Showing results by narrator "Alex McKenna" in All Categories

In seven days Jet Mason will be dead. Jet is the daughter of one of the wealthiest families in Woodstock, Vermont. Twenty-seven years old, she’s still waiting for her life to begin. I’ll do it later, she always says. She has time. Until Halloween night, when Jet is violently attacked by an unseen intruder. She suffers a catastrophic head injury. The doctor is certain that within a week, the injury will trigger a deadly aneurysm.

Annabelle Reynolds has everything she’s ever wanted. A devoted husband, two wonderful daughters, and a career she loves. She couldn’t be happier. So why is she suddenly plagued by disturbing dreams of a future where she hates her husband and her daughters’ lives are at risk? At first, she chalks the dreams up to an overactive imagination. But when details from her dreams, details she couldn’t possibly have predicted, begin to materialize, she realizes these aren’t just dreams but rather premonitions of a terrifying future.

After being rescued as infants from a sinking ocean liner in 1914, Marian and Jamie Graves are raised by their dissolute uncle in Missoula, Montana. There—after encountering a pair of barnstorming pilots passing through town in beat-up biplanes—Marian commences her lifelong love affair with flight. At fourteen she drops out of school and finds an unexpected and dangerous patron in a wealthy bootlegger who provides a plane and subsidizes her lessons, an arrangement that will haunt her for the rest of her life, even as it allows her to fulfill her destiny: circumnavigating the globe.

Four freshmen arrive at college from completely different worlds: Lainey, a California party girl with a flair for drama; Tyson, a brilliant scholar and aspiring lawyer from Washington, D.C.; Summer, an ambitious, recruited athlete from the Midwest; and Hannah, a mild-mannered southerner who is content to quietly round out the circle of big personalities. Soon after arriving on campus, they strike up a conversation in their shared dorm, and the seeds of friendship are planted.

Venus Black is a straitlaced A student fascinated by the study of astronomy - until the night she commits a shocking crime that tears her family apart and ignites a media firestorm. Venus refuses to talk about what happened or why, except to blame her mother. Adding to the mystery, Venus’ developmentally challenged younger brother, Leo, goes missing. More than five years later, Venus is released from prison with a suitcase of used clothes, a fake identity, and a determination to escape her painful past.

Abandoned by first her father and then her mother, as a girl Tessa is left to live with her abusive stepfather and stepbrother. She survives by finding reserves of strength in herself, and by the transformative love of another teenage girl, Mel, who sees through Tessa’s tough exterior to the loving woman inside. When she suddenly loses Mel, too, Tessa stumbles into a kind of refuge with Henry and his mama, becoming a mother and finding herself in a familial existence that somehow carries her into adulthood—until the day she runs into Mel, who has just returned to Perris after years away.

Lilia Liska has shrewdly outlived three husbands, raised five children, and seen the arrival of 17 grandchildren. Now she has turned her keen attention to the diary of a long-forgotten man named Roland Bouley, with whom she once had a fleeting affair. Increasingly obsessed with Roland's intimate history, Lilia begins to annotate the diary with her own rather different version of events, revealing the surprising, long-held secrets of her past.

A grief-stricken librarian decides to have sex with every man who enters her library. A half-mad, unbearably beautiful heiress follows a strange man home, seeking total sexual abandon: He only wants to watch game shows. A woman falls in love with a hunchback; when his deformity turns out to be a prosthesis, she leaves him. A wife whose husband has just returned from the war struggles with the heartrending question: Can she still love a man who has no lips?

Lola Nox is the daughter of a celebrated horror filmmaker—she thinks nothing can scare her. But when her father is brutally attacked in their New York apartment, she's quickly packed off to live with a grandmother she's never met in Harrow Lake, the eerie town where her father's most iconic horror movie was shot. The locals are weirdly obsessed with the film that put their town on the map—and there are strange disappearances, which the police seem determined to explain away. And there's someone—or something—stalking her every move.

Six college friends have reunited for a glamorous weekend in the Catskills, a decade after a fatal accident that nearly destroyed them. Keith, once the ringleader of the group, was a handsome charmer on the fast track to success. Now he’s spiraling into addiction and stands at the edge of losing it all. This weekend is the last chance to save him. But Keith, it turns out, is not the only one who needs saving.

For as long as A can remember, life has meant waking up in a different person's body every day, forced to live as that person until the day ended. A always thought there wasn't anyone else who had a life like this. But A was wrong. There are others. A has already been wrestling with powerful feelings of love and loneliness. Now comes an understanding of the extremes that love and loneliness can lead to - and what it's like to discover that you are not alone in the world.

Naomi and Ethan will test the boundaries of love in this provocative romance from the author of the ground-breaking debut, The Roommate. Naomi Grant has built her life around going against the grain. After the sex-positive start-up she cofounded becomes an international sensation, she wants to extend her educational platform to live lecturing. Unfortunately, despite her long list of qualifications, higher ed won't hire her.

When Echo Blue, the most famous child star of the nineties, disappears ahead of a highly publicized television appearance on the eve of the millennium, the salacious theories instantly start swirling. Mostly, people assume Echo has gotten herself in trouble after a reckless New Year’s Eve. But Goldie Klein, an ambitious young journalist who also happens to be Echo's biggest fan, knows there must be more to the story. Why, on the eve of her big comeback, would Echo just go missing without a trace?

When Page Dickey moved away from her celebrated garden at Duck Hill, she left a landscape she had spent thirty-four years making, nurturing, and loving. She found her next chapter in northwestern Connecticut, on 17 acres of rolling fields and woodland around a former Methodist church. In Uprooted, Dickey reflects on this transition and on what it means for a gardener to start again. The sur­prise at the heart of the book? Although Dickey was sad to leave her beloved garden, she found herself thrilled to begin a new garden in a wilder, larger landscape.

3:47 a.m. That's when they come for Wren Clemmens. She's hustled out of her house and into a waiting car, then a plane, and then taken on a forced march into the desert. This is what happens to kids who've gone so far off the rails, their parents don't know what to do with them anymore. This is wilderness therapy camp. Eight weeks of survivalist camping in the desert. Eight weeks to turn your life around. Yeah, right.

Mara Carlyle's senior year is going as normally as could be expected, until - wa-bam! - fellow senior Katelyn Ogden explodes during third period precalc. Katelyn is the first, but she won't be the last teenager to blow up without warning or explanation. As the seniors continue to pop like balloons and the national eye turns to Mara's suburban New Jersey hometown, the FBI rolls in, and the search for a reason is on.

Starr Media Second-Assistant Survival Guide: 1. Don't call your hot boss the Antichrist to his face. 2. Don't stare at hot boss', um, package or his full sleeve of tattoos. (No. Really. Stop!) 3. Don't get on the malicious first assistant's bad side. 4. Don't forget to memorize the 300-page employee manual. 5. If you value your cashmere, steer clear of boss' dog. 6. Boss' dimples are lust-inducing. Do. Not. Give. In. 7. "The elevator ate your clothes" is not a valid excuse for showing up to important meetings half dressed.

“My adult life can be divided into two distinct parts”, Eula Biss writes, “the time before I owned a washing machine and the time after.” Having just purchased her first home, the poet and essayist now embarks on a provocative exploration of the value system she has bought into. Through a series of engaging exchanges - in libraries and laundromats, over barstools and backyard fences - she examines our assumptions about class and property and the ways we internalize the demands of capitalism.

It was 1970 when thirteen-year-old runaway Kit Walker was abducted by Manny Romero, a smooth-talking, low-level criminal, who first coddled her and then groomed her into his partner-in-crime. Before long, Kit and Manny were infamous for their string of gas station robberies throughout Texas, making a name for themselves as the Texaco Twosome.

In the male-dominated field of animation, Mel Vaught and Sharon Kisses are a dynamic duo, the friction of their differences driving them: Sharon, quietly ambitious but self-doubting; Mel, brash and unapologetic, always the life of the party. Best friends and artistic partners since the first week of college, where they bonded over their working-class roots and obvious talent, they spent their twenties ensconced in a gritty Brooklyn studio. Working, drinking, laughing.