, and the thief. Plus, as a special bonus, you will find the first Latvian elkhounds ever photographed.

21 Nights takes the reader from the passenger seat of a limousine zipping through the streets of London to his sleeping quarters in a luxury hotel. In between we see him and his phenomenal band of musicians, singers and dancers backstage in the make up room to onstage, bathed in purple lights and a fog of gray smoke. Like a movie-in-a-book, readers are taken on his journey from London to Prague, in a style that takes glam rock to a new level.

Here's an adorable fuchsia carryall full of trés fabulous accessories—butterfly barrettes, a butterfly fan, glittery sunglasses, and more. It's a must-have, all-in-one emergency kit for girls on the go, because you never know when you'll need to get fancy! Throughout the book, the ultimate expert on all things fancy (that's Nancy, of course!) reveals her secret tips for instant glamourification—from hair to dolls to party invitations. There will be loud choruses of merci beaucoup when little girls receive this wonderful gift.