Book Reviews

Cover image of a book called The Word is Murder by Anthony Horowitz. There is a picture of a pencil and a knife.

The Word is Murder: A Novel (A Hawthorne and Horowitz Mystery, 1) by Anthony Horowitz

New York Times bestselling author Anthony Horowitz takes a crack…

POPCORN by Rob Harrell

All seventh grader Andrew Yeager, the protagonist of Rob Harrell’s Popcorn, wants…

The Knight and the Moth by Rachel Gillig

Sybil Delling is a Diviner. She and the other five Diviners she…

The Fact Checker by Austin Kelley

A quick glance at the cover of Austin Kelley’s novel, The Fact…

Every Deadly Suspicion by Janice Cantore

Janice Cantore’s Every Deadly Suspicion is set in present day…
Book cover of The Love Haters by Katherine Center; features a woman in a purple swimsuit and a man in a red pair of swim shorts, both on round floaties

The Love Haters by Katherine Center

In an effort to avoid being laid off from the video production…

Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett

It’s 1909 and Emily Wilde is a professor of dryadology at…

Children’s Art Books for Summer Reading 2025

Summer reading is well under way at Joplin Public Library. In…

Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space by Adam Higginbotham

January 28, 1986, was the day NASA's carefully cultivated image…

Finlay Donovan Is Killing It by Elle Cosimano

The fifth Finlay Donovan book is out and reminded me how much…
cover of the book being reviewed

Culture: the story of us from cave art to K-pop by Martin Puchner

It can be easy to dismiss popular culture as trite and inconsequential.…
Cover image of Great Big Beautiful Life book by Emily Henry

Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry

Journalist Alice Scott longs to move from writing features and…

How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix

Louise never thought her family was weird, really. She’s always…
Illustration of girl in red beret painting a mix of colors on the floor

OH, OLIVE! by Lian Cho

Next Tuesday kicks off the most exciting time of year: Summer…

Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History by S.C. Gwynne

One not-small benefit of working at a library trucks with it…