Fort Morgan Public Library

The Tragedy of Arthur A New York Times Top Ten Book of the Year • A Kirkus ReviewsLook for special features inside. Join the Circle for author chats and more.

-- Hotel Angeline, Something is amiss at the Hotel Angeline, a rickety former mortuary perched atop Capitol Hill in rain-soaked Seattle. Fourteen-year-old Alexis Austin is fixing the plumbing, the tea, and all the problems of the world, it seems, in her landlady mother’s absence.

On a copper-rich tropical island shattered by war, where the teachers have fled with almost everyone else, only one white man chooses to stay behind: the eccentric Mr. Watts, object of much curiosity and scorn, who sweeps out the ruined schoolhouse and begins to read to the children each day from Charles Dickens's classic Great Expectations. While artillery echoes in the mountains, thirteen-year-old Matilda and her peers are riveted by the adventures...