Showing results by narrator "Mara Wilson" in All Categories

The Beidermeier might be several rungs lower on the ladder than the real-life Barbizon, but its residents manage to occupy one another nonetheless. There’s Katherine, the first-floor manager, lightly cynical and more than lightly suggestible. There’s Lucianne, a workshy party girl caught between the love of comfort and an instinctive bridling at convention, Kitty the sponger, Ruth the failed hairdresser, and Pauline the typesetter. And there’s Stephen, the daytime elevator operator and part-time Cooper Union student.

Fake spirit medium Gretchen Acorn is happy to help when her best (read: wealthiest) client hires her to investigate the unexplained phenomena preventing the sale of her bridge partner’s struggling goat farm. Gretchen may be a fraud, but she'd like to think she’s a beneficent one. So if "cleansing" the property will help a nice old man finally retire and put some much-needed cash in her pockets at the same time, who's she to say no? Of course, it turns out said bridge partner isn't the kindly AARP member Gretchen imagined.

A violent storm washes a mysterious house onto a rural Pacific Northwest beach, stopping the heart of the only woman who knows what it means. Her grandson, Simon Culpepper, vanishes in the aftermath, leaving two of his childhood friends to comb the small, isolated island for answers—but decades have passed since Melissa and Leo were close if they were ever close at all. Now they'll have to put aside old rivalries and grudges if they want to find or save the man who brought them together in the first place—and on the way they'll learn a great deal about the sinister house on the beach.

The Finch sisters once spent long, hot summers exploring the dozens of abandoned properties littering their dying town—until they found an impossible home with an endless hall of doors … and three keys left waiting for them. Curious, fearless, they stepped inside their chosen rooms and experienced horrors they never dared speak of again. Now, years later, youngest sister Claire has been discovered dead in that old, desiccated house. Haunted by their sister’s suicide and the memories of a past they’ve struggled to forget, Meg and Esther find themselves at bitter odds.

Hannah Rosenstein should be happy: after a lonely childhood of traipsing all over the world, she finally has a home as the co-owner of destination inn Carrigan’s All Year. But her thoughts keep coming back to Levi "Blue" Matthews: her first love, worst heartbreak, and now, thanks to her great-aunt’s meddling will, absentee business partner.

Ann M. Martin’s Baby-Sitters Club series featured a complex cast of characters and touched on an impressive range of issues that were underrepresented at the time: divorce, adoption, childhood illness, class division, and racism, to name a few. In We Are the Baby-Sitters Club, writers from the original BSC generation will reflect on the enduring legacy of Ann M. Martin’s beloved series, 35 years later - celebrating the BSC’s profound cultural influence.

Tattooed from her neck to her toes—and sporting a gold tooth as sharp as her wisecracks, Sister Holiday struggles to stay on the righteous path. Never one to make things easy for herself, she’s committed to taking her permanent vows with the Sisters of the Sublime Blood and joining former fire inspector Magnolia Riveaux’s latest venture, Redemption Detective Agency—both in service of satisfying her eternal quest for answers. When Sister Holiday and Riveaux set out to bust a philandering husband, they instead find the body of a priest floating in the swollen Mississippi River.

Mallory Smith was no ordinary girl, and this is no ordinary story. At age three, Mallory was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis—a disease that attacks the internal organs and would eventually kill her. Despite living on borrowed time, Mallory pursued her passions: volleyball; writing; the environment; her boyfriend, family, and friends. Most importantly, every day she chose to embody the mantra "live happy."

Four years ago, an unthinkable disaster occurred. In what was later known as the Low-Probability Event, 8 million people were killed in a single day, each of them dying in improbable, bizarre ways: strangled by balloon ropes, torn apart by exploding manhole covers, attacked by a chimpanzee wielding a typewriter. A day of freak accidents that proved anything is possible, no matter the odds. Luck is real now, and it's not always good.

In the town of Night Vale, there’s a faceless old woman who secretly lives in everyone’s home, but no one knows how she got there or where she came from...until now. Told in a series of eerie flashbacks, the story of The Faceless Old Woman goes back centuries to reveal an initially blissful and then tragic childhood on a Mediterranean Estate in the early 19th century, her rise in the criminal underworld of Europe, a nautical adventure with a mysterious organization of smugglers, her plot for revenge on the ones who betrayed her, and ultimately her death and its aftermath.

Every summer, Vivian Levy and Lucy Webster spend a month with their father at his lake house — separately. Raised in New York City, Vivian is an ambitious sommelier with a secret that could derail her future. Lucy grew up in a tiny Maine town, where she now teaches high school English while watching her marriage unravel. They’ve never met. While Lucy envied her half-sister from afar, their father kept Vivian in the dark. When Vivian arrives at the lake to spread his ashes and sell his cabin, she's shocked to find Lucy there, awaiting his return.

When Mona Ramsey married Lord Teddy Roughton to secure his visa—allowing him to remain in San Francisco to fulfill his wildest dreams—she never imagined she would, by age 48, be the sole owner of Easley House, Teddy’s grand, romantic country manor in the UK. She also didn't imagine that she’d need to open the manor’s doors to paying guests to afford the electric bill and repair the leaking roof. Yet somehow she and her young friend Wilfred--whom guests assume is serving as Easley’s charming-but-clumsy butler--and the loopy old gardener Mr. Hargis, are making it work.

Homebody Lex McCall loves her sleepy Vermont town and quiet bookstore job. After her family, friends, and exes all moved away to seek futures elsewhere, Lex set one rule: no dating tourists, newcomers, or anyone else who is bound to leave her behind. When the bookshop owner, eager to off-load the supposedly haunted building, offers to sell the store to Lex at an unbeatable price, Lex jumps at the chance to further put down roots.

Camavor is a brutal land with a bloody legacy. Where the empire’s knights go, slaughter follows. Kalista seeks to change that. When her young and narcissistic uncle, Viego, becomes king, she vows to temper his destructive instincts, as his loyal confidant, advisor, and military general. But her plans are thwarted when an assassin’s poisoned blade strikes Viego’s wife, Isolde, afflicting her with a malady for which there is no cure. As Isolde’s condition worsens, Viego descends into madness and grief, threatening to drag Camavor down with him.

From the moment they locked eyes in high school, Abby and Freya have been at each other’s throats. Ten years later, when Abby and Freya cross paths again, their old rivalry doesn’t take more than a few minutes to begin anew. And now Naomi, Abby’s best friend, is falling for Freya’s producer and close pal, Will.

When Saint Sebastian's School becomes the target of a shocking arson spree, the Sisters of the Sublime Blood and their surrounding community are thrust into chaos. Unsatisfied with the officials' response, sardonic and headstrong Sister Holiday becomes determined to unveil the mysterious attacker herself and return her home and sanctuary to its former peace. Her investigation leads down a twisty path of suspicion and secrets in the sticky, oppressive New Orleans heat, turning her against colleagues, students, and even fellow Sisters along the way.

At the edge of Chicago, nestled on the shores of Lake Michigan, there is a waystation for the dead. Every night, the newly-departed travel through the city to the Station, guided by its lighthouse. There, they reckon with their lives, before stepping aboard a boat to go beyond. Nera has spent decades watching her father—the ferryman of the dead—sail across the lake, each night just like the last. But tonight, something is wrong.

Paranormal skeptic Zelda Tempest is hoping for a much-needed creativity boost for a new paranormal mystery novel. But despite the alleged magic of her hometown, Moonville, Ohio, she’s as stuck as ever. With two witch sisters, not believing in magic is strange for a Tempest, but no one is more disappointed than Morgan Angelopoulos, the charming man next door.

Tania de Batz is most herself with a sword in her hand. Everyone thinks her near-constant dizziness makes her weak, nothing but “a sick girl.” But Tania wants to be strong, independent, a fencer like her father—a former Musketeer and her greatest champion. Then Papa is brutally, mysteriously murdered. His dying wish? For Tania to attend finishing school. But L’Académie des Mariées, Tania realizes, is no finishing school. It’s a secret training ground for new Musketeers.

Natalya Fox has twenty-hours to make the biggest choice of her life: stay home in NYC for the summer with her dad (and finally screw up the courage to talk to the girl she's been crushing on), or spend it with her basically estranged mom in LA (knowing this is the best chance she has to fix their relationship, if she even wants to.) (Does she want to?) How's a girl supposed to choose? She can't, and so both summers play out in alternating timelines.