Showing results by narrator "Elizabeth Hess" in All Categories

On his 11th birthday, Jackson is nervous about moving up to middle school where he knows he'll be bullied by older kids, so he makes his wish, "I don't want to grow up!" When his 12th birthday rolls around, he discovers his wish came true: he's still 11, and he's starting fifth grade (again). At first, this is the perfect life. Jackson is the smartest kid in his class, the best on his baseball team, and the star of the school band. But after a few years of being eleven, he realizes his life is passing him by.

Hanna is devastated when just a few weeks before her wedding, her fiancé drops the bomb that he doesn’t want to marry her. With the wedding bought and paid for (and completely non-refundable!), she decides to give it away to a deserving couple. Hanna chooses a pair of strangers that fate seems to put in her path, and then embarks on rearranging the wedding details with the help of the new bride-to-be’s brother.

In her latest forays into the American scene, Joan Didion covers ground from Washington to Los Angeles, from a TV producer's gargantuan "manor" to the racial battlefields of New York's criminal courts. At each stop she uncovers the mythic narratives that elude other observers: Didion tells us about the fantasies the media construct around crime victims and presidential candidates; she gives us new interpretations of the stories of Nancy Reagan and Patty Hearst; she charts America's rollercoaster ride through evanescent booms and hard times that won't go away.

Full of funny, quarrelsome, and quirky characters generating near-nuclear energy on talk alone, Mother of Pearl introduces readers to the McAlisters, a family rivalling Faulkner's Sartoris clan and crossed with Snopeses and laughter.

In 1959, the year Terry Galloway turned nine, the voices of everyone she loved began to disappear. No one yet knew that an experimental antibiotic given to her mother had wreaked havoc on her fetal nervous system, eventually causing her to go deaf. As a self-proclaimed "child freak," she acted out her fury with her boxy hearing aids and Coke-bottle glasses by faking her own drowning at a camp for crippled children