Showing results by narrator "Emily Zeller" in All Categories

Seventeen-year-old Ali Chu knows that as the only Asian person at her school in middle-of-nowhere Indiana, she must be bland as white toast to survive. This means swapping her congee lunch for PB&Js and ignoring the clueless racism from her classmates and teachers. Her autopilot existence is disrupted when she finds out that Chase Yu, the new kid in school, is also Taiwanese. Ali and Chase soon spark a chemistry rooted in competitive martial arts, joking in two languages, and, most importantly, pushing back against the discrimination they face.

The lives of writers can often best be understood through the eyes of those who nurtured them and made their work possible. In The Sweetest Fruits, these three women tell the story of their time with Lafcadio Hearn, a globetrotting writer best known for his books about Meiji-era Japan. In their own unorthodox ways, these women are also intrepid travelers and explorers. Their accounts witness Hearn's remarkable life but also seek to witness their own existence and luminous will to live unbounded by gender, race, and the mores of their time.

Jetta’s family is famed as the most talented troupe of shadow players in the land. With Jetta behind the scrim, their puppets seem to move without string or stick - a trade secret, they say. In truth, Jetta can see the souls of the recently departed and bind them to the puppets with her blood. But ever since the colonizing army conquered their country, the old ways are forbidden, so Jetta must never show, never tell. Her skill and fame are her family’s way to earn a spot aboard the royal ship to Aquitan, where shadow plays are the latest rage.

Determined to expose Dean Berg's dream mining operation to the world, and desperate to find her suddenly missing family, Rosie follows a series of clues across the country, where she discovers an abandoned, horror-themed amusement park hiding a labyrinth of tunnels beneath its grounds. There, Rosie uncovers the vault, where her sister sleeps among the dreamers she is determined to set free. Meanwhile, nefarious subliminal messaging embedded within the Forge Show poses a danger to all who watch.

The year is 1881, the era of China's humiliation at the hands of imperialist Europe. Seven-year-old Jinhua is left alone and unprotected, her life transformed after her mandarin father's summary execution for the crime of speaking the truth. As an orphan, she endures the brutal logic of a brothel keeper who puts her to work as a so-called money tree, and she survives the worst of human nature with the friendship and wisdom of the crippled brothel maid.

A moving and illuminating memoir about the life of world-famous author and historian Iris ChangIris Chang's best-selling book, The Rape of Nanking, forever changed the way we view the Second World War in Asia. It all began with a photo of a river choked with the bodies of hundreds of Chinese civilians that shock Iris to her core. Who were these people? Why had this happened and how could their story have been lost to history? She could not shake that image from her head.

She’s served in battle. She’s killed. She’s watched as her friends have fallen away, either to death or to the brainwashing that forces the government’s agenda into young, hungry minds. But Riley is one of the few citizens who has seen the inside of the Stilts, the flooded buildings that surround Manhattan. Now that she knows what life is really like on the other side of the wall, she must decide which path to take. She can continue her career as a soldier in the Service, or she can turn spy against the government and begin working with the Volunteers.

All Samantha wanted was to move back to New York and pursue her music, which was difficult enough being a Chinese girl in Missouri, 1849. Then her fate takes a turn for the worse after a tragic accident leaves her with nothing and she breaks the law in self-defense. With help from Annamae, a runaway slave she met at the scene of her crime, the two flee town for the unknown frontier. But life on the Oregon Trail is unsafe for two girls.

The Queensville Heritage Society is restoring the once-grand Dumpe Manor. While Dumpe relatives and society members use the occasion to dust off old grudges, Jaymie Leighton prefers to adorn the kitchen with authentic Depression-era furnishings. A collection of vintage wooden mallets found in the house is a perfect addition to her display, but one also offers a late-night intruder the perfect weapon to knock Jaymie unconscious before escaping.

General Keith Brennan would rather face an army with his trusty rifle than attend another state dinner. When the president of the solar system is assassinated on Mars, Brennan is the obvious choice to investigate. If he comes up with the wrong answer, though, his career will be over.

Desi Lee believes anything is possible if you have a plan. That's how she became student body president. Varsity soccer star. And it's how she'll get into Stanford. But she's never had a boyfriend. In fact, she's a disaster at romance, a clumsy, stammering humiliation magnet whose botched attempts at flirting have become legendary with her friends. So when the hottest human specimen to have ever lived walks into her life one day, Desi finds guidance in the Korean dramas her father has been obsessively watching for years.

Six years after a virus wiped out most of the planet’s population, former pop star Moira is living under a new identity to escape her past. Desperate for a fresh start herself, jaded event planner Krista navigates the world for those still too traumatized to go outside, but she never reaches out on her own behalf. Rob has tried to protect his daughter, Sunny, by keeping a heartbreaking secret, but when strict government rules threaten to separate parent and child, Rob needs to prove himself worthy in the city’s eyes by connecting with people again.

Tunguska, Roswell, the Bermuda Triangle, the Mary Celeste... For hundreds of years, the danger posed by colliding worlds has been ignored as a crackpot theory, until now, and now it's too late.

When a body wrapped in a blue plastic tarp and tied up with twine is discovered by the bushes near a quiet suburban Tokyo neighborhood, Lieutenant Reiko Himekawa and her squad take the case. The victim was slaughtered brutally - his wounds are bizarre, and no one can figure out the "what" or the "why" of this crime. At age 29, Reiko Himekawa of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police's Homicide Division is young to have been made lieutenant, particularly because she lacks any kind of political or family connections.

The need for love - obsessive, self-destructive, unpredictable - takes us to forbidden places, as in the chilling world of Give Me Your Heart, a new collection of stories by the inimitable Joyce Carol Oates. In ten razor-sharp stories, National Book Award winner Oates shows that the most deadly mysteries often begin at home.

On a dark Kentucky night in 1952, exactly halfway between her 15th and 16th birthdays, Annie Holleran crosses into forbidden territory. Everyone knows Hollerans don't go near Baines - not since Joseph Carl was buried two decades before - but armed with a silver-handled flashlight, Annie runs through her family's lavender fields toward the well on the Baines' place. At the stroke of midnight, she gazes into the water in search of her future.

In the early 1870s, local children begin disappearing from the working-class neighborhoods of Boston. Several return home bloody and bruised after being tortured while others never come back. With the city on edge, authorities believe the abductions are the handiwork of a psychopath until they discover that their killer - 14-year-old Jesse Pomeroy - is barely older than his victims.

Korea's brightest literary star sets this complex and nuanced coming-of-age story against the backdrop of Korea's industrial sweatshops of the 1970s and takes on the extreme exploitation, oppression, and urbanization that helped catapult Korea's economy out of the ashes of war. But it was girls like Shin's heroine who formed the bottom of Seoul's rapidly changing social hierarchy, forgotten and ignored.

With a minimal tableau of familiar objects and a gentle rhythm, three places and all their items are assembled, ending with bedtime as the sun goes down. These places are for young children to have whenever they want to go there. Focusing on safe spaces, comfort, and imagination, each book in the Your Places bundle signals a departure for Jon Klassen while collecting three stories whose peculiar touches of whimsy stamp the books as iconically his.

Pears is a divorced 40-something living with her mother in Queens when the unsexiest pandemic ever hits the country and smatters her potential love life. If her mother wasn’t enough to cock block her, this virus does a double cock block of trapping her in masks while dosing her in hand sanitizer.