The Listener; Dear Fahrenheit 451

I was pleasantly surprised at how good "The Listener" by Robert McCammon was. I've never read anything by him before, and I was expecting a decent horror story, but it was much more than that. It takes place in the 1930s, during the Depression. A con artist, known as Pearly, and a woman he hooked up with, Ginger, decide to kidnap a couple of kids and squeeze their wealthy businessman father for a hefty ransom. What they didn't count on was the daughter, Nilla, being a "listener": Nilla can hear and talk telepathically to others who share the same gift (or curse, depending on how you feel about it). Nilla talks to Curtis, a young, hardworking black man. When Nilla and her brother Jack are kidnapped by Pearly, Ginger, and her nephew Donnie, Nilla sends Curtis a distress signal. He receives it and promises to help her, but he's in the unenviable position of trying to first of all, get an audience with a powerful white man, and secondly convince him he's not a lunatic. Like I said, it was really, really good and suspenseful, the characters were very well written. Great read, I might have to check out more of his work

In the Library world, whenever a librarian gets a book published (spoiler alert: most of us are frustrated writers who never get published) the rest of us all squee and go "You have to read this book! A LIBRARIAN wrote it!".
This is what happened with Annie Spence's book, "Dear Fahrenheit 451". The first half was love (or break up letters) to books she's read and liked or disliked, the second half was more suggestions for reading. It was a super quick read, and while it wasn't bad...I hate to criticize a fellow librarian. But for me, her tone was just too casual and familiar. It grated on me, her little cutesy phrases and way of talking. And then with the "Virgin Suicides" by Jeffrey Eugendies. It's, apparently, her favorite book of all time. Great. I've read it, it's a good book, I enjoyed it. But she literally mentions it 1,000,000 times. I imagine it's how I would be, if I were writing a book about books *I* liked. It would be "Sound and the Fury" every other page and everyone would be rolling their eyes. I probably wouldn't have bothered with it, if it hadn't been written by a librarian, but that being said it wasn't terrible. Just not my cup of tea.