Family Life Science

Are you fed up with parents nagging you about the mess in your bedroom? Are you sick and tired of being reminded that your feet smell and your armpits pong? Does it bug you when they keep telling you to have a shower or get off your phone? If you are going through those frustrating teenage years, this audiobook is all you need. Having to deal with so much pressure, anxiety, and stress can often feel overwhelming and no one seems to have the answers that you are looking for.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, and the American Book Award, the best-selling Common Ground is much more than the story of the busing crisis in Boston as told through the experiences of three families. As Studs Terkel remarked, it's "gripping, indelible...a truth about all large American cities."

It’s 2032 and Britain is facing yet another heatwave. Temperatures are breaking all records, and now government curfews are in place to ensure people stay indoors out of the sun. But it’s also the school holidays and Polly Carraway is fed up. When a late night beach swim goes horribly wrong, she’s relieved to be sent away, with her troubled brother Joel, to stay with their aunt, whose house is on the banks of a reservoir. On arriving Polly’s shocked to see Truthwater Lake is drying up. As the water level drops, a lost village emerges.

Edinburgh is a city filled with magical creatures. No one can see them...except Ramya Knox. As she is pulled into her family's world of secrets and spells, Ramya sets out to discover the truth about the Hidden Folk with only three words of warning from her grandfather: beware the sirens. Plunged into an adventure that will change everything, Ramya is about to learn that there is more to her powers than she ever imagined.

With a relaxing and peaceful winter behind her, Ellen is looking forward to the promise of summer - but her peace doesn’t last. An earthquake rips fatally through her friends’ home, and Ellen is left with the grief from their loss. The Lianthem, a sacred ruling group, is profiting from her brother’s lunacy, and her little sister is in danger. While her companions come within a breath of freezing to death, battles between rival factions break out, killing hundreds. And it’s all her fault. Ellen knows she must make it right, but how?

On top of battling the normal teenage angst that everyone goes through, Joanie is also reeling from her parents' bitter divorce and having to cope with her mother's new boyfriend and father's new family. Alone in a new town and without friends, she turns to passing the time by indulging in her longtime hobby of making toy models of soldiers and is both amazed and shocked when one of them comes to life.

Sheils is very pleased with her perfectly controlled life (controlling others while she's at it). She's smart, powerful, the student body chair, and she even has a loving boyfriend. What more could a girl ask for? But everything changes when the first-ever interspecies transfer student, a pterodactyl named Pyke, enrolls at her school. There's something about him - something primal - that causes the students to lose control whenever he's around.

Author Kathleen Van Cleve delivers a promising debut with this magical novel. Eleven-year-old Polly Peabody lives on a farm like no other. It rains every Monday at 1:00 p.m., the crops taste like chocolate, the bugs can communicate, and Polly’s best friend is a rhubarb plant named Harry. But when the weekly downpours stop, and Polly’s brother grows ill, she must figure out how to make it rain again—or her family’s future could be destroyed.

Sisters Esme, Katy, and Ronnie are smart, talented, and gorgeous, and better yet...all three are witches. They have high school wired until the arrival of two new students. The first is Norman, who is almost eight feet tall and appears to be constructed of bolts and mismatched body parts. Despite his intimidating looks, Esme finds herself strangely - almost romantically - drawn to both his oversized brain and oversized heart. The second new arrival is Zack, an impossibly handsome late transfer from the UK who has the girls at school instantly mesmerized.

Amidst the 1971 Troubles between the Irish Republican Army and Northern Ireland, 12-year-old Finn lives in a world of her own of fairy tales. Raised by her grandmother, Nuala, who is the village storyteller, Finn spends her days playing make-believe in the forest, weaving tall tales to tell her friend Darcy, longing to go to the island of Inis Eala to meet the swans there, and waiting for her father to return from the war. She's long since stopped believing in happy endings and miracles, preferring to believe instead in serendipity, or "happy mistakes".

Twelve-year-old Lily Mavers and her sister, Erin, do not get on. It doesn’t help that Lily has nothing in common with her overachieving, grade-A-student sister. But after an emergency trip to the oddly named Hairy Godmother salon, Lily and Erin leave with much more than a new look - they’ve got a whole new life. Because the sisters have undergone a full-on body switch, and they're about to find out that life in each other's shoes is much harder than it looks!

On Wilde Island, Rosalind and her mother live their lives in exile, awaiting the time they can reclaim their rightful place on the throne. And there is reason to hope - a 600-year-old prophesy has decreed that they will do just that. But little do they know, their destinies hinge on Rosalind's amazing, shameful secret. Beneath her gold gloves, the fourth finger of her left hand is in truth a dragon's claw.

Theodosia Throckmorton is in a fix. Allowed to attend a reception given by one of the directors of her parents museum, she stumbles across Mr. Tetley of the British Museum in most unusual circumstances! Since Theo has last seen him in a showdown in an ancient Egyptian tomb, his reappearance could mean only one thing: the Serpents of Chaos are back.

Mia has settled into her life with the Della Torres - Milan's premier demon-catching family, accompanying them to exorcisms and even learning some way to be useful in the family trade. Then Bernardo comes into her life, handsome, well-mannered, someone who makes her forget her impossible crush on Emilio, her cousin. But always lurking in the background is the demon who possessed Mia once before, and who has not given up on possessing her again - this time for good.

Mia’s ordinary life is disrupted for good in the most horrifying way possible when she is possessed by a hungry and powerful demon - and saved only by the arrival of relatives from Italy, the country her grandfather fled many decades ago. Now her cousins, the charming and gorgeous Emilio, and stern, elderly Giuliano, say the only way to keep Mia safe is for her to come back with them to Milan - to live, to learn Italian, to fall in and out of love, and to master the family trade: fighting all demons with the ancient lore of bell, book, and candle.

Sixteen-year-old Cody Forester is a werewolf. He lives in Loxahatchee, Florida, where his horrified parents banished him. He works hard at keeping his superpowers secret, yet the circle of people who know about him is expanding.

In the third book of the Midnight Twins trilogy, Mally and Merry's supernatural dream visions are put to the test when their baby brother is kidnapped - and by someone who has grown very close to the Brynn family.

Chris Astor is a man in his early forties who is going through the toughest stretch of his life. Becky is Chris's fourteen-year-old daughter, a girl who overcame enormous challenges to become a vibrant, vital young woman - and now faces her greatest obstacle yet. Miea is the young queen of a fantasy land that Becky and Chris created when Becky was little, a fantasy land that has developed a life of its own and now finds itself in terrible, maybe fatal trouble.

A dark, fantastical, multi-enerational tale about a family whose patriarch is consumed by the hunt for the mythical, elusive Sasquatch he encountered in his youth. Eli Roebuck was nine years old when his mother walked off into the woods with "Mr. Krantz", a large, strange, hairy man who may or may not have been a sasquatch. What Eli knows for certain is that his mother went willingly, leaving her only son behind.

Karen DeSonne is used to pretending to be something she's not. All her life, she's passed as a normal all-American teenager; with her friends, with her family, and at school. Passing cost her the love of her life. And now that Karen's dead, she's still passing - this time, as alive. Meanwhile, Karen's dead friends have been fingered in a high-profile murder, causing a new round of anti-zombie regulations that have forced nearly all of Oakvale's undead into hiding.