Girl Child

Immediately following the success of Little Women, Louisa May Alcott sat down to write An-Old Fashioned Girl, expanding on the subject of rich versus poor that she explored in her first novel. It’s a story of a country mouse and a city mouse: 14-year-old Polly Milton travels to Boston for a stay with her friend Fanny Shaw. The wealthy Shaws’ way of life is foreign to Polly who tries to adapt but is quickly labeled “old-fashioned”. Fanny and her friends dress and behave as their elders do, flirting with boys and gossiping.

Dear diary... I'm not exactly a farm girl, but even I was excited to meet farmers Sam and Abby Heyworth. Through their CSA (that's Community Supported Agriculture), they supply most of River Heights with fresh fruits and veggies. But lately Black Creek's food has been making people sick. Really sick. In fact tests revealed that their fruits and vegetables are crawling with deadly bacteria!

Are you a parent? So your child's education is a priority. Most of the times this importance overshadows several other factors that build a child's personality in an impressive manner. Being one of those parents, if you are the one then this audiobook perfectly belongs to you...In my book, messages about values are integrated. The messages are related to what any parent wants to embellish their child.

Snow and Rose didn't know they were in a fairytale. People never do.... Once, they lived in a big house with spectacular gardens and an army of servants. Once, they had a father and mother who loved them more than the sun and moon. But that was before their father disappeared into the woods and their mother disappeared into sorrow. This is the story of two sisters and the enchanted woods that have been waiting for them to break a set of terrible spells.

This third entry from the much-loved Nancy Drew and the Clue Crew series finds the clever detective and her friends investigating a Houdini of a pony. When a new petting zoo opens in town, Buttons becomes the star by escaping every night and showing up on someone else’s lawn to eat the flowers. Nancy quickly jumps on the case—because even though she’d love to see Buttons on her lawn one morning, it’s more important to keep him safe at the zoo.

Tana lives in a world where walled cities called Coldtowns exist. In them, quarantined monsters and humans mingle. But once you pass through Coldtown's gates, you can never leave. One morning, after a perfectly ordinary party, Tana wakes up surrounded by corpses. The only other survivors are her exasperatingly endearing ex-boyfriend, infected and on the edge, and a mysterious boy burdened with a terrible secret. Shaken and determined, Tana enters a race against the clock to save the three of them by going straight to Coldtown's opulent heart.

You just can't keep a good girl down...unless you use the proper methods. Piper McCloud can fly. Just like that. Easy as pie. Sure, she hasn't mastered reverse propulsion and her turns are kind of sloppy, but she's real good at loop-the-loops. Problem is, the good folk of Lowland County are afraid of Piper. And her ma's at her wit's end. So it seems only fitting that she leave her parents' farm to attend a top-secret, maximum-security school for kids with exceptional abilities.

Something’s rotten in Apple country! Hildy Biddle is a high school reporter eager to stand up for the truth. She’s just waiting for a chance to prove herself as a journalist, and yearning for a big story. The trouble is, the town’s biggest story stars...a ghost. Not a very easy interview! This ghost has the town in a tizzy, and the local paper is playing up people’s fears with shocking headlines of eerie happenings and ghostly sightings. Hildy’s determined to discover what’s really going on, but her desire to uncover the truth is making some people awfully nervous.

Like many women of her generation, Heather Lanier did everything by the book when she was expecting her first child. But her daughter, Fiona, challenged all of Lanier's preconceptions. Born with an ultra-rare syndrome known as Wolf-Hirschhorn, Fiona received a daunting prognosis: She would experience significant developmental delays and might not reach her second birthday. Award-winning writer Heather Lanier's memoir about raising a child with a rare syndrome, defying the tyranny of normal, and embracing parenthood as a spiritual practice that breaks us open in the best of ways.

That's because Class 3T is studying the Amazing Human Body. Judy, who idolizes Elizabeth Blackwell, First Woman Doctor, can hardly wait to begin her better-than-best-ever third-grade projects - like show-and-tell with something way rarer than a scab, a real-live ooey-gooey operation, and a cloning experiment that may create double trouble for Judy and her friends!

Devorah Blachor, an ardent feminist, never expected to be the parent of a little girl who was totally obsessed with the color pink, princesses, and all things girly. She wasn't sure how to reconcile the difference between her parental expectations and the reality of her Disney-worshiping three-year-old daughter. Offering insight, advice, and plenty of humor and personal anecdotes, this mother shares her story of how she surrendered control and opened up - to her Princess Toddler, to pink, and to life.

Alice always thought fairy tales had happy endings. That - along with everything else - changed the day she met her first fairy. When Alice's father goes down in a shipwreck, she is sent to live with her uncle Geryon - an uncle she's never heard of and knows nothing about. He lives in an enormous manor with a massive library that is off-limits to Alice. But then she meets a talking cat.

Aza's singing is the fairest in all the land - and the most unusual. She can "throw" her voice so it seems to come from anywhere. But singing is only one of the two qualities prized in the Kingdom of Ayortha. Aza doesn't possess the other: beauty. Not even close. She's hidden in the shadows in her parents' inn, but when she becomes lady-in-waiting to the new queen, she has to step into the light - especially when the queen demands a dangerous favor.

"It finally happened: we went to college. We started over. No one knows who we've coveted, what we scored on the SATs,where our parents live, or when we became debaucherous. We've learned new things, made new friends, and maybe even met the loves of our lives. We've changed. Or at least, some of us have. But old habits are hard to break-especially when faced with your former besties and former flames."

This year, the girls are everywhere but home for the holidays. From a tropical cruise to a ski trip to Switzerland, it promises to be a Christmas to remember. Becca, Megan, Emma, Cassidy, and Jess have plenty of reading material to bring on their trips, too, because the book club is tackling the Betsy-Tacy series before their next meeting on New Year's Eve.

Eleven-year-old Nhamo is running for her life. When the village witch finder decrees that she must marry a cruel stranger to propitiate an evil spirit, her only recourse is to steal a fishing boat and go looking for a father she has never met. Alone on the Musengezi River, Nhamo has meager resources to help her survive loneliness, hunger, wild animals, and even land mines.

Friday's Mum, the Nobel Prize winning physicist, has been accused of espionage. The police think she's been selling secrets about the CERN Hadron Super Collider. Friday knows her mother isn't capable of such a thing - this is a woman who can't even operate a dishwasher. She's got to smuggle herself into Switzerland to clear her Mum's name. Fortunately, Melanie is a master of disguise. After an extremely extreme make-over, Friday arrives at CERN and finds axolotls in the water coolers, graffiti in the great hall and most baffling of all - her sister has fallen in love with an engineer!

In the post-apocalyptic, neo-medieval city of Ark, speech is constrained to 500 sanctioned words. If somewhere were to speak outside that approved lexicon, they'd face banishment. The only exceptions to this rule are the Wordsmith and his apprentice, Letta. Together, they are the keepers and archivists of all language. But when Letta's master dies, she is suddenly promoted to Wordsmith and finds the situation more complicated than she knew.

Author Coleen Murtagh Paratore gives fairytale love stories a modern gloss through the eyes of 12-year-old cherry-cordial eater and classic-literature reader Willafred Haversham. What Willa wishes for most in the world is a father, but so far no luck. When she and her wedding planner mother, Stella, move back home to Cape Cod, Willa’s luck begins to change. With help from her best friend Tina and candy-making Nana, Willa decides wishing for a father isn’t enough - it’s time to take action.

There's a murderer on the loose - but that doesn't stop the girls of St. Etheldreda's from attempting to hide the death of their headmistress in this rollicking farce. The students of St. Etheldreda's School for Girls face a bothersome dilemma. Their irascible headmistress, Mrs. Plackett, and her surly brother, Mr. Godding, have been most inconveniently poisoned at Sunday dinner.