Merry Christmas from all of the volunteers at Finley library!  By next Friday this year's Christmas will be a fond memory.  We certainly hope that Santa brings you everything you might hope for and that you have wonderful holidays and good memories.  The wishes of the library staff for Christmas are more visitors to the library, more books and more room!  We will see what happens!  

Here's a couple reviews:

Storm Front by John Sandford.  (HC/LP)  (Virgil Flowers series #7)  In quite a change of pace for Sanford and the Flowers series, this entry in the series concerns a Stelle (pronounced stella) found on a dig in in Israel with carvings/words on it that would change the Biblical story concerning Jewish people being God's "Chosen People" and, therefore, due their own homeland.  Several different groups are after this stone brought home to Minnesota by the man that found it--and since he took it out  of Israel without government permission, he is in big trouble.  He calls on Virgil Flowers to help him out and Virgil does so in his own particular fashion.  In the dedication Sandford notes that Michael Cook, partner, journalist and screenwriter helped write this book.  Perhaps for that reason this book--though still very enjoyably "Virgil Flowers"-- is a bit different in writing and style (in my opinion) than the others in the series. 

Empire Falls by Richard Russo.  Miles Roby's mother died unhappily and unfulfilled within her meager life because her son, Miles, did not complete his schooling and become an English professor as she and he had both hoped would happen--something she had worked and saved for all her life.  Instead he spent twenty years running the Empire Grill owned by the richest woman in town who owned it and most of the other property in town having been married to the richest man in town.  However, it wasn't just that that she owned and controlled so much property in Empire Falls, but that she also
controlled the lives of the people in various covert ways.  The lives of these people are revealed to the readers' eyes, but there is lots of tragedy and little satisfaction in the end.  I suppose the best way to describe this book is that it is life in a small company-type town when the company fails and folks are just trying to cope with the situation and, of course, how they do it.