Showing results by narrator "Almarie Guerra" in All Categories

FBI Special Agent Daniela “Dani” Vega was seventeen when her mother murdered her father. Ten years after Dani’s own damning eyewitness testimony sealed her mother’s fate, she’s starting to have doubts. What if she got it all wrong? A veteran NYPD homicide detective agrees to reopen the closed case on one condition—Dani must help him find a serial killer who’s been operating throughout New York City for the past decade. If anyone can decipher his patterns, and his riddles, it’s a trained codebreaker like Dani. The killer knows this too. And his next riddle—and victim—is meant just for her.

Orphaned at a young age and witness to her brother’s decline into addiction, Nora Martinez has every excuse to question the fairness of life. Instead, the openhearted librarian in the small Colorado community of Silver Ridge sees only promise. She holds on to the hope that she’ll be reunited with her missing brother and does what she can at the town library. It’s her home away from home, but it’s also a sanctuary for others who, like her brother, could use a second chance.

Maggie just wants to get through her first year of middle school. But between finding the best after-school clubs, trying to make friends, and avoiding the rumored monster on school grounds, she’s having a tough time...so she might need a little help from her 20-sided dice. But what happens if Maggie rolls the wrong number?

Thirsty for fresh blood? Sink your teeth into vampire stories from young adult fiction's leading voices. In this delicious new collection edited by Zoraida Córdova and Natalie C. Parker, you’ll find stories about the lurking vampires of social media, the rebellious vampires hungry for more than just blood, the eager vampires coming out - and going out for their first kill - and other bold, breathtaking, dangerous, dreamy, eerie, iconic, powerful creatures of the night.

When Rosayra “Rosy” Pablo Cruz made the agonizing decision to seek asylum in the United States with two of her children, she knew the journey would be arduous, dangerous, and quite possibly deadly. But she had no choice: violence - from gangs, from crime, from spiraling chaos - was making daily life hell. Rosy knew her family’s one chance at survival was to flee Guatemala and go north.

Their foster mother, Carol, has always been fanatical, but with Jazz grown up and out of the house, Carol takes a dangerous turn that threatens 13-year-old Joaquin’s life. Over and over, child services fails to intervene, and Joaquin is running out of time. Then Jazz gets a blocked call from someone offering a solution. There are others like her - people the law has failed. They’ve formed an underground network of “helpers”, each agreeing to eliminate the abuser of another.

Sixth-grader Lu Olivera just wants to keep her head down and get along with everyone in her class. Trouble is, Lu's old friends have been changing lately - acting boy-crazy and making snide remarks about Lu's newfound talent for running track. Lu's secret hope for a new friend is fellow runner Belinda Gresham, but in 1970 Red Grove, Alabama, blacks and whites don't mix. As segregationist ex-governor George Wallace ramps up his campaign against the current governor, Albert Brewer, growing tensions in the state - and in the classroom - mean that Lu can't stay neutral about the racial divide at school.

After "borrowing" her father's credit card to finance a more stylish wardrobe, Margot Sanchez suddenly finds herself grounded. And by grounded, she means working as an indentured servant in her family's struggling grocery store to pay off her debts. With each order of deli meat she slices, Margot can feel her carefully cultivated prep school reputation slipping through her fingers, and she's willing to do anything to get out of this punishment. Lie, cheat, and maybe even steal.

Eighteen kids, one year of poems, one school set to close. Two yellow bulldozers crouched outside, ready to eat the building in one greedy gulp. But look out, bulldozers. Ms. Hill's fifth-grade class has plans for you. They're going to speak up and work together to save their school.

There hasn’t been a winner of the Miss Meteor beauty pageant who looks like Lita Perez or Chicky Quintanilla in all its history. But that’s not the only reason Lita wants to enter the contest or her ex-best friend Chicky wants to help her. The road to becoming Miss Meteor isn’t about being perfect; it’s about sharing who you are with the world - and loving the parts of yourself no one else understands.

Captain Eva Innocente and the crew of La Sirena Negra find themselves once again on the fringe of populated space - and at the center of a raging covert war. When Eva's sister asks for help locating a missing scientist, promises of a big paycheck and a noble cause convince Eva to take the job despite lingering trust issues.

By day Eustaquia “Kiki” de Sonza and Ana Lezama de Urinza are proper young seventeenth century ladies. But when night falls, they trade in their silks and lace for swords and muskets, venturing out into the vibrant, bustling, crime-ridden streets of Potosí, in the Spanish Empire's Viceroyalty of Peru. They pass their time fighting, gambling, and falling desperately in love with one another. Then, on the night Kiki's engagement to the Viceroy's son is announced, her older brother—heir to her family’s fortune—is murdered.

If you realize that you are overspending resulting in a depletion of your savings account, it's time to keep your spending in check. It takes a lot of discipline to stick to your financial plan. However, keeping to a financial goal is not that difficult if you start with the basics. Fortunately, there are effective strategies you can adopt to make sure you follow through on your good financial intentions.

Once upon a time, a girl named Kristy Thomas had a great idea: to form The Baby-Sitters Club with her best friends. And now 12-year-old Malia Twiggs has had a great idea too. Technically, she had Kristy's idea. (And technically, little kids seem gross and annoying, but a paycheck is a paycheck). After a little convincing, Malia and her friends Dot and Bree start a babysitting club to earn funds for an epic birthday bash. But babysitting definitely isn't what they thought it would be.

When Green Crayon claims that green is the only color for Christmas, other crayons let him know that there would be no Christmas without them either. No candy canes or Santa without Red, no snow without White, no bells or stars without Silver, and no cookies or reindeer without Tan! The crayons agree that they all need to come together to make Christmas special.

R. L. Stine - the godfather of Goosebumps - and some of the most popular authors today bring an unrivaled mastery of all things fearsome, frightening, and fantabulous to this terrifying anthology of all-new scary short stories.

Cheating is an ugly yet real part of the dating world. Once the initial shock of discovering your sweetheart is a cheat sinks in, you'll likely ask the big question - why? Reasoning away the infidelity is a kind of coping mechanism that helps our bruised egos deal with the rejection we often experience in these circumstances. While there's always a few original excuses, most of them have withstood the test of time.

Rose Mortiz has always been a fixer, but lately she's been feeling lost. She has brand-new powers that she doesn't understand, and her family is still trying to figure out how to function in the wake of her amnesiac father's return home. Then, on the night of her Death Day party, Rose discovers her father's memory loss has been a lie. As she rushes to his side, the two are ambushed and pulled through a portal to the land of Adas, the fairy realm. There Rose is forced to work with a group of other powerful teens to save Adas.

As a child, horses consumed Halimah Marcus' imagination. When she wasn't around horses she was pretending to be one, cantering on two legs, hands poised to hold invisible reigns. To her classmates, girls like Halimah were known as "horse girls," weird and overzealous. Decades later, when memes about "horse girl energy" began appearing across social media, Halimah reluctantly recognized herself. The stereotypical horse girl is also white, thin, rich, and straight, a daughter of privilege. Yet so many riders don't fit this narrow, damaging ideal.

Carmen and Grace have been inseparable since they were little girls—more like sisters than cousins, survivors of a childhood marked by neglect and addiction and a system that never valued them. For too long, all they had was each other. That is, until Doña Durka swept into their lives and changed everything, taking Grace into her home, providing stability and support, and playing an outsize role in Carmen’s upbringing too.