Showing results by narrator "Brittany A" in All Categories

Katharine Smyth was a student at Oxford when she first read Virginia Woolf’s modernist masterpiece To the Lighthouse in the comfort of an English sitting room, and in the companionable silence she shared with her father. After his death - a calamity that claimed her favorite person - she returned to that beloved novel as a way of wrestling with his memory and understanding her own grief. Through her inventive, highly personal reading of To the Lighthouse, Smyth guides us toward a new vision of Woolf’s most demanding and rewarding novel.

Taylor Edwards’ family might not be the closest-knit - everyone is a little too busy and overscheduled - but for the most part, they get along just fine. Then Taylor’s dad gets devastating news, and her parents decide that the family will spend one last summer all together at their old lake house in the Pocono Mountains. Crammed into a place much smaller and more rustic than they are used to, they begin to get to know each other again. And Taylor discovers that the people she thought she had left behind haven’t actually gone anywhere.

The high school and college years: an extended roller coaster of academics, friends, first loves, first break-ups, driver’s ed, jobs, and everything in between. Kids are constantly changing, and how we parent them must change, too. But how do we stay close as a family as our lives move apart? Enter the co-founders of Grown and Flown, Lisa Heffernan and Mary Dell Harrington. In the midst of guiding their own kids through this transition, they launched what has become the largest website and online community for parents of 15- to 25-year-olds.

Yale professor Marissa King shows how anyone can build more meaningful and productive relationships based on insights from neuroscience, psychology, and network analytics. Conventional wisdom says it's the size of your network that matters, but social science research has proven there is more to it. King explains that the quality and structure of our relationships has the greatest impact on our personal and professional lives.

The ADHD brain comes with some unique challenges, and until we recognize what they are, they will keep getting in our way. Starting new things, stopping others, concentrating, studying, getting stuff done, paying the bills, and getting on with life just seems so much harder for you than for others. That’s because it actually is, and it is time we faced up to this. ADHD brains are not wrong, weak, or broken–just different. And because the world is set up for neurotypical people, those with ADHD struggle to fit in with these systems which are not matched to them or their needs at all.

Big Burr, Kansas is the kind of place where everyone seems to know everyone - or so they think. But when a national nonprofit labels Big Burr “the most homophobic town in the US” and sends in a queer task force to live and work there for two years, no one is prepared for what will ensue.

Riley Wynn went from a promising singer-songwriter to a superstar overnight, thanks to her breakup song concept album and its unforgettable lead single. When Riley’s ex-husband claims the hit song is about him, she does something she hasn’t in ten years and calls Max Harcourt, her college boyfriend and the real inspiration for the song of the summer.

A high-powered attorney from a success-oriented family, Louisa "Lulu" Malone lives to work, and everything seems to be going right, until the day she realizes it’s all wrong. Lulu’s cousin Mitch introduced her to the world of Renaissance Faires, and when she spies one at a time just when she needs an escape, she leaps into the welcoming environment of turkey legs, taverns, and tarot readers. The only drawback? Dex MacLean: a guitarist with a killer smile, the Casanova of the Faire…and her traveling companion for the summer.

Human webs are the deadliest...When Ryan O’Connelly - the unwilling accomplice of a bank robber turned mass murderer - slipped out of the FBI’s grasp, no one expected to hear from him again, much less of his own volition. But when he shows up at the FBI’s doorstep after almost a year of successful evasion, he has information to point Special Agent Winter Black in the direction of a brutal serial killer.

Lacy Marie Crocker has settled into a comfortable groove back home in New Orleans, and with Valentine's Day right around the corner, she's busier than ever running a thriving pet boutique, helping her mother organize the upcoming National Pet Pageant, and untangling her complicated love life. But when delivering a king-sized order of dreidel-shaped doggy biscuits for a Saint Berdoodle's bark-mitzvah, Lacy stumbles into yet another murder scene - and the last person to see the victim alive was her own father.

To many that know her, FBI agent Blake Wilder is a pillar for truth and the dealer of justice. When faced with threats and adversity, you can count on her to continue to fight for what is right. With her sister Kit clinging to life after being attacked, Blake and her team are called away to solve a case in North Dakota. Teenage girls from prominent families are going missing, and the local sheriff is at a loss to understand who’s taking them—or why.

Assistant DA Kate Stone has just suffered the biggest loss of her career. She’d worked so hard to prosecute a serial assaulter of women, and it was a case she should have won. But a corrupt judge allowed Max James to walk free. When he confronts her outside the courthouse, she punches James, and he goes down hard. After the footage is plastered across every TV screen, Kate’s boss demands that she either attend anger-management meetings or give up the job she lives for.

What happened to the Lost Colony of Roanoke remains a mystery, but the women who descended from Eleanor Dare have long known that the truth lies in what she left behind: a message carved onto a large stone and the contents of her treasured commonplace book. Brought from England on Eleanor’s fateful voyage to the New World, her book was passed down through the fifteen generations of daughters who followed as they came of age.

Before she became a glamorous fashion designer, Ellie de Florent-Stinson was a trailer-park teen about to turn 16. But a night of birthday celebration doesn’t go exactly as planned and descends into a night she’ll never be able to forget. Now, on the cusp of her 40th birthday, it appears Ellie has everything she ever wanted. Except everything is not quite as perfect as it looks on the outside - Ellie is keeping many secrets. But hiding those skeletons has a cost, and it all comes to a head the night of her fabulous birthday party in the desert.

Already dealing with a mysterious figure who keeps sending her body parts, now Blake finds herself under attack from within her own unit. Against the backdrop of an impending OPR review, Blake and her Black Cell team head to Iowa to search for Teagan Stills, the missing daughter of Congressman Elton Stills, at the behest of the director of the FBI himself. When they touch down in the Hawkeye state though, Blake gets caught up in a mystery unlike anything she has ever encountered before.

A few generations from now, the coastlines of the continent have been redrawn by floods and tides. Global powers have agreed to not produce any new plastics, and what is left has become valuable: Garbage is currency. In the region-wide junkyard that Appalachia has become, Coral is a “plucker", pulling plastic from the rivers and woods. She’s stuck in Trashlands, a dump named for the strip club at its edge, where the local women dance for an endless loop of strangers and the club's violent owner rules as unofficial mayor.

Cassidy Foster is heartbroken, stuck in life, and getting a little too obsessed with plants. Then when a well-connected friend becomes sick of Cassidy’s moping and gets her a gig with famous Hollywood couple, Marisol and Nate Sterling, Cassidy jumps at the chance to move to sunny L.A. All Cassidy has to do is be available a few hours a week for errands. But Cassidy learns she was hired for a different purpose. The Sterlings aren’t the perfect couple. Marisol isn’t the perfect wife. And when one of them is found dead, Cassidy becomes the perfect suspect.

Moving, harrowing, and ultimately uplifting, Lori Schiller's memoir is a classic testimony to the ravages of mental illness and the power of perseverance and courage. At 17, Lori Schiller was the perfect child - the only daughter of an affluent, close-knit family. Six years later she made her first suicide attempt, then wandered the streets of New York City dressed in ragged clothes, tormenting voices crying out in her mind. Lori Schiller had entered the horrifying world of full-blown schizophrenia.

From the moment she first learned to read, literary genius Darcy Wells has spent most of her time living in the worlds of her books. There, she can avoid the crushing reality of her mother’s hoarding and pretend her life is simply ordinary. But when a new property manager becomes more active in the upkeep of their apartment complex, the only home Darcy has ever known outside of her books suddenly hangs in the balance.

It's always been just Kate and her mom - and her mother is dying. Her last wish? To move back to her childhood home. So Kate's going to start at a new school with no friends, no other family, and the fear her mother won't live past the fall. Then she meets Henry. Dark. Tortured. And mesmerizing. He claims to be Hades, god of the Underworld - and if she accepts his bargain, he'll keep her mother alive while Kate tries to pass seven tests. Kate is sure he's crazy - until she sees him bring a girl back from the dead. Now saving her mother seems crazily possible. If she succeeds, she'll become Henry's future bride, and a goddess.