Washoe County Library System

The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under -- maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche...

Mary Beth Latham is first and foremost a mother, whose three teenaged children come first, before her career as a landscape gardener, or even her life as the wife of a doctor. Caring for her family and preserving their everyday life is paramount. And so, when one of her sons, Max, becomes depressed, Mary Beth becomes focused on him, and is blindsided by a shocking act of violence.

The wondrous Aimee Bender conjures the lush and moving story of a girl whose magical gift is really a devastating curse.
On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents’ attention, bites into her mother’s homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother’s emotions in the cake. She discovers this...

When brain surgery makes a mouse into a genius, dull-witted Charlie Gordon wonders if it might also work for him. With more than five million copies sold, Flowers for Algernon is the beloved, classic story of a mentally disabled man whose experimental quest for intelligence mirrors that of Algernon, an extraordinary lab mouse. In poignant diary entries, Charlie tells how a brain operation increases his IQ and changes his life. As the experimental...

When Nicky Jack was a baby, his mother was murdered, and the town feared he was drowned in the creek where his pajamas were found. Thirty years later he has mysteriously returned and stirs up long-buried emotions and memories.

Helen Knightly, a middle-aged depressed divorcee, kills her elderly mother and reveals her miserable childhood, her life of obligation and pain, and her attempts to break free.

Emotions and thoughts of a woman, on the day she meets the man she loved, but did not marry.

In the second book in the Slammed series, Layken and Will's relationship has endured through hardships, heartache, and a cruel twist of fate, further solidifying the fact that they belong together. But the two lovers could not have expected that the things that brought them together may ultimately be the things that tear them apart. Their connection is on the brink of being destroyed forever and it will take an extraordinary amount of willpower to...

When Faye Travers appraises the estate of a family who descended from an Indian agent who worked on the North Dakota Ojibwe reservation that is home to her mother's family, she finds a rare drum. The story traces the drum's passage both backward and forward in time, from the reservation on the northern plains to New Hampshire and back.

A Black man's search for success and the American dream leads him out of college to Harlem and a growing sense of personal rejection and social invisibility.