Showing results by narrator "Brittany A" in All Categories

Seventeen-year-old Amelia Gannon (just "Gannon" to her friends) is invisible to almost everyone in her life. To her parents, to her teachers - even her best friend, who is more interested in bumming cigarettes than bonding. Some days the only way Gannon knows she is real is by carving bloody lines into the flesh of her stomach. Then she meets Michael Brooks, and for the first time she feels like she is being seen to the core of her being.

The Preacher is dead, the case solved, but now, Special Agent Winter Black’s missing brother seems to be taunting her, leaving a trail that leads back to their old house in Harrisonburg. As she learns more, Winter must fight the urge to revert to that primal part of herself that was set on secrecy and vengeance during the investigation of her parents’ murder. Especially now that her best friend and partner Noah Dalton’s own past has come back to play.

#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.

Shadow Island lore insists that anyone who steps in the shadow cast onto the old witch’s cottage is cursed. But when two bodies are discovered inside the cottage, their heads arranged in a ghastly tableau, Rebecca is more concerned about the real monsters—the human ones who’d commit such an atrocious murder.

In a near-future where a virtual currency of digital content fuels a fame-hungry society, a brand-new experiment that combines social media and reality TV has been greenlit. Voted on, and contestants are sent to a maximum-security reform camp on an island where they can have no contact with the outside world. To lose means prison. But to win is to be free. The most popular young offender with the most upvotes by the end is given both a second chance in society and a cash prize.

With his father’s mysterious disappearance and his brother Ronnie enlisting in the Vietnam War, 13-year-old TJ Crowley is left alone with his racist, unstable mother, Kate. The newly enforced Fair Housing Act results in the unthinkable for the Crowleys when a Black family, headed by the eminent Dr. Washington, crosses the racial red line and moves in next door. Kate is quick to warn TJ that their new neighbors are strictly off-limits and makes a panicked call to beg Ray, her old flame, to travel to their home in Wichita Kansas to help deal with “the problem next door.”

When called upon, she can talk the death out of the dying and save their lives—only once, never twice. But this truly unique gift comes at a price, rooting Weatherly to people who only want her around when they need her and resent her backwater ways when they don’t. Weatherly’s cousin Adaire also has a gift: she’s a Scryer and can see the future reflected back in dark surfaces. Right before she is killed in an accident, Adaire saw something unnerving, and that’s why Weatherly believes she was murdered—never thinking for a moment that it was an accident.

Within the walls of Truvy's beauty shop are six women whose lives increasingly hinge on the existence of one another. Together, they absorb the passing seasons, just like the weathered wooden structure of the salon "home" that they share.

Three hours into her new job, Blake Larsen stumbles across her first body. But this is no ordinary murder. The scene is elaborately staged, with the victim's head clinically severed from her shoulders. Blake is certain this isn't the killer's first time. Then, a second woman goes missing, a beautiful young Army wife named Nina Crawford. When the kidnappers—claiming to be ISIS—release a horrific videoed ransom demand threatening to livestream her execution, the attention of the entire country turns to Northern Pines. And a countdown begins. Nina has 48 hours to live.

Every year, over 10,000 letters addressed to Juliet Capulet arrive in Verona, Italy, the famous hometown of Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet. These handwritten letters come from people all over the world, seeking guidance and support from Juliet herself. Capturing the pain, joy, humor, and confusion of love, the 60 letters in this book offers encouragement, comfort, hope - and a nod to the human condition. Including responses from Juliet herself, this romantic and relatable, and perfect as a Valentine's Day gift, Dear Juliet proves that love is the universal language.

Lena Westbrook, a perfectionist and workaholic, has carefully planned and orchestrated every detail of her life—career, love, and everything in between. So when her boyfriend of two years lets her down on the night she expects him to propose, she’s heartbroken and confused. Lena flees to her beloved aunt’s home on Seattle’s picturesque Bainbridge Island to lick her wounds. The familiarity of home is a relief. But when she awakens the next morning, she’s no longer in a cottage nestled on the Puget Sound, but rather in a chic Parisian apartment.

Asking her older brother Charlie to train her softball team over spring break, Kristy is convinced that Charlie is a great coach, until he meets Angelica and is no longer able to pay attention to the kids.

A year after saving the powers of Olympus by defeating Nyx, the Goddess of Darkness, Daphne is haunted by still-looming threats, her complicated feelings for the god Apollo, and the promise she made to the Olympian gods that she would help them again when they called upon her. When their command finally comes, it is deceptively simple: secure herself a spot as one of Queen Helen’s guards. A war is coming, and all of Sparta must be prepared.

Watch out, parents! Hilarious jokes are coming your way! This kids' joke book will turn your 10-year-old into a young comedian. The You Laugh You Lose Challenge: 10 Year Old Edition is a book designed for both single player and to be shared and listened to by everyone in your household. But why not let everyone play? Gather your family around the fire, call them into the kitchen, meet on the patio, and let the good times roll! Hundred percent kid-appropriate material.

US Marshal Milana Tanner doesn’t know where she came from. Abandoned as a toddler, she was adopted into a pastor’s family and raised as their own. Her brother is the sole witness to a murder…and the intended target. She’ll do whatever it takes to keep him safe from the infamous assassin hunting him, even if it means confronting the demons from her own mysterious past. It will test her training, her skills, and her faith. Now more than ever, failure is not an option. Who can she trust when her brother’s life is on the line?

Assistant DA Kate Stone has just suffered the biggest loss of her career. She’d worked so hard to prosecute a serial assaulter of women, and it was a case she should have won. But a corrupt judge allowed Max James to walk free. When he confronts her outside the courthouse, she punches James, and he goes down hard. After the footage is plastered across every TV screen, Kate’s boss demands that she either attend anger-management meetings or give up the job she lives for.

Shane has been doing college all wrong. Her life has been dorm, dining hall, class, repeat. Time's a ticking, and she needs a change - there's nothing like moving to a new country to really mix things up. Shane signs up for a semester abroad in London. She's going to right all her college mistakes: make friends, pursue boys, and find adventure! Easier said than done. She is soon faced with the complicated realities of living outside her bubble, and when self-doubt sneaks in, her new life starts to fall apart.

An anthropologist and his daughter travel to Kermunkachunk, the capitol of Chalazia, to conduct research for an ethnography on the Chalazian Mafia Faction (a splinter group of the Chalazian Children's Theater). The book takes place over the course of a night at the Bar Pulpo, Kermunkachunk's #1 spoken-word karaoke bar, where conversations are actually being read from multiple karaoke screens arrayed around the barroom. Moreover, it's Thursday, "Father/Daughter Nite", when the bar is frequented by actual fathers and daughters as well as couples cosplaying fathers and daughters.

When Sylvie Patterson, a bookish student at a Northern California boarding school, falls in love with a spirited, elusive classmate named Gabe, they embark on an experiment that changes their lives. Their headmaster, Dr. Adrian Keller, is a charismatic medical researcher who has staked his career on the therapeutic potential of lucid dreaming: by teaching his patients to become conscious during sleep, he believes he can relieve stress and trauma. Over the next six years, Sylvie and Gabe become consumed by Keller’s work, following him across the country.

Eliza and Graham are anticipating an anything-but-sexy, weeklong getaway to celebrate their five-year anniversary. Nestled on the Northern California coastline, the resort prides itself on being a destination for those in love and those looking to find it. For Eliza and Graham, it might as well be a vacation with a roommate.