Showing results by author "Deb Caletti" in All Categories

Thirty-six of the most interesting writers in the Pacific Northwest came together for a week-long marathon of writing live on stage. The result? Hotel Angeline, a truly inventive novel that surprises at every turn of the page. Something is amiss at the Hotel Angeline, a rickety former mortuary perched atop Capitol Hill in rain-soaked Seattle. Fourteen-year-old Alexis Austin is fixing the plumbing, the tea, and all the problems of the world, it seems, in her landlady mother’s absence.

When everything has been taken from you, what else is there to do but run? So that’s what Annabelle does - she runs from Seattle to Washington, DC, through mountain passes and suburban landscapes, from long lonely roads to college towns. She’s not ready to think about the why yet, just the how - muscles burning, heart pumping, feet pounding the Earth. But no matter how hard she tries, she can’t outrun the tragedy from the past year, or the person - The Taker - that haunts her.

The Sunday morning starts like any other. But on this particular Sunday morning, she's surprised to see that her husband, Ian, is not home. As the hours pass, Dani fills her day with small things. But still, Ian does not return. And then, like a relentless blackness, the terrible realization hits Dani: He's gone. As the days pass, Dani will plumb the depths of her conscience, turning over and revealing the darkest of her secrets in order to discover the hard truth - about herself, her husband, and their lives together.

A trio of women gather at their aunt's once famous Nevada "divorce ranch," where in the 1950's, high-society women and Hollywood elite gathered to obtain quickie divorces. As they tackle their own conflicts of love and marriage, past and present collide when secrets of the ranch's tumultuous history are revealed. Here is a story of the pull of stability versus the inevitability of change, the therapeutic power of female friendship, and the astonishment of finding yourself just when you've convinced yourself that you're lost.

Seventeen-year-old Cassie Morgan lives with a time bomb (a.k.a. her stepfather, Dino Cavalli). To the public, Dino is a world-renowned violin player and composer. To Cassie, he’s an erratic, self-centered bully. And he’s getting worse: He no longer sleeps, and he grows increasingly paranoid. Before, Cassie was angry. Now she is afraid.

Sydney Reilly has a bad feeling about going home to San Francisco before she even gets on the plane. How could she not? Her mother is Lila Shore - the Lila Shore - a film star who prizes her beauty and male attention above all else...certainly above her daughter. But Sydney’s worries multiply when she discovers that Lila is involved with the dangerous Jake, an art dealer with shady connections.

A sixteen-year-old girl’s road trip across the country to get an abortion becomes a transformative journey of vulnerability, strength, and above all, choice. From the acclaimed author of A Heart in a Body in the World, this is both an achingly tender love story and a bold, badly needed battle cry about bodily autonomy and the experiences that connect us.

When Charlotte wins a scholarship to a writing workshop in Venice with the charismatic and brilliant Luca Bruni, it’s a dream come true. Writing is her passion, she loves Bruni’s books, and going to that romantic and magical sinking city gives her the chance to solve a long-time family mystery about a Venetian poet deep in their lineage, Isabella Di Angelo, who just might be the real author of a very famous poem.

Something must be done. Vlad Luxor continues to rule the Timeless Province with a cruel hand, and now he's screaming about Inners and Outers, Others and Us. Then when the meanest boy in school is turned into the stinkiest, weirdest creature ever, Henry, Jo, Apollo, and Pirate Girl are asked to do the impossible. Breaking this spell will force them to go on their most dangerous, frightening adventure yet - through the Wilds, the Forest of Knives, and a lodge in the woods belonging to the most terrible bully of all...Vlad Luxor himself.

Eighteen-year-old Indigo Skye feels like she has it all – a waitress job she loves, and adorable refrigerator-delivery-guy boyfriend, and a home life that’s slightly crazed but rich in love. Until a mysterious man at the restaurant leaves her a 2.5-million-dollar tip, and her life as she knew it is transformed.

Quinn is surrounded by women with broken hearts. Between her mother, her aunt, and her grandmother, Quinn hears nothing but cautionary tales. Then she gets dumped and starts to wonder if there really are no good men. It doesn't help when Quinn discovers that her selfish, womanizing father has stolen more from the women in his life than their hearts. Quinn joins forces with the stepsisters she's never met and sets out to right her father's wrongs.

Harper Proulx has lived her whole life with unanswered questions about her anonymous sperm donor father. She's convinced that without knowing him, she can't know herself. When a chance Instagram post connects Harper to a half sibling, that connection yields many more and ultimately leads Harper to uncover her father's identity.

It is summer in the northwest town of Nine Mile Falls, and 16-year-old Ruby McQueen, ordinarily dubbed The Quiet Girl, finds herself hanging out with gorgeous, rich, thrill-seeking Travis Becker. But Ruby is in over her head and starts risking more and more when she’s with him.

High-school junior Jordan MacKenzie’s life was pretty typical: fractured family, new boyfriends, dead-end job. She’d been living with her father (the predictable optometrist) since her mother (the hippie holdover) had become too embarrassing to be around. Jordan felt that she finally had as normal a life as she could. Then came Gayle D’Angelo. Jordan knew her father was dating Gayle and that Gayle was married.

Since being diagnosed with Panic Disorder, Jade DeLuna is trying her best to stay calm, and visiting the elephants at the nearby zoo seems to help. That’s why Jade keeps the live zoo webcam on in her room, which is where she first sees Sebastian.

Sometimes people want to be lost. Madison - Mads to everyone who knows her - is trying her best to escape herself during one last summer away from a mother who needs more from her than she can give and from a future that has been decided by everyone but her. Sometimes the lost do the unimaginable, like the woman - the body - Mads collides with in the middle of the water on a traumatic morning that changes everything.

The story takes place in a world much like ours, but at the same time not at all like ours, in which Vlad Luxor - capricious, vain, infantile tyrant - rules over a town with an iron fist. He's an emperor with no clothes, but woe is the person who points that out - they could wind up turned into a squirrel or lizard or who knows what! For in this world, the evil leader also has magic, which he uses to punish anyone who speaks out against him. But in every classic tale with a despicable villain, there must also be a truly noble hero - in this case, four of them!

Scarlett Hughes is overly involved in the lives of everyone around her, especially her neighbors, including: a young goth girl who chalks her very traditional wishes on the sidewalk; a forgetful mailman; and an older couple whose main excitement in their lives are the formal-sounding scam emails from foreign lands promising large sums of money.