Katelynn's Staff Picks

I’ve been in love, well maybe not love, but a strong liking with Good Eats for a while now. Mainly since when I was up late one night I found it to be completely entertaining to make a board game out of beans. Of course I was completely intrigued by it in book form. It’s great.

On a soft summer night in Vermont, Lisa went into the woods behind her house and never came out again. Before she disappeared, she told her little brother, Sam, about a door that led to a magical place where she would meet the King of the Fairies and become his queen. Fifteen years later, Phoebe is in love with Sam, a practical, sensible man who doesn’t fear the dark and doesn’t have bad dreams—who, in fact, helps Phoebe ignore her own. But suddenly the couple is faced with a series of eerie, unexplained occurrences that challenge Sam’s hardheaded, realistic view of the world. As they question their reality, a terrible promise Sam made years ago is revealed—a promise that could destroy them all.

Anyone whom I’m friends with can tell you, at any given moment I will blurt out some line of Mater’s. Most famously, “Mater, like Ta Mater but without the Ta,” so I was shocked to find out that Mater went to the moon for a rescue tow operation.

Philip Pullman's trilogy is a masterpiece that transcends genre and appeals to readers of all ages. His heroine, Lyra, is an orphan living in a parallel universe in which science, theology, and magic are entwined. The epic story that takes us through the three novels is not only a spellbinding adventure featuring armored polar bears, magical devices, witches, and daemons, but a true coming of age story, rebound into one beautiful volume.