Showing results by narrator "Tamara Christians" in All Categories

You have Asperger’s Syndrome. You hate the name of this syndrome. You also stopped using drugs six months ago and now your best friend, Winsey, is dead. And your cat, Lester keeps pooping on the floor—it’s a riddle, wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. And eff no, you don’t use the F-word, even when you find out Winsey was killed. You suspect the gargoyle who was sniffing around at the bar the night before, the last time you saw her alive. 

Listeners know that few authors are able to create an atmosphere of unease and terror as well as Oates, a fact confirmed by the four novellas presented here. All the novellas in this collection revolve around the theme of love gone wrong - horribly, shockingly wrong.

In the title story, a white aspiring professor is convinced she is being followed. No need to panic - she has a handgun stowed away in her purse, just in case. But when she turns to confront her black male shadow, the situation isn't what she expects. In "The Rescuer" a promising graduate student detours to inner-city Trenton, New Jersey, to save her brother from a downward spiral. But she soon finds out there may be more to his world than to hers.

Blackbird - a Memoir addresses these questions through Elena Sada’s humorous and insightful story. It is the uplifting interpretation of a dark tale that begins the day she decides to leave Regnum Christi, a Catholic organization founded by sexual predator and Catholic priest Marcial Maciel. After leaving the order, Elena finds herself in Manhattan, longing for the life she left at 19. There, she faces a difficult decision: whom to trust? A shattered love story is followed by a successful one, and Elena finally understands what happened to her under Maciel.

Meg Storm has stepped in it. After becoming entangled within an industry as nefarious as it is criminal, she becomes swept under the riptide in a lurid world of drugs and drug money. With law enforcement at a loss about the island’s escalating trafficking of drugs, authorities opt to use unorthodox tactics. After her daughter, Lily, dies from an apparent heroin overdose, and then her husband, the same way, Meg has nothing left to lose. She transforms herself from housewife into fighting phenom. Will she become a victim, a vigilante, or both? For Meg, nothing is as it seems.

Mackenzie Fraser witnesses a drunk driver mow down her seven-year-old sister and her mother blames her. Then she ends up in juvie on a trumped-up drug charge. Now she’s in the fight of her life...on the inside! And she’s losing. From the ashes rises the phoenix. As a family descends into an abyss of pain, so Mackenzie fights to discover her own way out of the overwhelming circumstances of her sibling's death.

When a comet streaks near Earth, its reverberation tears Croy Justice out of bed. The reverberation causes an onset of earthquakes which mark utter ruin on Earth, especially on the small island where Croy Justice lives. With a gang of boys who want to scour her of dignity, Croy must outrun the gang or risk a gruesome death at their hands. Will she survive these end times? Or, will Croy be snapped up into satan’s grip?

 As a child Natalia goes fishing with her father, Walker, but spends more time humming songs than catching fish. When Walker comes upon Natalia sitting beside a stream, he hears her singing and asks what the music is. Natalia tells him that it’s the music she hears in her dreams, music she wants to write and perform. So begins into the silence: the fishing story, America Hart’s genre-bending, time-warping debut novel. Natalia does become an accomplished musician, but even with her father’s encouragement, she struggles with her family to be understood. 

With her mother dying and her marriage falling apart, Euly Winger returns to her birth place in order to uncover a dark secret about her parent's divorce. Something that has haunted their family since Euly was a young adult. But when Euly meets up with an old acquaintance, her time back home turns nightmarish when he angrily reveals everything he knows about her parents.

Deanna's life has gone up in flames. Can she trade in the ashes for beauty? Can her ashes turn her into Phoenix? You'll have to find out in this rags to righteousness story.