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Hotlists 2008

Fiction | Zoho DB

Crime Fiction | Zoho DB

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Seeing Stars

Lists of (mostly) hardcover books which received at least one starred review (indicating a work of unusual merit) from the following review sources: Booklist , Publisher's Weekly (PW), Kirkus and Library Journal (LJ).

The review journal assigns the star.

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Overbooked specializes in providing timely information about fiction (all genres) and readable nonfiction. Overbooked has been online since 1994. Overbooked is a work in progress . . .

Overbooked is the winner of the 2008 Louis Shores - Greenwood Publishing Award: to recognize excellence in book reviewing and other media for libraries. The award recipient is selected for significant achievement related to a reviewing process that helps librarians make selection decisions.

Starred Reviews

All Stars - 2000

August 19, 2008

• The Toughest Indian In the World: Stories
  Author: Alexie, Sherman
  Publisher: Atlantic Monthly $ 24 ISBN: 0871138018
  Publishers Weekly Booklist Kirkus
  The author of Reservation Blues now presents an anthology pf love stories--his first since the bestselling The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven.
  Updated 4/17/00.
• Blind Assassin
  Author: Atwood, Margaret
  Publisher: Bantam $ 26 ISBN: 0385475721
  Booklist Kirkus Publishers Weekly Library Journal
  Containing a novel within a novel, The Blind Assassin is a science fiction story told by two unnamed lovers who meet in dingy backstreet rooms. Told in a style that magnificently captures the colloquialisms of the 1930s and 1940s, it unfolds layer by astonishing layer and concludes in a brilliant and wonderfully satisfying twist.
  Updated 8/23/00
• The Year of Jubilo: A Novel of the Civil War
  Author: Bahr, Howard
  Publisher: Henry Holt $ 25 ISBN: 0805059725
  Kirkus Publishers Weekly Library Journal
  Written with scrupulous respect for historical accuracy, The Year of Jubilo is the story of Civil War soldier Gawain Harper, who returns to his home in Cumberland, Mississippi, only to find that a showdown awaits him that once again pits South against North, and dignity against defeat.
  Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars | Civil War Fiction
  Updated 3/16/00.
• Master of the Crossroads
  Author: Bell, Madison Smartt
  Publisher: Pantheon $ 30 ISBN: 0375420568
  Booklist Publishers Weekly Library Journal
  Against the 1793 slave revolt of Haiti's Saint Dominigue, the author of All Souls' Rising gives a kaleidoscope portrait of the remarkable Toussaint Louverture. The black leader's beliefs, passions, and compulsions unfold over the course of seven tumultuous years.
  Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars
  Updated 9/29/00
• Ravelstein
  Author: Bellow, Saul
  Publisher: Viking $ 22.50 ISBN: 067084134x
  Kirkus Publishers Weekly Booklist Library Journal
  When Abe Ravelstein, a brilliant professor, suggests that his friend write a memoir or life of him, the two share a celebratory trip to Paris where they explore thoughts on mortality, philosophy, history, old suits, and friends old and new. The mood of this journey turns more somber once they have returned to the Midwest and Ravelstein succumbs to AIDS in this elegy to friendship and lives well (or badly) lived. Excerpted in The New Yorker.
• A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You
  Author: Bloom, Amy
  Publisher: Random House $ 22.95 ISBN: 0375502688
  Kirkus Publishers Weekly Booklist
  The author of Come to Me and Love Invents Us now presents a stunning new collection of short stories on the frontiers of emotion.
  Updated 6/12/00
• Don't Tell Anyone
  Author: Busch, Frederick
  Publisher: Norton $ 25.95 ISBN: 0393049736
  Publishers Weekly Booklist Library Journal
  The hungers of love and the fear of time drive the men and women, sons and daughters in these stories to speak. Busch renders precisely the need to connect and shows readers the ways--funny, tender and heartbreaking--in which connections, in spite of love, often fail.
  Updated 10/23/00
• Girl With a Pearl Earring
  Author: Chevalier, Tracy
  Publisher: Dutton $ 23.95 ISBN: 052594527x
  Publishers Weekly Kirkus Booklist
  With the precision and focus of an Old Master's painting, Girl with a Pearl Earring paints a vivid portrait of colorful 17th-century Delft, as well as the hauntingly poignant story of one young girl's rite of passage.
  Suggested Reading: Vermeer | Historical Fiction Stars | Biographical Fiction
• Being Dead
  Author: Crace, Jim
  Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux $ 23 ISBN: 0374110131
  Kirkus Publishers Weekly Booklist
  A haunting new novel about love, death and the afterlife by the award-winning author of Quarantine. Baritone Bay, mid-afternoon: A couple, naked, married almost 30 years, lies murdered in the dunes.
  Updated 4/17/00.
• Fasting, Feasting
  Author: Desai, Anita
  Publisher: Mariner $ 13 (trade paper) ISBN: 0618065822
  Publishers Weekly Booklist Library Journal
  Short-listed for the 1999 Booker prize.
• The Best of Jackson Payne
  Author: Fuller, Jack
  Publisher: Knopf $ 25 ISBN: 0375405356
  Publishers Weekly Booklist Library Journal
  A musicologist sets out to explain the life and work of the tormented African-American jazz saxophone player, Jackson Payne. As he discovers the family secrets that tortured Payne and the musical doubts that haunted him, the musicologist begins to fathom the depths of his own obsessions.
  Suggested Reading: Music - Fiction Stars
  Updated 5/19/00.
• Wild Life
  Author: Gloss, Molly
  Publisher: Simon & Schuster $ 24 ISBN: 0684867982
  Kirkus Publishers Weekly Booklist
  A free-thinking, fiercely independent writer of women's adventure stories finds herself in a mysterious world that challenges her concept of reality, after she agrees to join a search party for a missing child who has disappeared in the Great Northwest Woods.
  Updated 7/5/00.
• The Gates of the Alamo
  Author: Harrigan, Stephen
  Publisher: Knopf $ 25 ISBN: 0679447172
  Publishers Weekly Kirkus Library Journal
  This full-scale novel about the siege and fall of the Alamo weaves in a love story between an American naturalist and a widow innkeeper who, along with her 16-year-old son, get swept up in the harrowing events of the heroic battle.
  Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars | Western Stars.
• The Binding Chair: A Visit from the Foot Emancipation Society
  Author: Harrison, Kathryn
  Publisher: Random $ 24.95 ISBN: 0679450009
  Kirkus Publishers Weekly Library Journal
  This mesmerizing novel by the author of the bestselling The Kiss is set in alluring Shanghai at the turn of the century, and it tells the story of two women whose lives intertwine - fascinating, tiny-footed Mai and Alice, her Western niece.
  Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars
  Updated 3/16/00.
• The Question of Bruno
  Author: Hemon, Aleksandar
  Publisher: Doubleday $ 22.95 ISBN: 038549923x
  Publishers Weekly Booklist Library Journal
  A novella and stories linked by characters, by locations, and by interwoven substories, The Question of Bruno is set in Chicago and Sarajevo and is a book about the trauma of war and how an exile makes a new life in a new land.
  The Question of Bruno web site
  Updated 7/20/00.
• Prodigal Summer
  Author: Kingsolver, Barbara
  Publisher: HarperCollins $ 26 ISBN: 0060199652
  Publishers Weekly Kirkus Booklist Library Journal
  In a beautiful hymn to wildness, Kingsolver celebrates the prodigal spirit of human nature and of nature itself. Over the course of one humid summer, as the urge to procreate takes over the countryside, the novel's characters find their connections to one another in the forested mountains of southern Appalachia.
  Updated 10/23/00
• English Passengers
  Author: Kneale, Matthew
  Publisher: Doubleday/Talese $ 25 ISBN: 0385497431
  Publishers Weekly Kirkus Booklist
  When a band of smugglers sails for Tasmania, believed to be the Garden of Eden, they find the British "civilization" of the aboriginal tribes is in full force. Each character has a voice in the narration in this bravura performance, which sets new standards for historical and nautical adventure writing.
  Suggested Reading: Sea Stories | Historical Fiction Stars. Also, Kalimantaan by C.S. Godshalk.
• In the Fall
  Author: Lent, Jeffrey
  Publisher: Atlantic Monthly $ 25 ISBN: 0871137658
  Kirkus Publishers Weekly Booklist
  "An extraordinary first novel that bears no resemblance to a first novel" (Jim Harrison), In the Fall tells the heartrending story of three generations of an interracial American family, from the end of the Civil War to the Great Depression.
  Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars | Civil War Fiction
• Conspiracy of Paper
  Author: Liss, David
  Publisher: Random $ 25 ISBN: 0375502920
  Kirkus Publishers Weekly Booklist Library Journal
  "In A Conspiracy of Paper, David Liss has woven a tale of 18th-century finance, murder, and religion that is a remarkable debut and a thoroughly satisfying novel." - Arthur Golden, author of Memoirs of a Geisha.
  Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars | Debuts
• The Barbarians Are Coming
  Author: Long, David Wong
  Publisher: Putnam $ 23.95 ISBN: 0399146032
  Publishers Weekly Kirkus Library Journal
  In a tale that alternates between black comedy and out-and-out slapstick, Louie explores the painful alienation between a Chinese-American man and his immigrant father - a conflict that is deepened by the son's decision to become a chef instead of a doctor.
  Suggested Reading: Black Humor Reading List | Asian American Stars
• Becoming Madame Mao
  Author: Min, Anchee
  Publisher: Houghton $ 25 ISBN: 0681004076
  Library Journal Booklist Publishers Weekly
  From the bestselling author of Red Azalea comes a strikingly original, erotically charged portrayal of Madame Mao, one of the most vilified women of the 20th century.
  Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars | Biographical Fiction
  Updated 4/13/00.
• Plowing the Dark
  Author: Powers, Richard
  Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux $ 25 ISBN: 0374236412
  Kirkus Library Journal Publishers Weekly
  On the shores of Puget Sound, a band of virtual reality researchers is building an empty white room that can become a jungle, a painting, or a cathedral. In a war-torn Mediterranean city, an American is held hostage in another empty white room. These two remote places will be linked by the power of the imagination.
  Updated 4/13/00.
• Tides of War: A Novel of Alcibiades and the Peloponnesian War
  Author: Pressfield, Steven
  Publisher: Doubleday $ 24.95 ISBN: 0385492529
  Kirkus Publishers Weekly Library Journal Booklist
  The internationally bestselling author of Gates of Fire returns with a stunning novel of the Peloponnesian War and Alcibiades, the man whose heroics and passions fueled the epic struggle. Narrated by the conqueror's trusted bodyguard and hired assassin in a mesmerizing death-row confession, Tides of War is historical fiction at its finest - a full-bodied, flesh-and-blood retelling of one of history's pivotal conflicts.
  Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars
  Updated 4/3/00.
• The Human Stain
  Author: Roth, Philip
  Publisher: Houghton Mifflin $ 27 ISBN: 0618059458
  Kirkus Booklist Publishers Weekly
  Set in 1990s America, where conflicting moralities and ideological divisions are made manifest through public denunciations and rituals of purification, the newest novel by award-winning author Philip Roth concludes his eloquent trilogy of postwar American lives begun in American Pastoral and continued in I Married a Communist.
  Updated 3/23/00.
• The Aerialist
  Author: Schmitt, Richard
  Publisher: Overlook $ 26.95 ISBN: 1585670707
  Publishers Weekly Kirkus Booklist
  This latest title in the Sewanee Writers's Series is a gritty debut novel in the tradition of Tom McGuane and Pete Dexter that chronicles a young man's retreat into the darkly glamorous world of the circus.
  Updated 11/22/00
• Horse Heaven
  Author: Smiley, Jane
  Publisher: Knopf $ 26 ISBN: 037540600x
  Kirkus Publishers Weekly Booklist Library Journal
  The universe of horse racing - passionate, cold-hearted, pure, corrupt - is revealed in Smiley's new novel that combines the intense feeling of her Pulitzer Prize-winning A Thousand Acres with the wit, pace, and brightness of Moo.
  Suggested Reading: Horse Tales
  Updated 4/12/00.
• In America
  Author: Sontag, Susan
  Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux $ 25 ISBN: 0374175403
  Publishers Weekly Booklist Library Journal
  In a glorious, sweeping new novel by the bestselling author of The Volcano Lover, Sontag once again bases her work on a real story. In 1876, a group of Poles led by Maryna Zalewska, Poland's greatest actress, travels to California to found a "utopian" commune. In America is a big, juicy, surprising book about a woman's search for self-transformation, about the fate of idealism, and about the world of the theater.
  Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars
  Updated 3/13/00.
• Music and Silence
  Author: Tremain, Rose
  Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux $ 25 ISBN: 0374199892
  Publishers Weekly Kirkus Booklist
  In the year 1629, a young English lute player named Peter Claire arrives at the Danish court where he must find the path that will realize his hopes and save his soul. Short-listed for the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award.
  Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars | Music and Fiction.
  Updated 4/17/00.
• Hill Bachelors
  Author: Trevor, William
  Publisher: Viking $ 22.95 ISBN: 0670893730
  Publishers Weekly Booklist Library Journal
  This collection of 12 beautifully rendered tales is an elegant, heartbreakingbook about men and women and their missed opportunities.
  Updated 9/29/00
• Marrying the Mistress
  Author: Trollope, Joanna
  Publisher: Viking $ 23.95 ISBN: 0670891509
  Library Journal Kirkus Publishers Weekly
  What happens when the esteemed head of a family - an English judge - announces he is leaving a 40-year marriage to marry his mistress? This provocative new novel is quintessential Trollope, combining her trademark sensitivity with a new boldness and unsentimental honesty.
  Updated 5/4/00.
• Ray in Reverse
  Author: Wallace, Daniel
  Publisher: Algonquin $ 21.95 ISBN: 1565122607
  Kirkus Publishers Weekly Booklist
  In this follow-up to Big Fish, Ray Williams, now sitting in heaven, reflects back on his difficult life - including his adulterous marriage, moments of sexual confusion, his worst deed, and his one good one.
  Suggested Reading: Humorous Fiction
• Married Man: A Love Story
  Author: White, Edmund
  Publisher: Knopf $ 25 ISBN: 03754000052
  Kirkus Library Journal Booklist
  Pushing 50, an American furniture scholar in Paris has an affair with a young and married French architect. In a desperate quest for health and happiness, they travel from Venice to Key West to Montreal to Providence. Finally, in the Sahara, their love is pushed to the ultimate crisis.
  Updated 5/19/00.
• Louisa
  Author: Zelitch, Simone
  Publisher: Putnam $ 24.95 ISBN: 0399146598
  Publishers Weekly Booklist Kirkus
  Following the holocaust, Nora and her German daughter-in-law, Louisa, enter an Israeli absorption camp for immigrants to await an uncertain future. Stranded in a new land, both women are forced to face the past and the responsibility each bears for what they have lost.
  Updated 8/29/00

  More All Stars Lists

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