Showing results by narrator "Brittany Pressley" in All Categories

The night little Madison disappears from her crib, Luce sees a pair of eyes—two points of gold deep in the forest behind her house—and and feels certain they belong to a wolf. Her town, Picnic, Illinois, is the kind of place where everyone knows one another and no one locks their doors. It’s not the kind of place where a toddler goes missing without a trace, where wolves lurk in the shadows.

Lady Charlotte Sand was born to calm the restless dead, but her power has grown unpopular thanks to the newly ascendant religion of the Silent Gods. Worse, her family’s ancestral Guardian, a lavender scarecrow who was once a defender of the crown, hasn’t woken for a new heir since her father’s sordid death. With other Guardians also reduced to pitiful bags of herbs on distant farms, the Order of the Guardians is a struggling remnant filled with political exiles. But darkness stirs in Niveaux, and the spirits of the dead are turning into vengeful wraiths with alarming frequency.

When sixteen-year-old Cindra Zoeller is sent to a reform camp in Montana after being involved in an armed robbery, she is thrust into a world of mountains and cowboys and prayers and miscreants and people from all walks of life like she’s never seen in suburban Massachusetts. At Camp Challenge, she becomes transfixed by Lucky, a camp employee of mysterious origin—an origin of constant speculation—and the chemistry between them is instant, and profound.

Without a job or a date in sight, freelance writer Jaine Austen is equally out of luck in finance and romance. So when her friend Lance offers to treat her to brunch at the Four Seasons, Jaine leaps at the invite. They've barely made it through the menu when Lance spots his friend Bunny, who is the new trophy wife of mattress maven Marvin Cooper.

When Jaine Austen's beloved cat Prozac unwittingly scares to death a parakeet belonging to the neighborhood's resident curmudgeon, Jaine finds herself knee-deep in toil and trouble. The cantankerous Hollywood has-been once played Cryptessa Muldoon, television's fourth most famous monster mom. Now she spends her days making enemies with everyone on the block. So when the ornery D-lister is murdered with her own Do Not Trespass sign on Halloween night, the neighborhood fills with relief - and possible culprits.

When freelance writer Jaine Austen is surprised with an über-luxe spa getaway, she and her feline pal Prozac are eager to hit the road and bask in a week of pampering and pedicures. But what she gets is a California fat farm in disguise, complete with celery-juice cocktails, humiliating weigh-ins, and a zero-tolerance position on carbs.

Jaine's accepted her share of lame gigs to pay the bills, but rewriting Shakespeare's got to be an all-time low. The fiasco begins with a call from Jaine's high-school nemesis, uber rich uber witch Patti Devane. It seems Patti will soon be sashaying down the aisle with another former classmate from Hermosa High, and she'd like the exchange of vows to evoke Romeo and Juliet...except without the "downer" of an ending.

When Jaine lands a job writing web copy and brochures for matchmaker Joy Amoroso, she's excited for a chance to help the lovelorn - until she realizes Joy is a ruthless taskmaster who screams at her employees for the smallest infractions, pads her website with pictures of professional models posing as clients, and offers up convincing but empty promises of love.

An unprecedented constellation of experts - leading cancer doctors, policymakers, cutting-edge researchers, national advocates, and more - explore the legacy and the shortcomings from the 50-year war on cancer and look ahead to the future.

Assistant DA Kate Stone has just suffered the biggest loss of her career. She’d worked so hard to prosecute a serial assaulter of women, and it was a case she should have won. But a corrupt judge allowed Max James to walk free. When he confronts her outside the courthouse, she punches James, and he goes down hard. After the footage is plastered across every TV screen, Kate’s boss demands that she either attend anger-management meetings or give up the job she lives for.

Lyric Bishop feels like a fraud—she’s studying sexual chemistry in romantic partners and what makes for a successful long-term relationship, only she can’t seem to figure it out in her own dating life. The science is sound, but how can she give her expert opinion with no real-world experience? In order to complete her doctoral thesis, she must crack the Sizzle Paradox—it seems the more sexually attractive she finds a guy, the less likely it is to come with an emotional connection; but why?—and to do that she must get the help she desperately needs.

From the author of Layoverland comes another bitingly clever, laugh-out-loud funny novel, about a group of teen girls going up against an exploitative megachurch in their small Montana town.

Journalist Diana Kapp has crisscrossed this country writing for and about empowered girls, girls who expect to be leaders, founders, and inventors. This book takes it a step further. It says to girls: While you’re striving to be CEOs and world leaders, consider solving the biggest challenge of our lifetime, too - because you can do both at the same time, and here are 34 women doing just that.

Irene, a lonely 19-year-old in rural North Carolina, works long nights at the local pool hall, serving pitchers and dodging drunks. One evening, her hilarious, magnetic coworker Luce invites her on a joyride through the mountains to take revenge on a particularly creepy customer. Their adventure not only spells the beginning of a dazzling friendship, it seduces both girls into the mysterious world of pills and the endless hustles needed to fund the next high.

In this powerful and virtuosic collection of interlocking stories, Peter Orner, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, takes the short story to new heights. Through 44 compressed gems, Peter Orner chronicles people whose lives are at inflection points, gripping us with a series of defining moments.

Five extraordinary sisters discover that they each have a unique talent, an extra-sensory perception that enables them to see what others can't. It makes them incredible, it puts them in danger, and it brings them closer to learning the secrets that have haunted them their entire lives. These are the Delta Girls. Sassy Sasha is having an online interlude with a secret admirer. She's convinced it's the gorgeous Taylor Petrenko behind the romantic emails. There's little time for love, though.

Lauren Cress teaches writing at a small college outside of Washington, DC. In the classroom, she is poised, smart, and kind, well liked by her students and colleagues. But in her personal life, Lauren is troubled and isolated, still grappling with the sudden death of her parents ten years earlier. She seems to exist at a remove from everyone around her until a new student joins her class: charming, magnetic Siri, who appears to be everything Lauren wishes she could be.

Percy is pregnant. She hasn’t told a soul. Probably she should tell her husband - certainly she means to - but one night she wakes up to find she no longer recognizes him. Now, instead of sleeping, Percy is spending her nights taking walks through her neighborhood. Amid this alienation, a package arrives. In it: an exhibition catalog for a photography show. The photographs consist of a series of digitally manipulated images of a woman lying on a bed in a red room. It takes a moment for even Percy to notice that the woman is herself...but no one else sees the resemblance.

The year is 2047, and teleportation is the cutting-edge transportation method of choice - Teleportation Services International (TSI) operates facilities in all of the world’s major cities. When Lillian, a TSI employee, wins a once-in-a-lifetime family vacation, she knows it’s just a photo op for the tech giant, but she takes the opportunity and books a trip to Tokyo with her husband Jackson and their six-year-old son Cole. But before they arrive, tragedy strikes: Cole disappears in transit.  

For nearly a century, the Justified have been searching for gifted children to help prevent the return of the pulse. Until recently, they thought they were the only ones. Jane Kamali and her telekinetic protégé, Esa, now 17, barely managed to claim victory against a Cyn - a being of pure energy - hell bent on hunting down the gifted. Now, they face an army. The Cyn and their followers will stop at nothing to find Esa and the others. No one knows what they want, but Jane, Esa, and their allies in the Justified are determined to find out.