First & then by Emma Mills

First & then
Emma Mills
Fiction M625f

Devon Tennyson wouldn't change a thing. She's happy silently crushing on best friend Cas, and blissfully ignoring the future after high school. But the universe has other plans. It delivers Devon's cousin Foster, an unrepentant social outlier with a surprising talent, and the obnoxiously superior and maddeningly attractive jock, Ezra, right where she doesn't want them--first into her P.E. class and then into every other aspect of her life.


With wit, heart, and humor to spare, First & Then is a contemporary novel about falling in love--with the unexpected boy, with a new brother, and with yourself.

(from publisher)

The Sweetheart

The Sweetheart
Angelina Mirabella
Fiction M67s

It’s 1953 and seventeen-year-old Leonie Putzkammer feels destined to spend the rest of her life waiting tables and living with her widowed father, Franz, in their Philadelphia row house. Until the day legendary wrestling promoter Salvatore Costantini walks into the local diner and offers her the chance of a lifetime.

Leonie sets off for Florida to train at Joe Pospisil’s School for Lady Grappling. There, she transforms into Gorgeous Gwen Davies, tag-team partner of legendary Screaming Mimi Hollander, and begins a romance with the soon-to-be Junior Heavyweight Champion Spider McGee. But when life as Gorgeous Gwen leaves her wanting, she orchestrates a move that will catapult her from heel to hero: she becomes The Sweetheart, a choice that attracts the fans she desires but complicates all of her relationships—with Franz, Joe, Spider, Mimi (who becomes her fiercest competitor), and even with herself.

She triumphs, she fails, but somehow she manages to endure when the odds are never in her favor.  Her actions hold promise: if she can, maybe we can, too.  In a novel about wrestling, Angelina Mirabella tells a surprising, affecting, and morally complex story about the path to adulthood.

(From publisher.)

Skink No Surrender

Skink No Surrender
Carl Hiassen
Fiction H52s

Classic Malley: her parents are about to ship her off to boarding school, so she takes off with some guy she met online . . . 

Poor Richard: he's less of a rebel than Malley, and a lot less trusting. He knows his cousin is in trouble before she does. 

Wild Skink: he's a ragged, one-eyed, wandering vigilante, with perfect teeth. Also, a former governor of Florida. Also, supposedly dead. But he's a man who relishes a lost cause, and he's willling to do whatever it takes to find Malley. 

With Richard riding shotgun, this unlikely pair sets off on a breakneck chase, undaunted by blinding storms, crazed pigs, giant gators, and flying bullets.

In Carl Hiaasen's outrageous, hilarious, and wildly dangerous state of Florida, there are a million places an outlaw might stash a teenage girl. A million unpleasant ways to die. And two who'll risk everything to rescue a friend . . . and to, hopefully, exact a bit of swamp justice.

(From publisher.)

Bad Monkey

Bad Monkey
Carl Hiaasen
Fiction H52b 2014

Andrew Yancy-late of the Miami Police and soon-to-be-late of the Monroe County sheriff's office-has a human arm in his freezer. There's a logical (Hiaasenian) explanation for that, but not for how and why it parted from its shadowy owner. Yancy thinks the boating-accident/shark-luncheon explanation is full of holes, and if he can prove murder, the sheriff might rescue him from his grisly Health Inspector gig (it's not called the roach patrol for nothing).

But first-this being Hiaasen country-Yancy must negotiate an obstacle course of wildly unpredictable events with a crew of even more wildly unpredictable characters, including his just-ex lover, a hot-blooded fugitive from Kansas; the twitchy widow of the frozen arm; two avariciously optimistic real-estate speculators; the Bahamian voodoo witch known as the Dragon Queen, whose suitors are blinded unto death by her peculiar charms; Yancy's new true love, a kinky coroner; and the eponymous bad monkey-who just may be one of Carl Hiaasen's greatest characters. 


(From publisher.)