Showing results by narrator "Xe Sands" in All Categories

When Sydney's engagement ends with Rian, his brother Jake is there to save the day...in more ways than one. Sydney has been the perfect friend, the perfect daughter, and Rian checks off on her perfect fiancé list. But when Sydney notices a strange truck parked in her fiancé’s parking spot, she’s in for the surprise of her life.

When June and her best friends rent a bungalow at a Maui resort, June is charmed by their gorgeous neighbor, Lance. And June has been down enough relationship paths to know that sunsets and beaches are not reality. Okay, so maybe she'll give into one kiss - what can that hurt? Listen to find out more.

The perfect relationship sometimes means letting things get a little messy. Lucy Morley’s older sister is perfect, and her younger brother is nearly there, too. Yet, Lucy can’t even hold down a job, let alone stick with something like college. She drops out and floats from job to job.

Grayson Ford and Emma Kinglsey - close since they were kids, opposites in every way. He's the stuff high school crushes are made of, Mister Popular, and captain of every team. She's artsy, cute, and not in his league, though fully aware of Summerland's "I Dream of Dating Grayson Ford" support group.

In 2006, vaquita, a diminutive porpoise making its home in the Upper Gulf of California, inherited the dubious title of world's most endangered marine mammal. When international crime cartels discovered a lucrative trade in the swim bladders of totoaba, illegal gillnetting went rampant, and now the lives of the few remaining vaquitas hang in the balance. Author Brooke Bessesen takes us on a journey to Mexico's Upper Gulf region to uncover the story. She interviewed townspeople, fishermen, scientists, and activists, teasing apart a complex story filled with villains and heroes.

A collection of sweet, tender, poetic, beautiful, heart-wrenching, sensual love stories.

In his second collection of short stories, James Leo Herlihy explores a landscape of people living on the fringes of normal society as the pleasures of daily life fade. Men and women search for the missing fragment of meaning from their existence with Herlihy’s signature humor and deft dialogue. In the titular story, Mary Ellen McClure is trapped in a dull, unfulfilled life in a trailer park, suspecting her husband of having an affair. Together with her neighbor Ivy, she dabbles with a Ouija board which spells out the name Ezra and implies that Mary Ellen will have an affair.

When Cara felt her teenaged children slipping away and saw an empty nest on the horizon, she decided the best way to fill that void was with dogs - lots of them - and so her foster journey began. In 2015, her Pennsylvania farm became a haven for Operation Paws for Homes. There were the nine puppies at once, which arrived with less than a day's notice; a heart-worm positive dog; a deeply traumatized stray pup from Iraq; and countless others who just needed a gentle touch and a warm place to sleep.

Nicole Hennessy's life revolves around her Zen practice at the Boston Zendo, seeking spiritual solace in the tenets of Buddhism. After a decade of grueling spiritual practice under her master's tutelage, living on a shoestring as a shop clerk, Nicole has become sexually and emotionally entangled with her mentor. To break free, she must retrace her entire life's journey - from her strict Irish Catholic upbringing to her drug-fueled year as a teenage runaway. Even as she reinvents herself in New York City, her master's intoxicating voice pursues her, whispering dangerously in her ear.

For Chicago sociology professor Amelia Emmet, violence was a research topic - until a student she'd never met shot her. He also shot himself. Now he's dead and she's back on campus, trying to keep up with her class schedule, a growing problem with painkillers, and a question she can't let go: Why? All she wants is for life to get back to normal, but normal is looking hard to come by. She's 38 and hobbles with a cane. Her first student interaction ends in tears (hers). Her fellow faculty members seem uncomfortable with her, and her ex - whom she may or may not still love - has moved on.

Claire wakes in a hospital room in the Florida Keys. She has no idea how she got there or why. The loss of so many memories is paralyzing. Some things she can piece together by looking at old photos saved by her husband, Charlie, and her best friend, Rachel, and by combing through boxes of letters and casual jottings. Told from alternating points of view that pull the listener into the minds of the three characters, the story unfolds as the smudge that covers Claire's memory is gradually, steadily wiped away, until finally she can understand the why and the how of her life.

The Prophet is dead. The eyes of the Gods have turned to his daughter. But she isn't ready. Not for the whispers in her ear, for the divinations...for the blood. Her people's history and their future, carved by ancients into the bones of long dead behemoths, are now her burden. Only she can read them, interpret the instructions, and guide them to the Promised Land. The Prophet is dead. Long live the Prophetess.

June is in transition, reeling from her divorce, trying to stay sober, and faced with a completely stalled career. She returns to the beautiful Oregon coast where she grew up and must decide what to do with her late and much-loved grandparents' charming cedar-shingled home, a place haunted by memories of her childhood.

Once Adele, Molly, and Lana were The Darling Songbirds, a world-famous country band. Now they're just three sisters who barely speak. But that's about to change. Middle sister Molly arrives in town, and is immediately drawn to the neglected little café where she worked as a teenager. Could she dare to bring it back to life? As lead singer, Molly had always been the voice of the band. But caught between controlling big sister Adele and demanding baby sister Lana, she never felt heard. If she's going to reopen the café, she'll do it on her own terms, no more being bossed.

Mark and Maggie's annual drive east to visit family has gotten off to a rocky start. By the time they're on the road, it's late, a storm is brewing, and they are no longer speaking to one another. Adding to the stress, Maggie - recently mugged at gunpoint - is lately not herself, and Mark is at a loss about what to make of the stranger he calls his wife.

Grace Holm-D’Angelo is at her wit’s end, trying to create a new life from broken pieces. Newly divorced, she is navigating suddenly becoming a single mother to her 14-year-old daughter. Emma, resentful about being uprooted from Chicago to Los Angeles and still reeling from the divorce, is generally giving her mother a hard time. Then Grace’s best friend, Leeza, succumbs to breast cancer after a long battle, and Grace realizes you don’t get a second chance at life. She returns to her hometown of New London, Wisconsin, to try to reconcile with her own mother, Lorraine, from whom she’s been estranged for longer than she cares to remember.

As a child, Susan Silverman was surrounded by a loving family; although her parents weren't happily married, they were devoted to their kids. In a vibrant, funny, imminently relatable voice (think Anne Lamott meets Katrina Kenison), Silverman tells of a family's evolution - from her parents' devastating loss of their infant son to raising bright and wildly unique daughters. It's also the creation story of her own family - raising her own bright and wildly unique daughters and taking a journey to adopt two boys from Ethiopia.

Contemporary Christianity seems to be suffering from an epidemic of sameness, uniformity, and monotony. Those trapped inside are often afraid to step beyond established norms and express their creativity, and those on the outside often see little that attracts them. Yet God, out of the abundance of his own creative force, made each one of us unique, peculiar, and irreplaceable. So why so much pressure to conform?

Isabelle, a woman in her 30s without any of the trappings of a grown-up life, has just been fired from her job at a San Francisco phone company. Returning to the midwestern suburb of her childhood, Standardsville, Illinois, she contends with her dating single mother, a neighbor who once appeared on The Honeymooners, and an ex-boyfriend.

By Cecile depicts post-World War II France as it reels from war and recovery. In Paris, an orphan girl, Cecile, finds refuge with an older man. He introduces her to nightclubs, intellectuals, artists (Jean Cocteau, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Eartha Kitt!), and non-monogamy. When she falls for his mistress, she begins to live a life she deems worthy of writing about...but only under the pseudonym of her husband.