Charlotte's Favorite Bookstore - Events Feed

Hugh McColl - From the Highlands to High Finance

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 15:15:55 -0500

Start: 02/04/2012 - 11:00am

End: 02/04/2012 - 11:00am

Ten years in the writing, Suzanne Cameron Linder Hurley’s book on Hugh L. McColl Jr.’s family is on press. This comprehensive account begins with the clan’s early years in Scotland and covers sixteen centuries of history, from Colla Uais, a fourth century Irish king, to the present day Carolina McColls.The first part of the book applies to all McColls (or McCalls) who can trace their families to Appin, Scotland. The second aspect of the story focuses on life in America from 1775 to 1870, between the American Revolution and the end of the Civil War. The last portion examines the post-war recovery of the New South, led by such men as Duncan D. McColl, Sr, his sons, and ultimately his great grandson, Hugh McColl Jr, under whose leadership, the Bank of America became one of the biggest, if not the biggest bank in the world.

This painstakingly researched history is illustrated with beautiful photography by Jack Hurley, Keith Fergus and others, along with many archival images from the McColl Personal Collection.

Pat Davies - Wizard Jasper and the Lost Princess

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 15:19:30 -0500

Start: 02/04/2012 - 1:30pm

End: 02/04/2012 - 1:30pm

Upon discovering their daughter trapped in a magic mirror, the King summons Wizard Jasper, the best wizard in the kingdom, to come to the rescue. Jasper is able to find his way into the mirror, but discovers not one but two princesses trapped inside. After returning the first princess to her parents, Jasper is torn between staying with the King's family to protect them from future evils and escorting the second princess on her journey home. However, with the confirmation that an evil sorcerer is behind the mysterious mirror trap, Wizard Jasper resolves that he must destroy the sorcerer before he endangers the princesses again!

Wizard Jasper and the Lost Princess and their gang of travelers have more problems than an evil sorcerer as they attempt to find the lost princess's home. Between encountering moody fairies and threatening dragons, they may never be able to find the palace or destroy the sorcerer!

Find out if Jasper can save the princess, or if the sorcerer will unleash his power on the kingdom once and for all!

Park Road Books Book Club Meeting

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:49:54 -0500

Start: 02/07/2012 - 6:30pm

End: 02/07/2012 - 6:30pm

This month we are reading award-winning writer Stewart O'Nan's novel Wish You Were Here. Book club participants will receive 20% off the $14.00 price. Our store bookclubs are open to the public. We hope that you will join us! Below is a synopsis of our book for this month.

A year after the death of her husband, Henry, Emily Maxwell gathers her family by Lake Chautauqua in western New York for what will be a last vacation at their summer cottage. Joining is her sister-in-law, who silently mourns the sale of the lake house, and a long-lost love. Emily's firebrand daughter, a recovering alcoholic recently separated from her husband, brings her children from Detroit. Emily's son, who has quit his job and mortgaged his future to pursue his art, comes accompanied by his children and his wife, who is secretly heartened to be visiting the house for the last time. Memories of past summers resurface, old rivalries flare up, and love is rekindled and born anew, resulting in a timeless novel drawn, as the best writing often is, from the ebbs and flow of daily life.

Joshilyn Jackson - A Grown Up Kind of Pretty

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 15:21:54 -0500

Start: 02/13/2012 - 7:00pm

End: 02/13/2012 - 7:00pm

When a long-hidden grave is unearthed in the backyard, headstrong young Mosey Slocumb is determined to investigate. What she learns could cost her family everything…

Every fifteen years, trouble comes after the Slocumb women. Now, as their youngest turns fifteen, a whole new kind of commotion is chasing all three generations. Mosey’s desperate to know who used their yard as a make-shift cemetery, and why. The oldest, forty-five year old Ginny, fights to protect Mosey from the truth, a fight that could cost Ginny the love of her life. Between them is Liza, silenced by a stroke, with the answers trapped inside her. To survive Liza’s secrets and Mosey’s insistent adventures, Ginny must learn to trust the love that braids the strands of their past—and stop at nothing to defend their future.

Eleanor Brown - The Weird Sister

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 15:26:24 -0500

Start: 02/17/2012 - 7:00pm

End: 02/17/2012 - 7:00pm

The Andreas sisters were raised on books - their family motto might as well be, 'There's no problem a library card can't solve.'

Their father, a renowned, eccentric professor of Shakespearean studies, named them after three of the Bard's most famous characters: Rose (Rosalind - As You Like It), Bean (Bianca - The Taming of the Shrew), and Cordy (Cordelia - King Lear), but they have inherited those characters' failures along with their strengths.

Now the sisters have returned home to the small college town where they grew up - partly because their mother is ill, but mostly because their lives are falling apart and they don't know where to go next.

Rose, a staid mathematics professor, has the chance to break away from her quiet life and join her devoted fiance in England, if she could only summon up the courage to do more than she's thought she could. Bean left home as soon as she could, running to the glamour of New York City, only to come back ashamed of the person she has become. And Cordy, who has been wandering the country for years, has been brought back to earth with a resounding thud, realizing it's finally time for her to grow up.

The sisters never thought they would find the answers to their problems in each other, but over the course of one long summer, they find that everything they’ve been running from – each other, their histories, and their small hometown – might offer more than they ever expected.

Rose Senehi - Render Unto the Valley

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 15:27:59 -0500

Start: 02/18/2012 - 1:26pm

End: 02/18/2012 - 1:26pm

Karen Godwell isn’t as much ashamed of her mountain heritage as of what she once had to do to preserve it.

Karen reinvents herself at college and doesn’t look back until her clan’s historic farm is threatened. The gutsy curator at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art returns to the mountains only to come face to face with who she was and what she did.

Descendants of the early settlers still have a grip on the farmlands deep in the folds of the southern Blue Ridge Mountains, but the ground is shifting beneath their feet. Cousin Bruce, the town historian, sees life through the family’s colorful 200-year past; Tom Gibbons, a local conservationist, keeps one eye on the mountains and the other on Karen; Karen’s nine-year-old daughter, Hali, is in the throes of the mission her dying father sent her on; and Karen is hiding the ugly secret that drove her away.

As she wrestles her dangerously cunning brother for the farm, Karen straddles the divide between the staunchly independent mountain culture she comes from and the sophisticated world she has become a part of.

Jack Gardner - Uptown

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 15:30:10 -0500

Start: 02/19/2012 - 2:00pm

End: 02/19/2012 - 2:00pm

Which is worse? The lies we tell each other, or the lies we tell ourselves?

When Stephen Rayfield, a young, gay professor arrives for dinner one evening at the home of his wealthy aunt and uncle, he begins a journey through the social, sexual and political tensions of Charlotte, North Carolina.

As he wades into the choppy waters of Charlotte society, Stephen becomes entangled with his Aunt Missy, a vigorous social climber whose wealth and ambition can never afford quite enough distance from her humble beginnings; Laura Caldwell, Missy's best friend, a woman of good intentions and repressive spirituality; Alice Owens, a physician reluctantly transplanted from San Francisco to Charlotte with her banker husband; and Ben Caldwell, Laura Caldwell's sexually confused eighteen-year-old son.

Uptown is a story of pretense and betrayal, a portrait of a New South city whose greatest aspiration is simply to be noticed. Part Edith Wharton and part Sex and the City, it is a reflection on the ways the past will always inform the present, for better or worse, and the fatal tension between what appears on the surface and the reality underneath.

Rachel Simon - The Story of Beautiful Girl

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 15:32:40 -0500

Start: 02/23/2012 - 7:00pm

End: 02/23/2012 - 7:00pm

It is 1968. Lynnie, a young white woman with a developmental disability, and Homan, an African American deaf man, are locked away in an institution, the School for the Incurable and Feebleminded, and have been left to languish, forgotten. Deeply in love, they escape, and find refuge in the farmhouse of Martha, a retired schoolteacher and widow. But the couple is not alone-Lynnie has just given birth to a baby girl. When the authorities catch up to them that same night, Homan escapes into the darkness, and Lynnie is caught. But before she is forced back into the institution, she whispers two words to Martha: "Hide her." And so begins the 40-year epic journey of Lynnie, Homan, Martha, and baby Julia-lives divided by seemingly insurmountable obstacles, yet drawn together by a secret pact and extraordinary love.

Robert Savage - Rendering Unto Caesar

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 15:35:19 -0500

Start: 02/25/2012 - 2:00pm

End: 02/25/2012 - 2:00pm

Robert Savage introduces a new tax system for the United States of America that does just that—and leaves prices we pay essentially unchanged. It's a system that would be the least intrusive on each citizen's freedom, as well as the fairest way for each of us to pay our own share of government's costs.

This system would allow citizens to easily see in one place how much of our money our various government bodies are spending. It would promote large and small businesses to produce good jobs, not to mention the consumer products and services we need and want in our lives.

In Rendering Unto Caesar: The Fairest Tax, the proposed plan is broken down in easy-to-understand terms, showing the transition that could be done over a four year time span.

Whether you're a financial novice or guru, this book will reveal a fair tax system that is both understandable and acceptable to the great majority of our fellow citizens.

Kyle Harper - Moving Beyond Mind

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 14:33:38 -0500

Start: 02/26/2012 - 1:30pm

End: 02/26/2012 - 1:30pm

Kyle P. Harper’s newest book Moving beyond Mind shares his journey starting February 16, 2011, spawned by an indescribable experience of the connection of body to soul. After this life-changing experience, he continues to be given ideas in the form of energy and feelings. His translation of these feelings and energy into words make up Moving beyond Mind. Moving beyond Mind offers a path for gaining clarity to be your authentic, creative self while following your heart and experiencing a life of freedom and peace.

Vickie Torrey - Joy Bringers

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 14:33:05 -0500

Start: 03/01/2012 - 7:00pm

End: 03/01/2012 - 7:00pm

Joy Bringers is a book full of inspirational stories, 52 weekly spiritual affirmations, vibrant healing art, and 56 days of healing with color affirmations. The stories and affirmations spiritually expand and inspire beyond religious, socio-economic, cultural beliefs or even politics.

Anyone who is on their healing journey will appreciate the beauty, support and comfort from the stories and affirmations that encourage well-being and abundance in living. Those who are experiencing chronic or terminal health conditions can find a deep soul peace in these life-affirming words.

Cindy Valenti-Scioto - A Heart Like Mine & A Heart Like Yours

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 13:58:18 -0500

Start: 03/02/2012 - 7:00pm

End: 03/02/2012 - 7:00pm

In September 2001, Cindy Valenti-Scinto, a healthy young woman, suffered a heart attack that was only the beginning of a grueling seven-year journey through heart disease. Four years later, after forty operations and several brushes with death, Cindy received a miraculous heart transplant that saved her life.

Cindy relied on the Lord as her strength through all the trials and pain, providing her many opportunities to share His love with others. Her story is not only inspiring—it shows how trust in God provides the strength to get through any “disease” of the heart. Whether you are facing illness, divorce, loss, or another difficult situation, you will find A Heart Like Mine beats with the encouragement you need to seek God’s will in the midst of turmoil.

In A Heart Like Yours, the second book in Cindy Valenti-Scinto’s Heart Like Mine trilogy, Valenti-Scinto expresses how her illness opened her eyes—and her heart—to God’s exciting plans. Discover how you can have the same contentedness by understanding the Lord’s direction.

You may not have had a heart transplant like the author, but everyone needs the new heart God provides when we yield to His will. Gain hope and encouragement for your heart in this compelling second installment in the “Heart Like Mine” trilogy.

Tim Owens - The Search Committee

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:03:26 -0500

Start: 03/03/2012 - 2:00pm

End: 03/03/2012 - 2:00pm

Seven congregation members, differing in age and life experience, set out on a series of weekend trips to visit other churches in the hopes of recruiting a new minister. They are all dealing with their own personal issues, yet they start to bond on these road adventures.

This winner of the Christian Writers Guild Operation First Novel Contest is a good pick for readers who like uplifting stories with multiple story lines.