Adult World

Abigail Swish's life is nothing to brag about: gang-ridden city, orphanage style accommodations, and a matron who's kinda on the evil side. Not that she has to worry about that for much longer. She'll turn 18 soon, and then it's goodbye compound, hello dangerous streets of New York City. Of course, as her luck would have it, she doesn't make it to 18 before her world is turned upside down. One ambushed meeting with an accent-bearing, sword-wielding stranger, and suddenly her entire life as she knows it is a lie.

After the death of her boyfriend, sixteen-year-old Valentine stops going to school, quits seeing her friends and, finally, won't leave her bed. Desperate for her daughter to recover, Valentine's mother takes her on a trek in Thailand. In the mountains north of Chiang Mai, Valentine finds a world she didn't know existed, where houses are on stilts and elephants still roam wild. She learns about the Burmese civil war and the relentless violence against the Karen and Rohingya peoples. Then she meets Lin, a mysterious young elephant keeper tormented by his past, and an orphaned elephant calf.

Conrad's Fate is part of the clever and humorous Chrestomanci series. Twelve-year-old Conrad Tesdinic is in disguise as a servant-in-training at Stallery Mansion in the town of Stallchester. He wants to figure out what evil he caused in a past life. He and his friend Christopher Chant are trying to repair Conrad's very bad karma and to discover what mysterious entity is haunting the town.

Mari, Nik, and their newly formed Pack are being hunted. Thaddeus and the God of Death will stop at nothing until they are obliterated from the earth. But Mari and Nik have one goal: to reach the plains of the Wind Riders, in order to band together to stop Thaddeus from destroying all that Mari and Nik hold dear. But will the mysterious Wind Riders accept the Pack, or will Mari and Nik and their people be rejected by the mighty Riders and be forced to flee for their lives?

Troy Billings, at six-foot-one, 296 pounds, is standing at the edge of a subway platform, seriously contemplating suicide, when he meets Curt MacCrae - and emaciated, semi-homeless punk guitar genius who also happens to be a dropout legend at Troy's high school on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

The series takes place in a world similar to our own, but one where vampires, witches, werewolves, and shape-shifters live among humans without their knowledge. These supernatural races make up a secret society known as the Night World, which enforces two fundamental laws to prevent discovery: (1) Never allow humans to gain knowledge of the Night World's existence, and (2) Never fall in love with one of them.

The Pinhoes don't want the Chrestomanci to find out that they've been misusing their magic, but when Cat finds a mysterious old egg at Gammer's place, the Chrestomanci is sure to notice. Author Diana Wynne Jones has won the prestigious Guardian and Mythopoeic Awards. The Pinhoe Egg, the fifth book in her popular Chrestomanci series, brings back Cat Chant.

British airman Dym Ingleford is convinced that the young German prisoner, Max Eckermann, is his brother Anthony, who was kidnapped years before. Raised in the Nazi ideology, Tony has by chance tumbled into British hands. Dym has brought him back, at least temporarily, to the family he neither remembers nor will acknowledge as his own.

Shunned after a trip through the galaxy with Abel, the most advanced cybernetic man ever created, Noemi Vidal dreams of traveling through the stars one more time. And when a deadly plague arrives on Genesis, Noemi gets her chance. As the only soldier to have ever left the planet, it will be up to her to save its people...if only she wasn't flying straight into a trap.

When Rini lands with a literal splash in the pond behind Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children, the last thing she expects to find is that her mother, Sumi, died years before Rini was even conceived. But Rini can’t let Reality get in the way of her quest—not when she has an entire world to save! (Much more common than one would suppose.) If she can't find a way to restore her mother, Rini will have more than a world to save: she will never have been born in the first place. And in a world without magic, she doesn’t have long before Reality notices her existence and washes her away.

I need to learn how to control my new magic — before it gets me killed. As the first ever Faerie Games player gifted with magic from the king of the gods — Jupiter — all eyes are on me. Especially since I won the first competition of the Games. Now I need to send three other players to fight in the Coliseum until one of them is dead. The two that survive will be gunning for me later. One player will win the Faerie Games and survive. The rest will die. I need to win. If that means getting close to Julian…then that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

Heading off for a weekend in Las Vegas with her friends, Jessie Ralle has only one worry: how to make it through the road trip in the same car as her ex, Jimmy Kelter. The guy she hasn’t come close to getting over since he broke up with her five months ago. The guy who’s finally ready to tell her why he did it, because now he wants her back. Only, sometimes knowing why doesn’t actually make things better. Sometimes it leads to bigger, more terrifying questions.

#1 New York Times best-selling, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Anthony Doerr brings his“stunning sense of physical detail and gorgeous metaphors” (San Francisco Chronicle) to selecting The Best American Short Stories 2019. Doerr and the series editor, Heidi Pitlor, winnow down twenty stories out of thousands that represent the best examples of the form published the previous year.

A quiet revolution has been underway in recent years, with study after study revealing substantial same-sex sexual behavior in animals. Join celebrated author Eliot Schrefer on an exploration of queer behavior in the animal world—from albatrosses to bonobos to clownfish to doodlebugs. In sharp and witty prose Schrefer uses science, history, anthropology, and sociology to illustrate the diversity of sexual behavior in the animal world. Interviews with researchers in the field offer additional insights for readers and aspiring scientists.

Thirteen-year-old Min comes from a long line of fox spirits. But you'd never know it by looking at her. To keep the family safe, Min's mother insists none of them use any fox-magic such as charm or shape-shifting. They must appear human at all times. Min feels hemmed in by the household rules and resents the endless chores, the cousins who crowd her, and the aunties who judge her. She would like nothing more than to escape Jinju, her neglected, dust-ridden, and impoverished planet. She's counting the days until she can follow her older brother, Jun, into the Space Forces.

With the amulet still stuck around her neck, Addie must outwit her powerful captors who will do anything to get to the power held within the ancient artifact. If they find out she doesn't know how to use it, she's dead.

The globe-trotting thief in the red fedora returns! And now, the question isn't where—but who? In the role of Carmen Sandiego, award-winning performer Kyla Garcia reveals, for the very first time, the backstory of the ever-elusive master criminal whose whereabouts captured the imaginations of children everywhere—through educational video games, animated series, and a popular PBS "gameshow" for middle schoolers in the 1990s.

In the great tradition of the American almanac, The Areas of My Expertise is a brilliant and hilarious compendium of handy reference tables, fascinating trivia, and sage wisdom on all topics large and small. Although best sellers such as Poor Richard's Almanack and The Book of Lists were certainly valuable, they also were largely true.

Tracing the path to the landmark decision in Roe v. Wade and the continuing battle for women's rights, Blumenthal examines, in a straightforward tone, the root causes of the current debate around abortion and repercussions that have affected generations of American women. This eye-opening audiobook is the perfect tool to facilitate difficult discussions and awareness of a topic that is rarely touched on in school but affects each and every young person. It's also perfect for fans of Steve Sheinkin and Deborah Heiligman.

From the Chrestomanci series comes book number three, The Magicians of Caprona. For years, the Montana family has feuded with the Petrocchi family. But Tonino Montana must seek help from the Petrocchis, and a special cat, to save the city of Caprona and prove he deserves to live among the spell-makers.