Showing results by narrator "Ruffin Prentiss" in All Categories

Richmond, Virginia 1811. It’s the height of the winter social season, the General Assembly is in session, and many of Virginia’s gentleman planters, along with their wives and children, have made the journey to the capital. On the night after Christmas, the city's only theater is packed with holiday revelers. In the middle of a performance, the theater goes up in flames. Based on the true story of Richmond’s theater fire, The House Is on Fire offers proof that sometimes, in the midst of great tragedy, we are offered our most precious—and fleeting—chances at redemption.

In Rye, Virginia, just outside Washington, DC, people work hard, kids go to school, and football is big on Friday nights. An eighth-grade English teacher creates an assignment for her class to debate whether Rye’s mascot should stay or change. Now six middle schoolers get involved in the issue that already has the suburb turned upside down with everyone choosing sides and arguments getting ugly. At the center of this story about human rights and Native sovereignty, there are six young people.

Firefly meets The Breakfast Club in this high-concept LGBTQ+ romance from #1 New York Times bestselling author Tracy Wolff and bestselling author Nina Croft.

He has one gray eye, the other as dark as the deepest parts of any ocean. The often misunderstood Ronald Doolally lives his life as a single man with few attachments. After the death of his father, he hasn't a person left in the world. Until he meets Gertrude Liberal, who immediately shows interest in the odd stranger. The outspoken, natural beauty sees his distant demeanor as endearing. Eventually wearing down his defenses, Gertrude finds a place in his heart against what Ronald would call his better judgment.

You gotta know the rules to play the game. Ball is life. Take it to the hoop. Soar. What can we imagine for ourselves? What if we were the star players, moving and grooving through the game of life? What if we had our own rules of the game to help us get what we want, what we aspire to, what will enrich our lives? The Playbook is intended to provide inspiration for kids ages 10 and up to help them succeed on and off the court.

Bones Malone feels like he can’t do anything right in his new small town: He almost punched the son of the woman who babysits him and his brothers, he’s one of the only Black kids in Langille, and now his baseball team (the one place where he really feels like he shines) just lost their first game. To make matters worse, things in town are getting weird. His mom isn’t acting like herself at all—she’s totally spaced out, almost like a zombie. And then he and his brothers have the same dream.

Forty-something widow Jessie Tucker is beloved throughout Lexington, Alabama, for her kind heart and endless generosity. But she feels it's past time she rewarded herself—especially when upstanding Hubert Wiggins tragically loses his wife and son. Making herself indispensable, yet discouraged by Hubert’s lack of romantic interest, Jessie cooks up a deception she knows will make pious Hubert do right by her....

Brian has always been anxious, whether at home, or in class, or on the basketball court. His dad tries to get him to stand up for himself, and his mom helps as much as she can, but after he and his brother are placed in foster care, Brian starts having panic attacks. And he doesn't know if things will ever be normal again. Ezra's always been popular. He's friends with most of the kids on his basketball team, even Brian, who usually keeps to himself. But now, some of his friends have been acting differently, and Brian seems to be pulling away.

When he graduates with his law degree, handsome and charismatic Langston Hudson is ready to hit the ground running as a lawyer with his family's firm, but a routine traffic stop during a night out with his friends quickly derails his plans and turns his world upside down. Langston and his friends are arrested after officers find half a million dollars' worth of drugs in his car. When Jacqueline Hudson learns of her son's arrest, she immediately begins to build her case. She is one of the top lawyers in the country, with a reputation for being a shark in the courtrooms.

Brian knows that anxiety and depression aren’t magically fixed overnight, but he still doesn’t understand why it’s all hitting him so hard right now. Sure, his dad is in prison and middle school is stressful, but he’s seeing a therapist, he’s got good friends, and he’s doing really well on the basketball team. He should be fine, so why does he feel too tired to get out of bed some days? And why does he turn into “Cursed Monster Brian” and snap whenever someone asks him what’s wrong?

He says: Omar "T-Diddy" Smalls has got it made - a full football ride to UMiami, hero-worship status at school, and pick of any girl at West Charleston High. She says: Football, shmootball. Here's what Claudia Clarke cares about: Harvard, the poor, the disenfranchised, the hungry, the staggering teen pregnancy rate, investigative journalism...the list goes on. She does not have a minute to waste on Mr. T-Diddy Smalls and his harem of bimbos.

With mysterious serial murders putting peaceful Lexington, Alabama, on edge, Jessie and Hubert Wiggins’ steadfast calm and devotion to each other reassures everyone that faith will see them through. But Jessie and Hubert have paid a terrible hidden cost to maintain their devout facade and respectable standing. Nothing can allay the guilt they feel—or stop the growing distrust between them.

There is an unspoken agreement between the racially divided towns of Bayside and Hamilton: no one steps over the train tracks that divide them. Or else. Not until Zach Whitman anyway, a white boy who moves in from Philly and who dreams of music. When he follows his dream across the tracks to meet his idol, the famous jazz musician who owns The Sunlight Record Shop in Hamilton, he’s flung into Capri Collins’s path.

Written in a voice that’s alternately humorous, lacerating, and wise, Long Division features two interwoven stories. In the first, it’s 2013: after an on-stage meltdown during a nationally televised quiz contest, fourteen-year-old Citoyen “City” Coldson becomes an overnight YouTube celebrity. The next day, he’s sent to stay with his grandmother in the small coastal community of Melahatchie. Before leaving, City is given a strange book without an author called Long Division. He learns that one of the book’s main characters is also named City Coldson—but Long Division is set in 1985.

August Wilson grew up open to the creative inspiration in everything he encountered: in library books, in music, in artworks, in the lively conversations overheard in the restaurants and barbershops lining the Pittsburgh neighborhood of his childhood. August paid attention. He listened. And when he got older, he got ideas about what to do with everything he’d seen and heard—ideas that would make him one of the greatest playwrights in American history.

In this third Legendary Alston Boys adventure from Edgar Award-nominated author Lamar Giles, Otto and Sheed have to team up with the Ellison twins to take down a corporation obsessed with the weirdness of Logan County and that's turning its residents into Money-Zombies.

The era is 1988, Detroit is the scene, and crack is the movement. It's a time when young black men can become self-made millionaires seemingly overnight by selling dope. The crack era has become to blacks what Prohibition was to the Italians - a time to get over! It's a time that inspires generations of street dreams.... Fresh out of high school, young Wink has but one thing on his mind - rollin' fresh. Infatuated by all the trappings of the game, Wink and his B-boy crew jump headfirst into the ills of the drug trade, determined to taste the good life.

Unlike the majority of Logan County's residents, Missus Nedraw of the Rorrim Mirror Emporium remembers the time freeze from The Last Last-Day-of-Summer and how Otto and Sheed took her mirrors without permission in order to fix their mess. Usually that's an unforgivable offense, punishable by a million-year sentence. However, she's willing to overlook the cousins' misdeeds if they help her with a problem of her own. One of her worst prisoners has escaped, and only the Legendary Alston Boys of Logan County can help bring the fugitive to justice.

Darrian dreams of writing for the New York Times. To hone his skills and learn more about the power of words, he enrolls in Mr. Ward's class, known for its open-mic poetry and boys vs. girls poetry slam. Everyone in class has something important to say, and in sharing their poetry, they learn that they all face challenges and have a story to tell - whether it's about health problems, aging out of foster care, being bullied for religious beliefs, or having to take on too much responsibility because of an addicted parent.

Plenty of legends surround the infamous Boulder House in Whispering Bluffs, Wisconsin, but nobody takes them seriously. Certainly nobody believes that the original owner, Maxwell Cartwright Jr., cursed its construction - or that a murder of crows died upon its completion, their carcasses turning the land black. Five very different high school seniors on a field trip - Violet, Paul, Ashley, Dylan, and Gretchen - are separated from the group, and they discover that what lies within Boulder House is far more horrifying than any local folklore.