Showing results by narrator "Audra Pagano" in All Categories

Margo is not like other girls. She lives in a derelict neighborhood called the Bone, in a cursed house, with her cursed mother, who hasn't spoken to her in over two years. She lives her days feeling invisible. It's not until she develops a friendship with her wheelchair-bound neighbor, Judah Grant, that things begin to change. When a neighborhood girl, seven-year-old Neveah Anthony, goes missing, Judah sets out to help Margo uncover what happened to her. What Margo finds changes her, and with a new perspective on life she's determined to find evil and punish it.

Anke’s father is abusive. But not to her. He attacks her brother and sister, but she’s just an invisible witness in a house of horrors, on the brink of disappearing altogether. Until she makes the volleyball team at school. At first just being exhausted after practice feels good, but as Anke becomes part of the team, her confidence builds. When she learns to yell “Mine!” to call a ball, she finds a voice she didn’t know existed. For the first time, Anke is seen and heard.

With Mama gone to the only place where people stay forever, Mabey now spends her after-school hours at Papa's junkyard. Just when things are beginning to look up, a stranger named Aggy begins to threaten Papa with words that Mabey cannot quite understand. By turns heartrending and hopeful, The Listening is a quiet but powerful tale about a little girl's first experiences with love, loss, race, and forgiveness.

I am leaking these journals because I'm tired and I know you are too. The success bar is too high and pretending has become the only way to reach it. Instagrams are filtered, Facebook profiles are embellished, photos are shopped, reality TV is scripted, body parts get upgraded like software, and even professional athletes are cheating. The things we believe in aren't real.

The five most popular students at Noble High have secrets to hide; secrets they wrote down in their journals. Now one of their own exposes the private entries. When our parents were growing up they were encouraged to make mistakes. That's how they learned. But us? Our mistakes go viral. There is no delete button on the Internet. What kind of future do we have if we can't escape our embarrassing pasts? I must come off as quite the hypocrite; complaining about our overexposed lives in a book of secret journals I have leaked. But these pages hold proof of how this pressure affects the "best" of us.

Lemon grew up with Stella, a single mom who wasn't exactly maternal. Stella always had a drink in her hand and a new boyfriend every few months, and when things got out of hand, she would whisk Lemon off to a new town for a fresh beginning. Now, just as they are moving yet again, Lemon discovers that she is pregnant from a reckless encounter - with a guy Stella had been flirting with. On the verge of revisiting her mother's mistakes, Lemon struggles to cope with the idea of herself as a young unmarried mother, as well as the fact that she's never met her own father.

Chosen as a sacrificial offering, Athena is left for dead in the cavernous labyrinth of the village beast. With only a smuggled bag of magical spells and a less than complete education in witchcraft, Athena must fight for her life in the cave that no villager before her has returned from alive.

River's in a tough spot - she has feelings for her best friend's boyfriend, Rafe, who has some issues of his own. But things aren't always as simple as they seem, and River soon finds herself in a powerful position.

Meteors aren't really stars. Lizbeth knows this. But she is a descendant of the Choctaw, who believe that meteors are really stars cast out of heaven - they are the fallen angels, the bringers of bad luck. When one of them lands nearby, Lizbeth sets out to find it. She returns with a mason jar full of magic even greater and darker than she could ever have imagined.