Showing results by narrator "Lauren Ezzo" in All Categories

Seventeen-year-old Anouk has finally caught the break she’s been looking for—she’s been chosen to participate in an exclusive program that includes an all-expenses-paid trip to France and a chance to explore the hidden underground Palais du Papillon, or Palace of the Butterfly. Along with four other gifted teenagers, Anouk will be one of the first people to set foot in the palace in more than two hundred years. But the expedition is not all it seems.

Tia D'Amico is thrilled to move to San Francisco to help her aunt transform an old luxury yacht into an upscale floating restaurant. What's not to love? Sunset dinner cruises, upscale wedding receptions - the possibilities are endless and far more appetizing than staying in a monotonous job in her Podunk hometown. Besides, some of her best memories are tied to San Francisco - especially the memory of Leo Parker, her crush from a long-ago sailing camp.

August 1914. While Europe enters a brutal conflict unlike any waged before, the Duncan household in Baltimore, Maryland, is the setting for a different struggle. Ruth and Elise Duncan long to escape the roles that society, and their controlling father, demand they play. Together, the sisters volunteer for the war effort - Ruth as a nurse, Elise as a driver.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin started out as two Stanford college students with a wild idea: They were going to organize the world’s information. From that one deceptively simple goal, they created one of the most influential and innovative companies in the world. The word google has even entered our vocabulary as a verb. Now, find out the true history of Google - from its humble beginnings as a thesis project made out of “borrowed” hardware and discount toys through its revolution of the world’s relationship with technology to a glimpse of where they might take us next.

What exactly is the difference between a love letter and a suicide note? Is there really any difference at all? These might be the questions posed by Dear Sweet Filthy World, Caitlin R. Kiernan’s 14th collection of short fiction, comprising 28 uncollected and impossible-to-find stories. Here are 28 tales of apocalypse and rebirth, of miraculous transformation and utter annihilation. Here is the place where professing your undying devotion might be precisely the same thing as signing your own death warrant or worse.

Following her forced departure from Fourline, Natalie Barns has been aching to rejoin the struggle to overthrow its evil dictator. With Soris and those she left behind constantly on her mind, Nat bides her time, determined to find a cure for the duozi - those infected by the terrifying Nala. An unexpected discovery propels her back to those she has sworn to protect, but her reappearance in Fourline is anything but straightforward, particularly when familiar faces appear when least expected.

Leigh Ramos—a woman on the run from her ex-boyfriend and the dangerous life she left behind—is starting over in Hawaii with a new name and hopes to leave her past behind her. She’s doing okay. A new job. Great friends. And a love interest in her new boss. But something seems off. The itch to run is back and the island seems to be rejecting her at every turn. There’s a darkness looming on the island and it seems that the only thing that will save them is a sacrifice that will cost a little bit of something from everyone.

Former Detective Karin Schaeffer has nothing left to live for after serial killer Martin Price destroys all she holds dear. Known as "The Domino Killer," Price doesn't stop until an entire family is destroyed. When he leaves a message, scrawled in blood, on her bathroom mirror, she knows what's coming - You are next. But Karin Schaeffer refuses to run and hide.

With no ID for his pet, an agitated young man shows up at Cassie's Comfy Cats claiming his house has burned down and he needs to board his big brown cat, Ayesha. But after a bath washes dye out of the cat's coat and reveals beautiful spots, Cassie suspects the exotic-looking feline may, in fact, be a valuable Bengal show cat, possibly stolen. At the same time, there are rumored sightings of a wild cat in the hills of Chadwick, New Jersey. Could there be a connection?

In a world where magic is sung, a powerful mage named Cadence has been forced to torture her country's disgraced nobility at her ruthless queen's bidding. But when she is reunited with her childhood friend, a noblewoman with ties to the underground rebellion, she must finally make a choice: Take a stand to free their country from oppression or follow in the queen’s footsteps and become a monster herself.

Rose Berman is losing her mind. At least, that’s what everyone at school seems to think. Plagued by panic attacks that started after her mother’s death, Rose is the target of frequent teasing and rumors. But when the star quarterback takes it too far, the school’s tattooed, cigarette-smoking time bomb―Elliott King―steps in and punches him in the face. Rose’s therapist recommends she try out a sport to manage her anxiety. She can’t help but think of Elliott―maybe if she could punch like him, she’d feel safer and stronger.

Samantha Fisher definitely does not want to be a bartender. But after a breakup and breakdown in San Francisco, she decides to defer law school for a year to move to New York, crashing on her best friend’s couch. When she is offered a job at Joe’s Apothecary, a beloved neighborhood bar in Brooklyn, she tells herself it’s only temporary. As Sam learns more about bartending and gets to know the service industry lifers and loyal regulars at Joe’s, she is increasingly seduced by her new job. She finds acceptance in her tight-knit community and even begins a new relationship.

In a small logging town in northern California, young Emma Rose Finnis was born and died. Now, no one remembers her hardworking life and her grand dreams - but she remembers. She remembers everything. Emma Rose is still here, one hundred years after her death...and she doesn't plan on leaving. But when a determined hunter arrives with instructions to "clean" Emma Rose out of her haunt, the stately Lambry mansion, death suddenly isn't the worst fate imaginable.

For as long as she can remember, Kugy has loved to write. Whimsical stories are her passion, along with letters full of secret longings that she folds into paper boats and sets out to sea. Now that she's older, she dreams of following her heart and becoming a true teller of tales, but she decides to get a "real job" instead and forget all about Keenan, the guy who makes her feel as if she's living in one of her own fairy tales.

Meet nine courageous young adults who have lived in the United States with a secret for much of their lives: they are not U.S. citizens. They came from Colombia, Mexico, Ghana, Independent Samoa, and Korea. They came seeking education, fleeing violence, and escaping poverty. All have heartbreaking and hopeful stories about leaving their homelands and starting a new life in America. And all are weary of living in the shadows.

In her first book of comic strips, Emma reflects on social and feminist issues by means of simple line drawings, dissecting the mental load, ie all that invisible and unpaid organizing, list-making and planning women do to manage their lives, and the lives of their family members. Most of us carry some form of mental load - about our work, household responsibilities, financial obligations and personal life; but what makes up that burden and how it's distributed within households and understood in offices is not always equal or fair.

Four girls. One unforgettable July. Britta is the bubbly drama queen. Meredith is the overachiever. Kate is the reluctant socialite. Spider is the quiet intellectual. When these four very different young women stay together for a month in the mountains, they discover that sometimes getting away from it all can only bring you back to whom you really are.

Caroline Sands has never been good at making friends, and her parents' divorce and the move to Arizona three years ago didn't help - being the new girl is hard enough without being socially awkward too. So out of desperation and a desire to please her worried mother, Caroline invented a whole life for herself using characters from Felicity, an old show she discovered online and fell in love with. But now that it's time for Caroline to go off to college, she wants nothing more than to leave that all behind and build something real.

A Is for Alien is award-winning author Caitlín R. Kiernan’s first collection devoted entirely to her science-fiction work. It includes the critically acclaimed novelette Riding the White Bull, along with seven other tales of a less-than-utopian future. Ranging from the wastelands and mountains of Mars to the streets of a late 21st-century Manhattan, from the moons of Europa and Saturn to an iceless Antarctica, these tales bring Kiernan’s trademark brand of the eco-gothic to bear on what it means to be human and the paths and decisions that may face mankind....

Set on the high prairies of Montana, in small towns scattered across vast landscapes, the distances in Broken Field are both insurmountable and deeply internalized. Life is dusty and hard, and men are judged by their labor. Women have to be tougher yet. That’s what sixteen-year-old Josie Frehse learns as she struggles to meet the expectations of her community while fumbling with her own desires.