Betwixt and Between is a novel by Jessica Stilling. Young Preston Tumbler dies after eating a poisoned cookie given to him by a neighbor and awakens in Neverland—a fantastical place where dead boys go before heading on to “the after.” In this fantastical place, Preston makes friend with a playful and mysterious boy named Peter who can fly, hunts Indians, and keeps watch over the other boys. Although he misses his poor, grieving mother, Preston comes to enjoy this life of perpetual play and comradery he finds in Neverland. When his best friend Peyton arrives, though, Preston realizes that the wrong person has been arrested for his murder and he desperately feels he should get the message to his mother, Claire, so that more children can be saved. Unable to leave Neverland, Preston discovers that Peter once went to Victorian London in search of a girl he loved named Winifred (or Wendy, as Peter called her). Will Preston be able to convince Peter to return to the real world once more to prevent other children from dying?
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Board Stiff is the 38th novel of the Xanth series by Piers Anthony. Irrelevant Kandy is breathtakingly beautiful with lush black hair, a slender waist, and piercing dark eyes set in her lovely face. She is as close to perfection as anyone can be and that is the problem. She is every man’s desire, but she knows that she is a smart girl who would make an excellent wife for the right man. In her frustration, she makes the following wish: “I’m bored stiff. I want adventure, excitement, and romance.” With that, the superficial magic of the wishing well she is sitting by sends a sudden whirlwind that surrounds her, lifts her up, and rips off her clothing. She feels herself changing and then she falls flat onto the ground. She is transformed into a flat, stiff board with tow knotholes for eyes.
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Empire is a zombie novel by David Dunwoody. In the year 2112, the United States government and its military forces are crippled and they have decided to give up the century-long fight against the undead plague that has ravaged the country. The zombie scourge is the result of a deadly virus being fused with an otherworldly energy. The ravenous hordes of zombified humans and animals have no natural enemies, but perhaps they have a supernatural one: Death himself. The Grim Reaper descends upon the deserted town of Jefferson Harbor, Louisiana to begin a bloody campaign that will put down the legions of zombies once and for all. He finds allies in the town’s last survivors, but he also finds an enemy in a man who wants to harness the dark power that drives the zombies and use it to rebuild the United States into an empire of the dead.
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The Oversight is a fantasy novel by Charlie Fletcher. The Oversight is a secret society that polices the supernatural borders between the mundane and the magical.  Once, there were hundreds in their service, but now, there are only five to guard the portals between the worlds. As these borders begin to break down, brutal murders erupt across London and the enemies of the Oversight come even closer. An enigmatic girl is brought to the Oversight’s headquarters screaming at the top of her lungs. Is this girl the best hope for a defense against the darkness or is she the instrument of the order’s destruction? If the Oversight falls, so do we all.
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Hacker: The Outlaw Chronicles is by Ted Dekker. Nyah Parks is a genius hacker who makes her living by cracking the firewalls of some of the world’s largest companies–and she is only seventeen-years-old. When the biggest job she has ever had in her life goes horribly wrong, Nyah is plunged into a desperate situation where her next hack could either save her or kill her. Things are never as they seem and Nyah admits, “I know things that most people would never believe. Things that shouldn’t exist, but do.”
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The Quantum Breach: a Mormon Hacker Novel is by Denver Acey. Tanner Zane is a man with a secret criminal past. Before his religious conversion to Mormonism, he hacked into thousands of computer networks all across the globe. Tanner has no desire for anyone to find this out, but when he is kidnapped and forced to hack into an impossible target, his well-guarded secrets become exposed. Inside the Los Alamos National Labs is a quantum computer powerful enough to crack the digital safeguards of the Internet. Tanner learns that a group of cyber-terrorists have a plan to use this powerful computer for massive identity theft and corporate espionage across the globe. He makes the choice to engage his kidnappers in intellectual battle to prevent them from obtaining the device that could collapse the global economy even if it costs him everything.
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The Science of Discworld is by Terry Pratchett with Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen. The wizards of Discworld have accidentally created a new universe during one of their experiments. Within this universe is a planet they name Roundworld—which is, of course, Earth. In this mash-up of fiction and fact, Terry Pratchett and science writers Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen use Discworld to examine our scientific discoveries from the outside. Pratchett’s story is interwoven with explanations of key scientific principles about the Big Bang Theory, the evolution of life on earth, and great moments in the history of scientific discovery. The authors offer a “wizard’s-eye view” of our own world that may make you change the way you view the universe.
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Evangeline Cessna is a history librarian at the Warren County-Vicksburg Public Library.