Showing results by narrator "Sophie Amoss" in All Categories

When 15-year-old Xie moves from California to a rural Southern town to live with his father he makes just two friends, Jo and Leni, both budding environmental and animal activists. One night, the three friends decide to free captive mink from a local farm. But when Xie is the only one caught, his small world gets smaller: Kicked out of high school, he becomes increasingly connected with nature, spending his time in the birch woods behind his house, attending extremist activist meetings, and serving as a custodian for what others ignore, abuse, and discard.

One bad boy. One good girl. One unforgettable week. Angelle Prejean is in a pickle. Her family is expecting her to come home with a fiancé - a fiancé who doesn't exist. Well, he exists, but he definitely has no idea Angelle told her mama they were engaged. Tattooed, muscled, and hotter than sin, Cane can reduce Angelle to a hot mess with one look - and leave her heart a mess if she falls for him.

Twelve-year-old Octavia grew up believing the town of Vittoria was the only one left in the world. The sole survivors of a deadly magical war and plague, the people of Vittoria know there’s no one alive outside the town walls - except the terrible monsters that prowl the forest. But then the impossible happens: Octavia meets another girl beyond the walls, someone who isn’t Vittorian. Everything she’s ever believed is thrown into question, and there’s no going back.

This dazzling, genre-defying collection from Jonathan Lethem features seven major stories published since his last collection, along with his best work spanning more than three decades. A major new story, “The Red Sun School of Thoughts,” never published elsewhere, follows a teenaged boy coming to terms with figures of authority and power—those both in his own biological family and in the family he creates for himself.

First-generation graduate student Dorothe Bartleby has one last chance to pass the Magic program’s qualifying exam. If she fails, she’ll be kicked out of the university, losing access to higher magic and her chance to prove classic literature contained spells that rebuilt the world. Still reeling from the paralyzing anxiety that made her freeze on her first attempt, she’s horrified when her adviser insists she reframe her entire dissertation using Digimancy. Mages may have found a way to make computers and magic work together, but throw Bartleby into the mix, and nothing ever goes right.

In 1892, America was obsessed with a teenage murderess, but it wasn't her crime that shocked the nation - it was her motivation. Nineteen-year-old Alice Mitchell had planned to pass as a man in order to marry her 17-year-old fiancée Freda Ward, but when their love letters were discovered, they were forbidden from ever speaking again. Freda adjusted to this fate with an ease that stunned a heartbroken Alice. Her desperation grew with each unanswered letter - and her father's razor soon went missing. On January 25, Alice publicly slashed her ex-fiancée's throat.

An eight-year-old trauma victim is enlisted as an underground courier, rushing frozen organs through the alleys of Eastern Europe. A young janitor transforms discarded objects into a fantastical, sprawling miniature city until a shocking discovery forces him to rethink his creation. A brazen child tells off a pack of schoolyard tormentors with the spirited invention of an 11th commandment. A wounded man drives eastward, through tears and grief, toward an unexpected transcendence.

Machine revolves around a group of teenagers - both locals and wealthy out-of-towners - during a single summer at the shore. Steinberg captures the pressures and demands of this world in a voice that effortlessly slides from collective to singular, as one girl recounts a night on which another girl drowned. Hoping to assuage her guilt and evade a similar fate, she pieces together the details of this tragedy, as well as the breakdown of her own family, and learns that no one, not even she, is blameless.

Waverly holds the vial of red liquid in her hands. She doesn't know what it is, or why it's important. But she knows that the mysterious Shadowface wants it, and is willing to do anything to get it.

Alice Mayfair, Millie Maximus, Jessica Jarvis, and Jeremy Bigelow face their biggest challenge yet when exposure of the sacred, secret world is threatened by a determined foe, someone with a very personal reason to want revenge against the creatures who call themselves the Yare. The fate of the tribe and its members’ right to live out peacefully in the open is at stake. Impossible decisions are made, friendships are threatened, secrets are revealed, and tremendous courage is required. Alice, her friends, and her frenemies will have to work together.

The alien invasion of Earth is imminent. But maybe not all the aliens are united. A rebel faction has reached out to Anaya, saying there's a way to stop the larger invasion - a way for humans and hybrids and cryptogens to work together. Can they be trusted? Or is this a trap? It's not even clear if Anaya, Petra, and Seth are united - some of the hybrids think they'd be better off if the aliens won. With everything on the line, these three teens will have to decide who they are at their core - alien or human, enemy or friend.

What do you do when you've got a degree in French and absolutely no job prospects? Of course, you slide into your favorite French bakery for a café crème! When a lighthearted conversation with the manager of the local patisserie turns into a job offer, Lexi Stuart gladly accepts. She indulges in tasty pastries and wins over skeptical coworkers, but the glamour is minimal, and the pay is less than generous.

Ruti is Markless. In a society where worth is determined by the pattern on your palm and the magic it grants you, this also deems her worthless. But she’s a hardened survivor, a protector of the lowest class … and the most powerful witch in Somanchi. With a single song, she can ask the spirits to grant her unimaginable powers. Dekala’s Mark is strong, a Mark fit for the future queen of Somanchi, but it’s also unstable. She knows the only solution is to be bonded with another, but that would mean relinquishing control over her throne and kingdom.

When Lane Fielding fled her isolated Florida hometown after high school for the anonymity of New York City, she swore she'd never return. But 20 years later, newly divorced and with two daughters in tow, she finds herself tending bar at the local dive and living with her parents on the historic Fielding Plantation. Here, the past haunts her and the sinister crimes of her father make her as unwelcome in town as she was the day she left. Ostracized by the people she was taught to trust, Lane's unsteady truce with the town is rattled when her older daughter suddenly vanishes.

Centering us in Rome, but transporting us seamlessly into worlds as varied and exotic as they are emotionally real, these stories paint landscapes that are populated - vividly, hauntingly - by animals: from squawking, violent seagulls, to magical snakes, to a tiny dog on the side of a deserted road, to starlings circling the evening sky in exhilarating formation.

The old-fashioned struggle for fairness has finally been abandoned. It was a misguided endeavor. The world is divided into two groups, pats and quads. The pats may kill the quads as they like, and do. The quads have no recourse but to continue with their lives. The Divers’ Game is a thinly veiled description of our society, an extreme case that demonstrates a truth: we must change or our world will collapse. What is the effect of constant fear on a life, or on a culture?

Danny didn’t know what she was looking for when she and her mother spread out a map of the United States and Danny put her finger down on Tempest, California. What she finds are the Grays: a group of friends who throw around terms like queer and witch like they’re ordinary and everyday, though they feel like an earthquake to Danny. But Danny didn’t just find the Grays. They cast a spell that calls her halfway across the country, because she has something they need.

Morgan Mallory is a typical college girl, immersing herself in her studies and her various hobbies—and overcoming her deep psychological traumas by indulging in careful manipulations and socially acceptable cruelties. So when she wakes up to discover she’s been transported to a new world that’s oddly reminiscent of a certain childhood fantasy story, she does what any completely sane and totally altruistic heroine would do: set out to kill the queen who brought her there.

In a post-apocalyptic world, where danger roams in many forms, 17-year-old Waverly seeks protection in the town of Crestwood after her boyfriend is ruthlessly killed by lawless raiders. But what she finds is a place wrought with mystery, shady dealings, and more instability than she anticipates.

There are five towns in the U.S. named “Normal” and seventeen-year-old Gemma Leonardo plans on visiting every one of them. Right after she escapes Children’s Hospital in Harrisburg, where she’s being treated for anorexia. Enter Lucas Polizzi, a high school wrestler with bulimia and, more importantly to Gemma, a getaway car. Sick of being told they’re sick, Gemma and Lucas team up for a themed road trip to “the Normals” on one condition—they can’t mention food, ever.