1891. In a remote and crumbling New England mansion, 12-year-old orphan Florence is neglected by her guardian uncle and banned from reading. Left to her own devices she devours books in secret and talks to herself - and narrates this, her story - in a unique language of her own invention. By night, she sleepwalks the corridors like one of the old house's many ghosts and is troubled by a recurrent dream in which a mysterious woman appears to threaten her younger brother Giles. Sometimes Florence doesn't sleepwalk at all, but simply pretends to so she can roam at will and search the house for clues to her own baffling past. After the sudden violent death of the children's first governess, a second teacher, Miss Taylor, arrives, and immediately strange phenomena begin to occur. Florence becomes convinced that the new governess is a vengeful and malevolent spirit who means to do Giles harm. Against this powerful supernatural enemy, and without any adult to whom she can turn for... Views: 98
As a result of finding her soul mate (Christopher), Ellie has broken her curse, and awakened from her death to find that she has become something mystical, an ethereal Other. A being, whose story has yet to end, where who one is before their death, leads to what they become after … kindness or violence follows in their wake. Views: 95
Dax Randall wasn’t much of a role model to his teen son Will as far as the female sex was concerned. Known as Mr. Impossible, the stubborn bachelor scarcely talked to women. So he thought Hannah Chalmers would be a safe date, since she was only in town for two weeks. Wrong! Contemporary Romance by Patricia McLinn; originally published by Silhouette Special Edition Views: 94
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Lisa Jackson comes the engrossing final book in the reader-favorite Forever Family series set in Bittersweet, OregonKatie Kinkaid knows what comes of following your heart; she did that once and ended up pregnant and unwed. So a mysterious bachelor—an undeniably attractive one—moving in next door isn't a complication she needs.Still, Luke Gates is the most intriguing man she's met in years. Katie has no time to figure out Luke's secrets, though. Her main priority is raising her rambunctious ten-year-old son. But the more Katie crosses paths with the six-foot Texan, the more smitten she is. And although Luke insists he isn't husband or father material, Katie can't help dreaming of the man next door... Views: 94
The first installment in the sexy, thrilling four-part L.A. Connections miniseries, a behind-the-curtains peek into the exclusive mansions of Hollywood where the city's most powerful players willingly risk it all for love, lust, and murder, from New York Times bestselling author Jackie Collins, now ebook standalone novellas at an unbeatable price! Views: 93
Meet the World's Funniest Kindergartner—Junie B. Jones!
Remember when it was scary to go to school? With over 50 million books in print, Barbara Park's New York Times bestselling chapter book series, Junie B. Jones, is a classroom favorite and has been keeping kids laughing—and reading—for over 20 years! In the 1st Junie B. Jones book, it's Junie B.'s first day and she doesn't know anything. She's so scared of the school bus and the meanies on it that when it's time to go home, she doesn't.
USA TODAY* :
"Junie B. is the darling of the young-reader set."
Publisher's Weekly *:
"Park convinces beginning readers that Junie B.—and reading—are lots of fun."
Kirkus Reviews *:
"Junie's swarms of young fans will continue to delight in her unique take on the world….A hilarious, first-rate read-aloud."
Time Magazine *:
"Junie B. Jones is a feisty six-year-old with an endearing penchant for honesty."
From the Trade Paperback edition. Views: 92
A triumph of the imagination and a masterpiece of modern storytelling, Cloudsplitter is narrated by the enigmatic Owen Brown, last surviving son of America's most famous and still controversial political terrorist and martyr, John Brown. Deeply researched, brilliantly plotted, and peopled with a cast of unforgettable characters both historical and wholly invented, Cloudsplitter is dazzling in its re-creation of the political and social landscape of our history during the years before the Civil War, when slavery was tearing the country apart. But within this broader scope, Russell Banks has given us a riveting, suspenseful, heartbreaking narrative filled with intimate scenes of domestic life, of violence and action in battle, of romance and familial life and death that make the reader feel in astonishing ways what it is like to be alive in that time.Amazon.com ReviewThe cover of Russell Banks's mountain-sized novel Cloudsplitter features an actual photo of Owen Brown, the son of John Brown--the hero of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" whose terrorist band murdered proponents of slavery in Kansas and attacked Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859 on what he considered direct orders from God, helping spark the Civil War. A deeply researched but fictionalized Owen narrates this remarkably realistic and ambitious novel by the already distinguished author of The Sweet Hereafter. Owen is an atheist, but he is as haunted and dominated by his father, John Brown, as John was haunted by an angry God who demanded human sacrifice to stop the abomination of slavery. Cloudsplitter takes you along on John Brown's journey--as period-perfect as that of the Civil War deserter in Cold Mountain--from Brown's cabin facing the great Adirondack mountain (called "the Cloudsplitter" by the Indians) amid an abolitionist settlement the blacks there call "Timbuctoo," to the various perilous stops of the Underground Railroad spiriting slaves out of the South, and finally to the killings in Bloody Kansas and the Harpers Ferry revolt. We meet some great names--Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and a (fictional) lover of Nathaniel Hawthorne--but the vast book keeps a tight focus on the aged Owen's obsessive recollections of his pa's crusade and the emotional shackles John clamped on his own family. Banks, a white author, has tackled the topic of race as impressively as Toni Morrison in novels such as Continental Drift. What makes Cloudsplitter a departure for him is its style and scope. He is noted as an exceptionally thorough chronicler of America today in rigorously detailed realist fiction (he championed Snow Falling on Cedars). Banks spent half a decade researching Cloudsplitter, and he renounces the conventional magic of his poetical prose style for a voice steeped in the King James Bible and the stately cadences of 19th-century political rhetoric. The tone is closer to Ken Burns's tragic, elegiac The Civil War than to the recent crazy-quilt modernist novel about John Brown, Raising Holy Hell. A fan of Banks's more cut-to-the-chase, Hollywood-hot modern style may get impatient, but such readers can turn to, say, Gore Vidal's recently reissued Lincoln, which peeks into the Great Emancipator's head with a modern's cynical wit. Banks's narrator is poetical and witty at times--Owen notes, "The outrage felt by whites [over slavery] was mostly spent on stoking their own righteousness and warming themselves before its fire." Yet in the main, Banks writes in the "elaborately plainspoken" manner of the Browns, restricting himself to a sober style dictated by the historical subject. Besides, John Brown's head resembles the stone tablets of Moses. You do not penetrate him, and you can't declare him mad or sane, good or evil. You read, struggling to locate the words emanating from some strange place between history, heaven, and hell. From Library JournalAt first glance, aside from the setting, this massive novelized life of Abolitionist John Brown, told from the viewpoint of one of his sons, has nothing in common with Banks's book of outlaw excess, Rule of the Bone (HarperCollins, 1995). Yet both deal with single-mindedness, rebellion, and codes?except that Brown's versions of these are more honorable (he would have agreed with Dylan that "to live outside the law you must be honest"). This book has all the stark beauty of the Adirondacks setting and of Brown's religion, and the elderly, reclusive narrator's coming to terms with himself and his father is an achievement in its own right. Besides, like the works of Thomas Mallon and Thomas Gifford, this is not just a fine novel (and a wonderfully structured one at that) but a way to participate in history. Recommended, without hyperbole, for all collections.-?Robert E. Brown, Onondaga Cty. P.L., Oswego, N.Y.Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. Views: 92
When his attempts to get to know his dying father fail, William Bloom makes up stories that recreate his father's life in heroic proportions.Amazon.com ReviewIn Big Fish, Daniel Wallace angles in search of a father and hooks instead a fictional debut as winning as any this year. From his son's standpoint, Edward Bloom leaves much to be desired. He was never around when William was growing up; he eludes serious questions with a string of tall tales and jokes. This is subject matter as old as the hills, but Wallace's take is nothing if not original. Desperate to know his father before he dies, William recreates his father's life as the stuff of legend itself. In chapters titled "In Which He Speaks to Animals," "How He Tamed the Giant," "His Immortality," and the like, Edward Bloom walks miles through a blizzard, charms the socks off a giant, even runs so fast that "he could arrive in a place before setting out to get there." In between these heroic episodes, Bloom dies not once but four times, working subtle variations on a single scene in which he counters his son's questions with stories--some of which are actually very witty, indeed. After all, he admits, "...if I shared my doubts with you, about God and love and life and death, that's all you'd have: a bunch of doubts. But now, see, you've got all these great jokes." The structure is a clever conceit, and the end product is both funny and wise. At the heart of both legends and death scenes live the same age-old questions: Who are you? What matters to you? Was I a good father? Was I a good son? In mapping the territory where myth meets everyday life, Wallace plunges straight through to fatherhood's archaic and mysterious heart. --Mary ParkFrom Publishers Weekly"People mess things up, forget and remember all the wrong things. What's left is fiction," writes Wallace in his refreshing, original debut, which ignores the conventional retelling of the events and minutiae of a life and gets right to the poetry of a son's feelings for and memories of his father. William Bloom's father, Edward, is dying. He dies in fact in four different takes, all of which have William and his mother waiting outside a bedroom door as the family doctor tells them it's time to say their goodbyes. He intersperses the four takes with stories (all filtered through William's mind and voice) about the elusive Edward, who spent long periods of time on the road away from home and admitted once to his son that he had yearned to be a great man. The father and son deathbed conversations have son William playing earnest straight man, while his father is full of witticisms and jokes. In a plainspoken style dotted with transcendent passages, Wallace mixes the mundane and the mythical. His chapters have the transformative quality of fable and fairy tale, and the novel's roomy structure allows the mystery and lyricism of the story to coalesce. Agent, Joe Regal; author tour. (Oct.) FYI: Wallace is an illustrator who designs T-shirts, refrigerator magnets and greeting cards.Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. Views: 92
Lord Pastern and Baggot (yes, that's one person) is a classic English eccentric, given to passionate, peculiar enthusiasms. His latest? Drumming in a jazz band. His rather stuffy wife is not amused, and even less so when her daughter falls hard for Carlos Rivera, the band's sleazy accordion player. Aside from the young woman, nobody likes Rivera very much, so there's a wealth of suspects when he is shot in the middle of a performance. Happily, Inspector Alleyn is in the audience, ready solve the murder, sooth Lord P&B, and generally get everyone back on beat. Who knew he was such a jazzbo? Views: 92
It is 3123, and traveling in the Tardis into deepest space, the Doctor and Sam find three spacecraft. One is a Ximosian warship, the other an Emindaran civilian starliner, and the third a ship of strange allen design. Both Ximosian and Emindaran crews want to discover what cargo this strange structure holds.In attempting to discover where these vessels come from, the Doctor and Sam unearth a terrible truth. The aden ship is caught in a closed loop of time, being neither created nor destroyed, constantly circling the vortex. The Doctor wants the ship to be destroyed, but the Ximosian and Emindarans are caught in a wrestle for power, and both desire to possess the spacecraft and transform its power into a source for their own political ends. Views: 91
He has walked through the valley of death and man's depravity. Now war photographer Mitch Coltrane is trying to escape his memories. As he loses himself in a world of art and obsession in L.A., a haunting photograph of a woman pulls him into the mystery of a beautiful starlet during Hollywood's golden age. But past and present are about to collide. A living woman, eerily like the woman in his photograph, comes into his life. So does a killer--straight from the hell that Coltrane survived. Deception, double identities, and murderous revenge will shatter his new life, and force Coltrane to perform the ultimate act of courage--not with a camera, but with a gun... Views: 87
A crime novel which features journalist Laura Ackroyd and her lover Chief Inspector Michael Thackeray. When building work unearths the bones of a young woman, bitter memories and old hatreds surface, and someone is willing to kill in order to conceal the identity of the murderer. Views: 87
