Books & Books - Coral Gables

While pregnant with twins, one sentence uttered by her doctor sent Stephanie Klein reeling: “You need to gain fifty pounds.” Instantly, an adolescence filled with insecurity, awkwardness, disappointment, and embarrassment came flooding back. Though she was determined to gain the weight for the health ... (more)of her babies, she could only express what deep fear this caused in her by telling her doctor simply, “I used to be fat.” In Moose: A Memoir of Fat Camp (HarperCollins, $24.95) Klein's passion and wrenching honesty fill the pages with attitude and heart, when as a mother-to-be, she’s forced to confront her adolescent struggles and angst, recounting an angry childhood with a weak mother, and how a summer at fat camp shaped more than just her body. It shaped her life. More than a story about weight loss, Moose reminds everyone what it was like to feel like an outsider, to desperately seek the right outfit, the right slang, the best comeback, or whatever that unattainable something is that would finally make you fit in. Calling upon her childhood diary entries to jog her memory, Klein opens up and shares her deepest thoughts and feelings from that turbulent, hopeful time, baring her soul and making her heartache palpable.

Book Signing

Meg Cabot brings her internationally bestselling series to a royal conclusion in the tenth and final installment, Forever Princess (HarperTeen, $16.99. Mia is now a senior in high school, and her future -- and Genovia's -- hangs in the balance. Mia has some tough choices to make.

Michael Buckley, author of The Sisters Grimm, a New York Times bestselling series and a Today Show Book Club pick, will be on hand to talk about the upcoming release of Book 7 -- The Everafter War (Amulet Books, $15.95) in which shocking secrets are finally revealed. He will also preview his brand new ... (more)series N.E.R.D.S., which will be out in fall 2009. Michael Buckley is a former stand up comedian and has written and developed shows for Nickelodeon, Disney, MTV Animation, the Sci-Fi Channel, the Discovery Channel. And VH1.

"Of course I want a home," writes Mary Elizabeth Williams, "I'm American." Gimme Shelter (Simon & Schuster, $26) is the first book to reveal how this primal desire, "encoded into our cultural DNA," drove our nation to extremes, from the heights of an unprecedented housing boom to the depths of an unparalleled ... (more)crash. Williams's house-hunting fantasy quickly morphs into a test of endurance, as her search for a place to live and a mortgage she can afford stretches into a three-year odyssey that takes her to the farthest reaches of the boroughs and the limits of her own patience. How frustrating is the process? Williams likens it to hearing "the opening bars of a song you think is 'Super Freak.' And then it turns out to be 'U Can't Touch This.'" Told in an engaging blend of fact-finding and memoir, Gimme Shelter charts the course of the real estate bubble as it floated ever upward, not with faceless numbers and documents but with the details of countless personal stories -- about the undeniable urge to put down roots and the lengths to which we'll go to find our way home.

Clarkston, Georgia, was a typical Southern town until it was designated a refugee settlement center in the 1990s, becoming the first American home for scores of families in flight from the world's war zones--from Liberia and Sudan to Iraq and Afghanistan. Suddenly Clarkston's streets were filled with ... (more)women wearing the hijab, the smells of cumin and curry, and kids of all colors playing soccer in any open space they could find. The town also became home to Luma Mufleh, an American-educated Jordanian woman who founded a youth soccer team to unify Clarkston's refugee children and keep them off the streets. These kids named themselves the Fugees. Set against the backdrop of an American town that without its consent had become a vast social experiment, Outcasts United (Spiegel & Grau, $24.95) follows a pivotal season in the life of the Fugees and their charismatic coach. New York Times reporter Warren St. John documents the lives of a diverse group of young people as they miraculously coalesce into a band of brothers, while also drawing a fascinating portrait of a fading American town struggling to accommodate its new arrivals.

This event is in Spanish.

This event is in Spanish.