Showing results by narrator "Jenna Lamia" in All Categories

Ever since Ellie wore a whale swimsuit and made a big splash at her fifth-birthday party, she's been bullied about her weight. To cope, she tries to live by the Fat Girl Rules - like "no making waves", "avoid eating in public", and "don't move so fast that your body jiggles". And she's found her safe space - her swimming pool - where she feels weightless in a fat-obsessed world. In the water, she can stretch herself out like a starfish and take up all the room she wants. It's also where she can get away from her mom, who thinks criticizing Ellie's weight will motivate her to diet.

Set in Appalachia in the years before World War II, Velva Jean Learns to Drive is a poignant story of a spirited young girl growing up in the gold-mining and moonshining South. Before she dies, Velva Jean's mother urges her to "live out there in the great wide world." Velva Jean dreams of becoming a big-time singer in Nashville until she falls in love with Harley Bright, a handsome juvenile delinquent turned revival preacher.

When beautiful, reckless Southern belle Zelda Sayre meets F. Scott Fitzgerald at a country club dance in 1918, she is seventeen years old and he is a young army lieutenant stationed in Alabama. Before long, the "ungettable" Zelda has fallen for him despite his unsuitability: Scott isn't wealthy or prominent or even a Southerner, and keeps insisting, absurdly, that his writing will bring him both fortune and fame. Her father is deeply unimpressed.

Teddi Overman found her life’s passion in turning other people’s castoffs into beautifully restored antiques. Leaving her hardscrabble Kentucky childhood behind, Teddi opens her own store in Charleston. She builds a life as unexpected and quirky as her many customers, but nothing alleviates the haunting uncertainty she’s felt since her brother Josh mysteriously disappeared. When signs emerge that Josh might still be alive, Teddi returns to Kentucky, embarking on a journey that could help her come to terms with her shattered family - and find herself.

Escape was just the beginning. Held captive for eight years, Lily has grown from a teenager to an adult in a small basement prison. Her daughter, Sky, has been a captive her whole life. But one day their captor leaves the dead bolt unlocked. This is what happens next to Lily, to her twin sister, to her mother, to her daughter - and to her captor.

Madison Parker has discovered that not all publicity is good publicity. After turning herself in for stealing some bling, the reality star is stuck doing community service while her Fame Game castmates soak up all the screen time. Not that newcomer Kate Hayes needs more attention - ever since her breakout song became an overnight sensation she's suddenly acting like she's Katy Perry.

Young Pip Tyler doesn't know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she's saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she's squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother - her only family - is hazardous. But she doesn't have a clue who her father is, why her mother chose to live as a recluse with an invented name, or how she'll ever have a normal life.

When Cornelius Allen gives his daughter Clarissa’s hand in marriage, he presents her with a wedding gift: the young slave she grew up with, Sarah. Sarah is also Allen’s daughter and Clarissa’s sister, a product of his longtime relationship with his house slave, Emmeline. When Clarissa’s husband suspects that their newborn son is illegitimate, Clarissa and Sarah are sent back to her parents, Cornelius and Theodora, in shame, setting in motion a series of events that will destroy this once-powerful family.

Did Mrs. Olinsky choose the four members of the sixth grade Academic Bowl Team, or did they choose her--and one another? Four stories-within-in-a-story, interspersed with the ongoing narrative of the team's triumphant march to the state championship, introduce each member of the team in his own her own voice, and bring the dynamics of the group into focus.

Enter a vanished and unjust world: Jackson, Mississippi, 1962. Where Black maids raise white children, but aren't trusted not to steal the silver. There's Aibileen, raising her 17th white child and nursing the hurt caused by her own son's tragic death; Minny, whose cooking is nearly as sassy as her tongue and white Miss Skeeter, home from college, who wants to know why her beloved maid has disappeared. No one would believe they'd be friends; fewer still would tolerate it. But as each woman finds the courage to cross boundaries, they come to depend and rely upon one another.

Kevin Wilson’s characters inhabit a world that moves seamlessly between the real and the imagined, the mundane and the fantastic. “Grand Stand-In” is narrated by an employee of the Nuclear Family Supplemental Provider—a company that supplies “stand-ins” for families with deceased, ill, or plain mean grandparents. And in “Blowing Up On the Spot,” a young woman works sorting tiles at a Scrabble factory after her parents have spontaneously combusted. These wonderfully inventive stories explore the relationship between loss and death and the ways we try to cope with both.

In 1972 home is a cozy nest on Cape Cod for 11-year-old Naomi "Chirp" Orenstein, her older sister Rachel; her psychiatrist father; and her dancer mother. But then Chirp's mom develops symptoms of a serious disease, and everything changes.

Brit Pheiffer has trained to backpack the Teton Range, but she isn’t prepared when her ex-boyfriend, who still haunts her every thought, wants to join her. Before Britt can explore her feelings for Calvin, an unexpected blizzard forces her to seek shelter in a remote cabin, accepting the hospitality of its two very handsome occupants - but these men are fugitives, and they take her hostage.

In Maggie Stiefvater's Shiver, Grace and Sam found each other. In Linger, they fought to be together. Now, in Forever, the stakes are even higher than before. Wolves are being hunted. Lives are being threatened. And love is harder and harder to hold on to as death comes closing in.

Hope's used to thinking on her feet - she hasn't become a terrific waitress by accident. But when she and her aunt Addie move from New York City to a small town in Wisconsin to run the Welcome Stairways Diner, she isn't sure she'll fit in.

Based on select writings from a collection of more than two thousand Dutch diaries written during World War II in order to record this unparalleled time, and maintained by devoted archivists, The Diary Keepers illuminates a part of history we haven’t seen in quite this way before, from the stories of a Nazi sympathizing police officer to a Jewish journalist who documented daily activities at a transport camp.

Solveig, a princess, is trapped in a hidden fortress with her siblings. As they wait for the winter and the unending ice to break, acts of treachery soon make it clear that a traitor lurks in their midst. Can Solveig, her siblings, and her best friend Mark survive the long winter months and expose the traitor before he (or she) succeeds in destroying the king, his empire, and his children?

In kindergarten, Jarrett Krosoczka's teacher asks him to draw his family, with a mommy and a daddy. But Jarrett's family is much more complicated than that. His mom is an addict, in and out of rehab, and in and out of Jarrett's life. His father is a mystery - Jarrett doesn't know where to find him, or even what his name is. Jarrett lives with his grandparents - two very loud, very loving, very opinionated people who had thought they were through with raising children until Jarrett came along. Only as a teenager can Jarrett begin to piece together the truth of his family.

Mercedes Hildebrand Ware is a member beyond reproach...until her life begins to unravel. When her husband betrays her, steals her money, and runs off to places unknown, it's something Frede would prefer to keep under wraps. The last thing she needs is to become fodder for the JLWC gossip mill. And to make matters worse, there's only one person in town who stands a chance at helping her get revenge - Howard Grout, a tasteless, gold-chain-wearing lawyer who has bought his way into Frede's tony neighborhood.

In Shiver, Grace and Sam found each other. Now, in Linger, they must fight to be together. Add to the mix a new wolf named Cole, and Isabelle, who already lost her brother to the wolves.