Showing results by narrator "Alex McKenna" in All Categories

On Day 56 of the pandemic called BluStar, 16-year-old Nadia's mother dies, leaving her responsible for her younger brother, Rabbit. They secretly received antivirus vaccines from their uncle, but most people weren't as lucky. Their deceased father taught them to adapt and survive whatever comes their way. That's their plan as they trek from Seattle to their grandfather's survivalist compound in West Virginia....

A young woman thinks she has escaped her past only to discover that she’s been hovering on its edges all along: She and her younger sister bide their time in a dilapidated warehouse in a desolate town north of New York City; their parents settled there with dreams of starting an art commune. But after the girls’ father vanishes, all traces of stability disappear for the family, and the girls retreat into strange worlds of their own mythmaking and isolation.

Starr Media Second-Assistant Survival Guide: 1. Don't call your hot boss the Antichrist to his face. 2. Don't stare at hot boss', um, package or his full sleeve of tattoos. (No. Really. Stop!) 3. Don't get on the malicious first assistant's bad side. 4. Don't forget to memorize the 300-page employee manual. 5. If you value your cashmere, steer clear of boss' dog. 6. Boss' dimples are lust-inducing. Do. Not. Give. In. 7. "The elevator ate your clothes" is not a valid excuse for showing up to important meetings half dressed.

Aimee Bender’s Willful Creatures conjures a fantastical world in which authentic love blooms. This is a place where a boy with keys for fingers is a hero, a woman’s children are potatoes, and a little boy with an iron for a head is born to a family of pumpkin heads. With her singular mix of surrealism, musical prose, and keenly felt emotion, Bender once again proves herself to be a masterful chronicler of the human condition.

Megan Mazeros and Lauren Mabrey are complete opposites on paper. Megan is a girl from a modest Midwest background, and Lauren is the daughter of a senator from an esteemed New England family. But in 1999, Megan and Lauren become college roommates and, as two young women struggling to find their place on campus, they forge a strong, albeit unlikely, friendship. The two quickly become inseparable, sharing clothes, advice and their most intimate secrets.

Karthia is nothing like it used to be. The kingdom's borders are open for the first time in nearly 300 years, and raising the dead has been outlawed. Odessa is determined to explore the world beyond Karthia's waters, with Meredy joining the ocean voyage. Despite the daily reminder of the history they share, Odessa and Meredy are fascinated when their journey takes them to a land where the dead rule the night and dragons roam the streets. But just as she and Meredy are beginning to explore the new world, a terrifying development in Karthia summons them home at once.

Everyone assumes that Zee is a lesbian. Her classmates, her gym buddies, even her so-called best friend. Even Zee is starting to wonder. Could they be on to something? Everyone assumes that Art is gay. They take one look at his nice clothes and his pretty face and think: well, obviously. But there's more to Zee and Art than anyone realizes.

Finley and Betty's close friendship survived Fin's ninth-grade move from their coastal Maine town to Manhattan. Calls, letters, and summer visits continued to bind them together, and in the fall of their senior year, they both applied to NYU, planning to reunite for good as roommates. Then Betty disappears.

When Page Dickey moved away from her celebrated garden at Duck Hill, she left a landscape she had spent thirty-four years making, nurturing, and loving. She found her next chapter in northwestern Connecticut, on 17 acres of rolling fields and woodland around a former Methodist church. In Uprooted, Dickey reflects on this transition and on what it means for a gardener to start again. The sur­prise at the heart of the book? Although Dickey was sad to leave her beloved garden, she found herself thrilled to begin a new garden in a wilder, larger landscape.

Venus Black is a straitlaced A student fascinated by the study of astronomy - until the night she commits a shocking crime that tears her family apart and ignites a media firestorm. Venus refuses to talk about what happened or why, except to blame her mother. Adding to the mystery, Venus’ developmentally challenged younger brother, Leo, goes missing. More than five years later, Venus is released from prison with a suitcase of used clothes, a fake identity, and a determination to escape her painful past.

Emily has the life, selling what Time Magazine hails as the revolutionary new treatment for cancer. Her boyfriend’s start-up gets acquired for almost half a billion dollars, and the view from their beachfront LA penthouse looks bright. Few know she’s on a dangerous journey of extremes, riding an alluring threshold of risk, while languishing at hedonistic soirees. Nothing is too big, too excessive, or ever enough. And then, Emily has a shock discovery that forces her to lose everything.

A writer dryly catalogs the myriad reasons she cannot write; an artist bicycles through a protest encampment in lower Manhattan and ruminates on an elusive lover; an old woman on her deathbed calls out for a man other than her husband; a hapless fifteen-year-old boy finds himself in sexual peril; two young people in the 1990s fall helplessly in love, then bicker just as helplessly, tortured by jealousy and mistrust.

A resentful member of a high school Quiz Bowl team with an unrequited crush. A Valentine's Day in the life of Every Day's protagonist, "A". A return to the characters of Two Boys Kissing. 19 Love Songs, from New York Times best-selling author David Levithan, delivers all of these stories and more. Born from Levithan's tradition of writing a story for his friends each Valentine's Day, this collection brings all of them to his listeners for the first time. With fiction, nonfiction, and a story in verse, there's something for every listener here.

It's 1983. David Bowie reigns supreme, and downtown Manhattan has never been cooler. But Justine and Eve are stuck at Griswold Academy, a Connecticut boarding school. Griswold is a far cry from Justine's bohemian life in New Haven, where her parents run a theater and struggle to pay the bills.

At 14, Turtle Alveston knows the use of every gun on her wall; that chaos is coming and only the strong will survive it; that her daddy loves her more than anything else in this world. And he'll do whatever it takes to keep her with him. She doesn't know why she feels so different from the other girls at school; why the line between love and pain can be so hard to see; why making a friend may be the bravest and most terrifying thing she has ever done; and what her daddy will do when he finds out....

It’s Halloween night on a pastoral East Coast college campus. Scantily costumed students ride the fine line between adolescence and adulthood as they prepare for a night of drinking and debauchery. Expectations are high as Leda flirts with her thrilling new crush, Ian, and he flirts back. But by the end of the night, things will have taken a turn.

An enemy you can't kill. A soldier who can't fight. An interstellar war that can't be won - until now. As a soldier of the Celestial Expanse, Guardian First Class Michael Sorenson knows better than anyone that when the Spectres invade, there are only two options - run or die. However, his defensive war takes on a whole new spin when he's recruited into Division 7, a research and development facility with the ultimate mission: to create a large-scale weapon that can kill Spectres en masse.

Annalise Oliver's family has owned and run lakeside cabins in Renn Lake, Wisconsin, for generations. This summer, she gets to help out while her younger sister focuses on being an actress and her best friend is babysitting rambunctious twin boys. It's the perfect opportunity for Annalise to work and spend more time by her beloved lake.

Khosa is given to the sea, a girl born to be fed to the water, her flesh preventing a wave like the one that destroyed the Kingdom of Stille in days of old. But before she's allowed to dance an uncontrollable twitching of the limbs that will carry her to the shore in a frenzy - she must produce an heir. Yet the thought of human touch sends shudders down her spine that not even the sound of the tide can match.

Olivia Reed needs a break. She doesn’t want to think about her name plastered on tabloids or be reminded of her recent meltdown on a Manhattan street. Her micromanaging publicist has just the thing in mind: a remote retreat in upstate New York—the House of Light. It’s not rehab; it’s a Spiritual Center, a site for seeking realignment and personal growth. There will be yoga and morning meditation, soft bamboo-blend fabrics and no shortage of crystals to cleanse her energy.