Showing results by narrator "Candace Thaxton" in All Categories

Milla’s whole world is her family’s farm. She is never allowed to travel to the village, and her only friend is her beloved older brother, Niklas. When a bright-eyed girl named Iris comes to stay, Milla hopes her loneliness might finally be coming to an end. But Iris has a secret she’s forbidden to share: The village is cursed by a demon who possesses girls at random, and the townspeople live in terror of who it will come for next. Now, it seems, the demon has come for Iris.

Ten-year-old Grace is in search of a subject for her fifth-grade history project when she learns that her four times-great grandfather once stabbed his lover to death. His grisly act was memorialized in a murder ballad, her aunt tells her, so it must be true. But the lessons of that revelation—to be careful of men and desire—are not just Grace’s to learn. Her family’s tangled past is part of a dark legacy in which the lives of generations of women are affected by the violence immortalized in folk songs like “Knoxville Girl” and “Pretty Polly” reminding them always to know their place.

Have you ever wondered what your mother was like before she became your mother, and what she gave up in order to have you? It’s the early days of the new millennium, and Laura has arrived in New York City’s East Village in the hopes of recording her first album. A songwriter with a one-of-a-kind talent, she’s just beginning to book gigs with her beautiful best friend when she falls hard for a troubled but magnetic musician whose star is on the rise. Their time together is stormy and short-lived - but will reverberate for the rest of Laura’s life.

Charlotte McGanley knows happiness. Just ask anyone who's read Perfect Happiness, her best-selling book about how she, a busy mother and professor, used her no-nonsense positive psychology research to brighten her own life. She always pictured her career beginning and ending in the halls of academia, but now she's become a bit of a self-help guru. No one is more surprised by this than Charlotte herself, who has secretly never been more miserable.

In 2014, Lacy Johnson was giving a reading from The Other Side, her “instant classic” (Kirkus Reviews) memoir of kidnapping and rape, when a woman asked her what she would like to happen to her rapist. This collection, a meditative extension of that answer, draws from philosophy, art, literature, mythology, anthropology, film, and other fields, as well as Johnson’s personal experience, to consider how our ideas about justice might be expanded beyond vengeance and retribution to include acts of compassion, patience, mercy, and grace.

Set in the enchanting land of Sang, a Blud series urban fantasy short story by the winner of Romantic Times Reviewer's Choice Award for Best Steampunk, Delilah S. Dawson, from the thrilling Carniepunk anthology. The question isn't whether Charlie Dregs has met Lydia, a Sang riff on Lydia the Tattooed Lady, but rather whether the woman has even met herself. Enter the mysterious steampunk world of Sang, and prepare to be amazed.

From well-loved women’s fiction writer Kristyn Kusek Lewis comes a breakout novel about a woman moving to a small community and uncovering the many secrets that hide behind closed doors. Greyhill, Virginia - refuge of old money, old mansions, and old-fashioned ideas about who belongs and who doesn’t - just got a few new residents. When Bess Warner arrives in town with her husband Cole and their kids, she thinks she knows what to expect....

Born in a small town in the desolate reaches of Western Texas and shaped by her girlhood in an industrial wasteland on the outskirts of Dallas, Bonnie Parker was a natural performer and a star student. She dreamed of being a movie star or a singer or a poet. But her dramatic nature, contorted by her limited opportunities and her overwhelming love for Clyde Barrow, pushed her into a course from which there was no escape but death.

Do you struggle with having honest and open conversations with your child? Do you find yourself not knowing what to say when faced with a tricky topic? From homework hassles to temper tantrums, sibling rivalry to bedtime battles, every parent has felt the weight of escalating scenarios and ineffective punishment. How to Talk When Kids Won't Listen is filled with top tips, relatable stories and forward-thinking techniques designed to transform your relationship with your child.

Sixteen-year-old Elena Mendoza is the product of a virgin birth. This can be scientifically explained (it's called parthenogenesis), but what can't be explained is how Elena is able to heal Freddie, the girl she's had a crush on for years, from a gunshot wound in a Starbucks parking lot. Or why the boy who shot Freddie, David Combs, disappeared from the same parking lot minutes later after getting sucked up into the clouds. What also can't be explained are the talking girl on the front of a tampon box, or the reasons that David Combs shot Freddie in the first place.

Alys was seven when the soul eaters came to her village. These soul eaters, twin sisters who were abandoned by their father and slowly morphed into something not quite human, devour human souls. Alys, and all the other children, were spared - and they were sent to live in a neighboring village. There the devout people created a strict world where good and evil are as fundamental as the nursery rhymes children sing. Fear of the soul eaters - and of the Beast they believe guides them - rules village life.

A Charlie Madigan short story - from the series praised for "intricate world-building and richly complex characters" ( Publishers Weekly) - as it first appeared in the Carniepunk urban fantasy anthology.

When Kiley learns firsthand what evil lurks in the heart of her boyfriend, he’ll learn about the Cold Girl, and her penchant for retribution.

Having just quit Julliard, disillusioned fiddler Melanie St. James finds herself as part of a group of traveling musicians en route to an OtherFolk carnival. Eager to break the chains of a lifetime of conformity, Melanie throws caution to the wind and enters a reckless bargain, plying her musical skills for the chance to win a violin that can open Doors to the CrossRoads. But the competition turns out to be far more than she expected.

Author of the Amanda Feral series Mark Henry lends his brilliantly twisted imagination to the gripping Carniepunk anthology in this creepy zombie short story. When the zombie apocalypse overtakes New York City, a trip to Coney Island is the most frightening thing of all. A gruesome tale of transformation, Ferris wheels, and transsexuals.

In 1898, a woman forsakes the comfort of home and family for a love that takes her to a remote lighthouse on the wild coast of California. What she finds at the edge of the earth, hidden between the sea and the fog, will change her life irrevocably. Trudy, who can argue Kant over dinner and play a respectable portion of Mozart's Serenade in G major, has been raised to marry her childhood friend and assume a life of bourgeois comfort in Milwaukee. She knows she should be pleased, but she's restless instead, yearning for something she lacks even the vocabulary to articulate.

Rachel has always idolized her older brother, Micah, but she knows he also secretly struggles with addiction. So when Micah doesn’t come home one night, Rachel panics. Then Rachel gets an anonymous note telling her that Micah is a few hours away - and on the brink of destruction. Accompanied by Micah’s best friend Tyler, Rachel sets out to find her brother. With no concrete leads, Rachel and Tyler spend hours wandering the streets.

A new and long-awaited novel exploring what happens when untested people are put to a hard test and in its aftermath find themselves in a newly uncertain world.

A psychological thriller about a young woman who thought she’d escaped the legacy of her mass-murderer father, until her estranged mother is killed by his so-called followers - and it’s clear this death is only the beginning.

1940s. With the world at war, Eleanor Trigg leads a mysterious ring of female secret agents in London. Twelve of these women are sent to aid the resistance. They never return home. 1946. Passing through Grand Central Station, Grace Healey finds an abandoned suitcase tucked beneath a bench. The case is filled with a dozen photographs, each of a different woman.