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Pollyanna Grows Up

The second book in the “Glad Series”. Pollyanna’s Aunt and new Uncle have received a call for help. Della Wetherby thinks Pollyanna’s joyful spirit is just the Medicine her bitter sister needs. So off Pollyanna sets on a trip to the big city, to make new friends and soften hardened hearts. After her return Pollyanna has to deal with some troubles of her own. Follow Pollyanna as she grows into a beautiful young lady. This story involves some interesting plot twists including the mystery of a missing boy. Illustrated
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The Woman He Loved Before

Libby has a nice life with a gorgeous husband and a big home by the sea. But over time she is becoming more unsure if Jack has ever loved her ? and if he is over the death of Eve, his first wife. When fate intervenes in their relationship, Libby decides to find out all she can about the man she hastily married and the seemingly perfect Eve. Eventually Libby stumbles across some startling truths about Eve, and is soon unearthing more and more devastating family secrets. Frightened by what she finds and the damage it could cause, Libby starts to worry that she too will end up like the first woman Jack loved...Tense and moving, The Woman He Loved Before explores if the love you want is always the love you need ? or deserve.
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Lost

At the flat in Weatherall Walk there was no milk in the fridge, no ice in the tiny freezer unit.... The better furniture was hung over with drop cloths, the leather-bound books evacuated from their shelves.... Unconnected wiring threaded from walls, and a smell of lazy drains, something rotting, unfurled from the sewer all the way up to this flat. Winnie wrenched open a window. But no sign of John? Winifred Rudge, a bemused writer struggling to get beyond the runaway success of her mass-market astrology book, travels to London to jump-start her new novel about a woman who is being haunted by the ghost of Jack the Ripper. Upon her arrival, she finds that her stepcousin and old friend John Comestor has disappeared, and a ghostly presence seems to have taken over his apartment in the nineteenth-century rowhouse once owned by Winnie's great-great-grandfather. Is it the spirit of this ancestor, who, family legend claims, was Charles Dickens's childhood inspiration for Ebenezer Scrooge? Could it be the ghostly remains of Jack the Ripper? Or a phantasm derived from a more arcane and insidious origin? Winnie begins to investigate, but John's erstwhile girlfriend, Allegra, is aggressively unhelpful, and his downstairs neighbor, the cat-obsessed Mrs. Maddingly, is growing stranger by the day. Gripped by inspiration and desperation alike, Winnie finds herself the unwilling audience for a drama of specters and shades, some from her family's peculiar history and some from her own unvanquished past.
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My Life as a Rat

"A painful truth of family life: the most tender emotions can change in an instant. You think your parents love you but is it you they love, or the child who is theirs?" —Joyce Carol Oates, My Life as a RatWhich should prevail: loyalty to family or loyalty to the truth? Is telling the truth ever a mistake and is lying for one's family ever justified? Can one do the right thing, but bitterly regret it? My Life as a Rat follows Violet Rue Kerrigan, a young woman who looks back upon her life in exile from her family following her testimony, at age twelve, concerning what she knew to be the racist murder of an African-American boy by her older brothers. In a succession of vividly recalled episodes Violet contemplates the circumstances of her life as the initially beloved youngest child of seven Kerrigan children who inadvertently "informs" on her brothers, setting into motion their arrests and convictions and her own long estrangement....
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The Last Girl

Fifteen year old Sonya Neslund solves the mystery behind the vicious attacks of three of her classmates.Sonya Neslund has gone through some serious changes over the last year. Her mother Carolyn has died from lung cancer and the home she shared with her mother and stepfather Cal had to be sold, forcing Sonya to live with her unemployed father Aron and Uncle Bill Neslund, who has early-onset Alzheimer's disease. Sonya manages to make two new friends during her first day of high school; Bobby Chambers, who is openly gay, and the beautiful Piper Jones. Piper's friend Jessica Holden does not show up for school, and they soon find out she was viciously attacked, her face slashed. Sonya and her new friends launch their own investigation to find the slasher, who calls himself the Ravisher, as they deal with pain from their pasts, including a former friend of Piper's, now institutionalized, who may know the identity of the Ravisher, but uses her information to control Piper as the Ravisher plans his next attacks. Meanwhile, Sonya could be putting herself in more danger as she uses her photography hobby and budding investigative skills to bring herself closer to the Blue Diamonds, a notorious motorcycle gang, that may hold the key to the Ravisher's identity.
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The Virtue of Selfishness

Ayn Rand here sets forth the moral principles of Objectivism, the philosophy that holds man's life -- the life proper to a rational being -- as the standards of moral values and regards altruism as incompatible with man's nature, with the creative requirements of his survival, and with a free society. **
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The Game-Players of Titan

In this sardonically funny gem of speculative fiction, Philip K. Dick creates a novel that manages to be simultaneously unpredictable and perversely logical. Poor Pete Garden has just lost Berkeley. He's also lost his wife, but he'll get a new one as soon as he rolls a three. It's all part of the rules of Bluff, the game that's become a blinding obsession for the last inhabitants of the planet Earth. But the rules are about to change--drastically and terminally--because Pete Garden will be playing his next game against an opponent who isn't even human, for stakes that are a lot higher than Berkeley. From the Trade Paperback edition.
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Starting From Now

Engaging, complex, enlightening and authentic ...' Mrs B's Book Reviews on Without a DoubtWhen twenty-five-year-old journalist, Zara Ellison receives her mother's ominous text message, Call me when you can, Zara knows it's not good news.Two weeks later, Zara has left her much-loved city life to relocate to Barker, the sleepy country town in which she grew up. For Zara, family comes first.But she needs to work too, and the town's police force is a rural journalist's best source of information. Meeting Detective Dave Burrows and Dave's second-in-charge, Senior Constable Jack Higgins, is a priority.Amid her family's troubles, and reporting on farming accidents and violently clashing activists, Zara is shocked to witness Jack Higgins in a role she'd never have believed. How could he possibly justify this? And what was she going to do about it?Wrapped in the love of family, friendship, crime and mystery, Starting From Now is another compelling...
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A Face to Die For

Eve Duncan attempts to unearth one of history’s mostintriguing lost secrets in this adventure ripped from the pages of Greek mythology, by #1 New York Times bestselling author Iris Johansen.Archaeologist Riley Smith has been obsessed with Helen of Troy since she was a small girl, trailing her professor father all over the world in search of the tomb of the world’s most beautiful woman. Professor Smith put his life on the line to prove that, instead of a myth, Helen had been a living, breathing queen.Riley seeks the help of forensic sculptor Eve Duncan, who has the unusual skills necessary to recreate the face that launched a thousand ships—revealing Helen’s true appearance for the first time in history. But convincing Eve to take on the challenge will be difficult because her efforts could come at great personal risk to her and her family…Tomb raiders have murdered Riley’s father, and now she is more...
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Middle School--Born to Rock

In the next book in James Patterson's bestselling Middle School series, Rafe Khatchadorian's hilarious little sister, Georgia, is back for another rollicking adventure! This time, she's vying to be crowned winner of the Battle of the Bands—if she doesn't die of embarrassment first!It's not easy being Rafe Khatchadorian's sister. He's got quite a reputation around school, and Georgia's got it hard enough as is! With a super secret crush on her classmate Sam Marks, a Rube Goldberg machine challenge to dominate, and constant confrontations with vicious Missy Trillin and her evil Princess Patrol to look forward to, Georgia can't help but throw all her energy into the one thing that makes her happy: her kick-butt, all-girl rock band, We Stink!When Georgia's favorite rock band, Lulu and the Handbags, advertise a major music competition where the winner gets to jam with Lulu herself, Georgia will pull all the stops to make sure We Stink wins—even if...
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A Short Guide to a Happy Life

From the author of Blessings and Still Life with Bread Crumbs, Anna Quindlen’s classic reflection on a meaningful life is the perfect gift for graduation, or any occasion. “Life is made of moments, small pieces of silver amidst long stretches of tedium. It would be wonderful if they came to us unsummoned, but particularly in lives as busy as the ones most of us lead now, that won’t happen. We have to teach ourselves now to live, really live . . . to love the journey, not the destination.” In this treasure of a book, Anna Quindlen, the bestselling novelist and columnist, reflects on what it takes to “get a life”—to live deeply every day and from your own unique self, rather than merely to exist through your days. “Knowledge of our own mortality is the greatest gift God ever gives us,” Quindlen writes, “because unless you know the clock is ticking, it is so easy to waste our days, our lives.” Her mother died when Quindlen was nineteen: “It was the dividing line between seeing the world in black and white, and in Technicolor. The lights came on for the darkest possible reason. . . . I learned something enduring, in a very short period of time, about life. And that was that it was glorious, and that you had no business taking it for granted.” But how to live from that perspective, to fully engage in our days? In A Short Guide to a Happy Life, Quindlen guides us with an understanding that comes from knowing how to see the view, the richness in living. From the Hardcover edition.
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