Showing results by narrator "Kyla García" in All Categories

Charming Libby is a people pleaser who is slow at making decisions. She has to learn how to say no, stand up for herself, and feel more confident about her choices. All of the Star Darling roommates have received beautiful bouquets of sparkly flowers welcoming them to Star Academy. The band tryouts begin and many different girls show up to audition. Meanwhile, the Star Darlings are dealing with their personal conflicts and issues.

Leona is very focused on her studies and is especially busy as the lead vocalist in the Star Darlings band. Star-Zaps start buzzing, and the girls know it’s probably time for one of them to head to Wishworld. It’s Leona’s turn, and she’s bursting with excitement. She can’t wait to get there and become a successful Wish-Granter. But she’ll have to challenge herself to put her own desires aside and truly understand what her Wisher needs - before her Countdown Clock runs out of time.

Cat, Magda, Gabi, and Luz have helped each other up the ladder with unshakable encouragement - and raw honesty - since forever. But lately, trouble is throwing everything these formidable women thought they knew into doubt. Now all four women will have to face the truths that make them vulnerable and the failings that give them strength to discover who they really are - and what real happiness means.

My mother named me Gabriella, after my grandmother who, coincidentally, didn't want to meet me when I was born because my mother was unmarried, and therefore living in sin. My mom has told me the story many, many, many, times of how, when she confessed to my grandmother that she was pregnant with me, her mother beat her. BEAT HER! She was 25. That story is the basis of my sexual education and has reiterated why it's important to wait until you're married to give it up.

These eight short stories and novella travel from Panama’s dusty city streets to its humid beaches to create an affecting portrait of a country in transition. They illustrate family bonds and generational conflicts, youthful infatuation and genuine passion. Tender, ambitious, bold, and unflinching, they reveal a fresh, exciting, and lavishly talented voice in American literature.

In her striking second collection, Natalie Scenters-Zapico sets her unflinching gaze once again on the borders of things. Lima :: Limon illuminates both the sweet and the sour of the immigrant experience, of life as a woman in the US and Mexico, and of the politics of the present day. Her lyrical poems focus on the often-tested resilience of women. Scenters-Zapico writes heartbreakingly about domestic violence and its toxic duality of macho versus hembra, of masculinity versus femininity, and throws into harsh relief the all-too-normalized pain that women endure.

Geeky Ella Reyes is at the bottom of the totem pole at Westwood High. Her ultra-popular stepsisters refuse to be seen with her at school, and every day she comes home to a mountain of chores. Ella's only friend (and maybe crush) lives on the other side of her phone's screen. She and Baller929 know everything about each other, except their real names. When they have a chance to meet at her school's Halloween ball, Ella must figure out a way to get there without her stepmom or stepsisters finding out.

Seventh grader Estefania "Stef" Soto is itching to shake off the onion-and-cilantro embrace of Tia Perla, her family's taco truck. She wants nothing more than for her dad to get a normal job and for Tia Perla to be put out to pasture. It's no fun being known as the "Taco Queen" at school. But just when new city regulations are proposed, and her family's livelihood is threatened, she will have to become the truck's unlikely champion.

Dreamers and their allies, those who care about immigration justice, and anyone interested in the experience of Mexicans in the US will respond to these stories of Mexican immigrants (some documented, some not) illuminating their complex lives. Regardless of status, many are subjected to rights violations, inequality, and violence - all of which existed well before the Trump administration - and have profound feelings of being unwanted in the country they call home.

When a shy girl named Sarah Sierra first joins an after-school program in her neighborhood, she never expects to travel back in time and discover the words of Miguel de Cervantes. But at Still Waters in a Storm, a teacher named Stephen and a group of kids have pushed together tables piled high with books so they can gather round to talk about and translate Cervantes’ classic, Don Quixote de La Mancha. They begin to reimagine Don Quixote as the story of a group of modern-day kids from immigrant families in Brooklyn.

In How We Disappear, award-winning author Tara Lynn Masih offers listeners transporting and compelling stories of those taken, those missing, and those neither here nor gone—runaways, exiles, wanderers, ghosts, even the elusive Dame Agatha Christie. From the remote Siberian taiga to the harsh American frontier, from rural Long Island to postwar Belgium, Masih’s characters are diverse in identity and circumstance, defying the burden of erasure by disappearing into or emerging from physical and emotional landscapes.

Between 1910 and 1920, vigilantes and law enforcement-including the renowned Texas Rangers - killed Mexican residents with impunity. The full extent of the violence was known only to the relatives of the victims. The Injustice Never Leaves You offers an invaluable account of why these incidents happened, what they meant at the time, and how a determined community ensured that the victims were not forgotten.

Eight years after graduation, Annie Radford is not happy to be back at her alma mater in her old job with the Ardwyn Tigers’ basketball team. Worse, her coworker from back in college, Ben Callahan, is still on the Tigers staff, and he’s annoyingly wholesome, hot, and clinging to a grudge against Annie for abandoning him and the team their senior year. But as Ardwyn becomes the season’s Cinderella Story, things start heating up between Annie and Ben, too

The space rock is just the latest thing to land, uninvited, in Vega Lucero’s road-stop hometown. But when she discovers how much a chunk of the meteorite might be worth, she realizes it’s exactly the treasure she’s been hoping to find—and maybe a way to convince her mom not to sell the family store to big city developers to help pay for her grandpa Tata's medical expenses.

This volume cultivates, for students and teachers in classrooms, as well as citizens in libraries and cafes, a language to deliberate about the possibilities and problems of democracy in America.

Set against the tropics and megacities of the Americas, Maria, Maria takes inspiration from wild creatures, tarot, and the porous borders between life and death. Motivated by love and its inverse, grief, the characters who inhabit these stories negotiate boldly with nature to cast their desired ends. Brimming with sharp wit and ferocious female intuition, these stories bubble over into the titular novella, "Maria, Maria"—a family drama set in a reimagined California rainforest that explores the legacies of three Marias, and possibly all Marias.

The stories cover a range of settings and topics, including finding freedom during the Civil War, growing up in a Nez Perce Indian tribe in 1764, standing up for equality in the Civil Rights era, celebrating Christmas during World War II, and helping a friend in need in turn-of the century New York in 1904.

Former LAPD cop turned private investigator Yolanda Ávila blames herself for her mother's death. If she'd only followed her cop instincts instead of the juju—her random prophetic dreams—the perpetrator would have been off the streets and her mother would still be alive. The only salve against her guilt is Yolanda's vow to reject that juju crap, and to solve cases using only good solid detective work. But when her godson is kidnapped and his parents are suspected of murder, Yolanda finds herself caught between what she feels and what she knows.

From the award-winning Native American literary writer Diane Glancy comes a book about travel, belonging, and home. Travel is not merely a means to bring us from one location to another. "My sense of place is in the moving," Glancy writes. For her the road is home—its own satisfying destination. But the road also makes demands on us: asking us to be willing to explore the incomprehensible parts of the landscapes we inhabit and pass through-as well as to, ultimately, let them blur as they go by. This, Glancy says, is home.

The first story collection from prize-winning author Fabio Morábito available in English, Mothers and Dogs features fifteen tales that show the emotional extremes in seemingly trivial details and quotidian situations: two brothers worry more about a dog locked in an apartment who hasn’t been fed than they do about their dying mother; when the lights go out on a racetrack, a man’s evening jog turns into a savage battle between runners; a daughter learns to draft business letters as an homage to her mother.