Showing results by narrator "Emma Galvin" in All Categories

It begins with a call one snowy February night. Lying in her bed, young Sylvie Mason overhears her parents on the phone across the hall. This is not the first late-night call they have received, since her mother and father have an uncommon occupation: helping "haunted souls" find peace. And yet something in Sylvie senses that this call is different from the others, especially when they are lured to the old church on the outskirts of town.

Alexi Littrell hasn't told anyone what happened to her over the summer. Ashamed and embarrassed, she hides in her closet and compulsively scratches the back of her neck, trying to make the outside hurt more than the inside does. At school, nobody sees the scratches or her pain. The only person she connects with is the mysterious Captain Lyric, who writes song lyrics on her fourth-period desk for her to complete. With pencil marks and music, Alexi carves out a comfortable space for herself as she and the Captain finish each other's songs - words on a desk feel safer than words spoken aloud.

In this contemporary thriller, National Book Award Finalist and New York Times best-selling author Paolo Bacigalupi explores the timely issue of how public information is distorted for monetary gain, and how those who exploit it must be stopped.

For Pie’s entire life, it’s been Pie and her mother. Just the two of them, traveling across America. They have slept in trains, in mattress stores, and on the bare ground. They have probably slept in your house. But Pie is lonely. And now, at 17, her mother’s given her a gift. The choice of the next city they will go to. And Pie knows exactly where she wants to go. Pittsburgh - where she fell in love with a girl who she plans to find once again. And this time she will reveal herself. Only how can anyone love an invisible girl?

Mark and Kate have sat next to each other for an entire year but have never spoken. For whatever reason, their paths outside of class have never crossed. That is until Kate spots Mark miles away from home, out in the city for a wild, unexpected night. Kate is lost, having just run away from a chance to finally meet the girl she has been in love with from afar. Mark, meanwhile, is in love with his best friend, Ryan, who may or may not feel the same way.

May is a survivor. But she doesn't feel like one. She feels angry. And lost. And alone. Eleven months after the school shooting that killed her twin brother, May still doesn't know why she was the only one to walk out of the band room that day. No one gets what she went through - no one saw and heard what she did. Zach lost his old life when his mother decided to defend the shooter. His girlfriend dumped him, his friends bailed, and now he spends his time hanging out with his little sister...and the one faithful friend who stuck around.

Lucia's father is dead, her mother is in a mental hospital, and she's living in a garage-turned-bedroom with her aunt. And now she's been kicked out of school - again. Making her way through the world with only a book, a Zippo lighter, a pocketful of stolen licorice, a biting wit, and the striking intelligence that she tries to hide, Lucia spends her days riding the bus to visit her mother and following the only rule that makes any sense to her: Don't do things you aren't proud of.

Sloane and Maggie have never met. Sloane is a straight-A student with a big and loving family. Maggie lives a glamorously independent life as an up-and-coming actress in New York. The two girls couldn't be more different - except for one thing. They share a secret that they can't tell a soul. At night, they dream that they're each other. The deeper they're pulled into the promise of their own lives, the more their worlds begin to blur dangerously together. Before long, Sloane and Maggie can no longer tell which life is real and which is just a dream.

Bailey Briggs is counting down the days to Christmas: She lives for holiday music, baking cookies, going on snowy sleigh rides, and wearing her light-up reindeer ears to work at Winslow's bookstore. But all she really wants this year is the one thing she doesn't have: someone special to kiss under the mistletoe. And she's 100 percent certain that that someone isn't Jacob Marley - athlete, player, and of questionable taste in girlfriends - and that Charlie, the mysterious stranger with the British accent, is the romantic lead of her dreams. Is she right?

Sadie and her friends should be preparing for end of the year finals but they are about to go on a mission to save one of their own. She was taken from school and they know just where to find her. Things are all going according to plan. But suddenly there's a new girl at school—with the same powers as Sadie—who claws her way into The Pack. But this girl is fiercly confident and soon wants to lead them her own way.

From the age of seven, Jack Harper is raised by the leader of a mystical cult, Cyrus Harper. Through Cyrus, Jack receives a full education in all usual subjects - economics, literature, mathematics, history - as well as one unique skill useful to a person in Cyrus's position: assassination. With the help of Roland James, a man incapable of dying, Cyrus hones Jack into the perfect weapon to use against all who oppose him.

Eighteen-year-old Red and her friends are on a road trip in an RV, heading to the beach for Spring Break. It’s a long drive but spirits are high. Until the RV breaks down in the middle of nowhere. And as the wheels are shot out, one by one, the friends realise that this is no accident. There’s a sniper out there. He’s watching them and he knows exactly who they are. One of the group has a secret that the sniper is willing to kill for.

Jane Madison is searching for a job that will fulfill her, enabling her to combine her peerless librarian skills with her witchcraft. Sarah Anderson, Clerk of Court for the District of Columbia Night Court, is just beginning to figure out what she can do as a sphinx, an ancient protector of vampires.

The town of Burden Falls drips with superstition, from rumors of its cursed waterfall to Dead-Eyed Sadie, the disturbing specter who haunts it. Ava Thorn grew up right beside the falls, and since a horrific accident killed her parents a year ago, she's been plagued by nightmares in which Sadie comes calling - nightmares so chilling, Ava feels as if she’ll never wake up.

When band-geek Ivy and her friends get together, things start with a rousing board game and end with arguments about Star Wars. Her older sister Autumn is a different story. Enigmatic, aloof, and tough as nails, Autumn hasn't had real friends - or trusted anyone - in years. Even Ivy. But Autumn might not be tough enough. After a drug deal gone wrong, Autumn is beaten, bound, and held hostage. Now, trapped between life and death, she leaves her body, seeking help. No one can sense her presence - except her sister. When Autumn doesn't come home, Ivy just knows she's in trouble.

Lynn Chambers is popular, wealthy, and going (almost) steady with a handsome college boy. But when she decides not to be a debutante, for the first time Lynn finds herself on the outside. Lois Duncan's 1958 young adult classic tells the story of what happens when the debutante tradition comes to one small town.

Sam Jones and Zoe Miller have one thing in common: they both want an escape from reality. Loner Sam flies under the radar at school and walks on eggshells at home to manage her mom’s obsessive-compulsive disorder, wondering how she can ever leave to pursue her dream of studying aerospace engineering. Popular, people-pleasing Zoe puts up walls so no one can see her true self: the girl who was abandoned as an infant, whose adoptive mother has cancer, and whose disabled brother is being sent away to live in a facility.

All Imogene Scott knows of her mother is the bedtime story her father told her as a child. It's the story of how her parents met: he a forensic pathologist, she a mysterious woman who came to identify a body. A woman who left Imogene and her father when she was a baby, a woman who was always possessed of a powerful loneliness, a woman whom many referred to as "troubled waters".

Seventeen-year-old Tess Fowler has dropped out of high school, tossed her laptop in a freezing lake, then jumped in after it fully clothed. Why? Because Jonah was the boy she knew only through texts and emails but understood to his very core. Jonah was the only boy she’d told she loved and the only boy to say it back. And Jonah was the boy whose suicide she never saw coming.

B Smith has been reunited with the murderous maniac clown, Mr. Dowling. To her shock and consternation, he's desperate to make B his partner in crime. Mr. Dowling disgusts her, but B thinks she can see a way to control him and maybe even save the world. But it will involve a sacrifice far greater and more surreal than any she has contemplated before . . .