Showing results by narrator "Emily Durante" in All Categories

Anna remembers a time before boys, when she and her mom were a family, just the two of them against the world. But now her mom’s gone most of the time, chasing the next marriage, and Anna is left to grow up alone. Until she discovers that boys can fill the void - from Desmond to Joey to Todd. But the price is high. The other kids make fun of her; the girls call her a slut. Anna’s new friend, Toy, seems to have found a way around the loneliness, but Toy has her own secrets that even Anna can’t know.

On May 2, 2008, an enormous tropical cyclone made landfall in Burma, wreaking untold havoc and leaving an official toll of 138,300 dead and missing. In the days that followed, the sheer scale of the disaster became apparent as information began to seep out from the hard-hit delta area.

Nothing is beyond Kristi Carmichael's disdain - her hippie high school, her friend Jacob, her workaholic mom. Yet Kristi has a vulnerable side. She can hear the thoughts of her fellow students calling her fat and gross. She's hot for Gusty Peterson, one of the most popular guys in school, but of course, she's sure he thinks she is disgusting. And she's still mad at her father, who walked out on them two years ago. Soon, a school project brings her together with Gusty, her father comes home and drops a bombshell, and a friend comes out of the closet.

Since the age of 12, McKenzie Arnold has spent every summer at Albany Beach, Delaware, with her best friends, Aurora, Janine, and Lilly. The seaside house teems with 30 years of memories - some wonderful, others painful - and secrets never divulged beyond its walls. This summer may be the last they spend together, as Janine contemplates selling her family cottage.

After eight years in the American Furniture department at Christie's, 29-year-old Carolyn Everett is a rising star. But one wrong decision and a scandal leaves her unemployed and broken. Desperate to piece her life back together, Carolyn leaves New York City to work in a tiny antique store in Newport, Rhode Island. At a small county auction, she discovers a piece of Middle Eastern pottery, which she purchases for 20 dollars on a hunch.

Photographer Samantha Blakely is stunned when her beloved friend Gemini Delaney leaves her the controlling interest in her family business, a magazine conglomerate - the same conglomerate that owns Daylight Magazine, where Sam has just landed her dream job as a photojournalist. Then she meets her new boss, Christian Delaney, and his mere gaze leaves her wanting more. But how can she tell him that she's the Sam Blakely who inherited the legacy he'd thought would be his?

On a hot summer night in a midwestern town, a high school teenage prank goes horrifically awry. Alcohol, guns, and a dare. Within minutes, as events collide, innocents becomes victims - with tragic outcomes altering lives forever, a grisly and unfortunate scenario all too familiar from current real-life headlines. But victims can also become survivors, and as we come to know each character through his/her own distinctive voice and their interactions with one another, we see how, despite pain and guilt, they can reach out to one another, find a new equilibrium, and survive.

It isn't easy being able to read minds - guys' minds, especially. Gusty Peterson, the hottest bimboy in school, is always thinking I'm sick, as in totally gross to look at. Not that it matters, since I don't have a crush on him or anything. And Mallory, my first real friend since forever, has disturbing, romantic ideas about me bouncing in his brain. Even worse, scrawny Jacob has bizarre fantasies about decorating my ginormous gazungas with mascarpone cheese.

How often have you seen a teenage girl pretend to be perturbed, but secretly smile, when she is told that she acts or looks just like her mother? Fathers, brothers, and friends sometimes shake their heads in wonder as girls "turn into their mothers". This new collection from Chicken Soup represents the best stories from Chicken Soup's library on the special bond between mothers and daughters, and the magical, mysterious similarities between them.

This previously rare, out-of-print collection is being republished with a new prefatory meditation by the author. Featuring Fowler's characteristic imagination, sly wit, and penetrating insight, Black Glass will be a welcome treat for fans new and old.

Julia Einstein knew that being a stay-at-home mom had a lot in common with her former job as a celebrity publicist - endless, irrational demands, little to no appreciation, and constant hustle. But it isn't until her husband is laid off from his job and she's forced to go back to work and resurrect screen legend Mary Ford's career that Julia realizes how very much she prefers an actual child to a formerly famous client.

Weddings. They're fun, festive, and joyful - they offer endless opportunities to reexamine love and what we want for ourselves, regardless of whether or not our aim is a walk down the aisle. In Save the Date, Jen Doll charts the course of her own perennial wedding guesthood, from the ceremony of distant family members when she was eight to the recent nuptials of a new boyfriend's friends. Wedding experiences come in as varied an assortment as the gowns at any bridal shop, and Doll turns a keen eye to each, delivering a heartfelt exploration of contemporary relationships.

Kate and Michael, twenty-something housemates working at the same Trader Joe’s supermarket, are thoroughly screwed when people start turning into zombies at their house party in the Oakland hills. The zombie plague is a sexually transmitted disease, turning its victims into shambling, horny, voracious killers.

With a popular comic strip, card line, and children's cartoon to her name, Lucy Brighton should be in a happy place. Then Lucy receives a call that her parents have been killed in a car crash. While settling their affairs in Florida, Lucy begins to realize how little she really knew about their lives. She has no way to explain the mysterious safe in their bedroom, with its cache of fake passports, cash, and weapons.

Named after her beloved tabby Deputy Donut, Emily Westhill's donut shop in small-town Fallingbrook, Wisconsin, is doing so well, she's expanding into catering weddings. When the owner of the clothing shop Dressed to Kill asks Emily to design a donut wall for her reception, she's immediately sweet on the idea and hangs the treats from dowels on the wall, so guests can help themselves. But that night, when the groom ends up on the floor with signs of poisoning, Emily suspects someone has tampered with her treats.

FBI agent Sam Sheridan’s mission is to take down a human-trafficking ring and save missing teens - until he witnesses a kidnapping. Blowing his cover, Sam rescues Ella McIntire. But she’s not safe yet. While searching for the truth about her cousin’s death, Ella came too close to a dangerous secret. And now only Sam can protect her from the men determined to silence her.

For once, Ivy Culpepper feels fulfilled. An apprenticeship at Yeast of Eden has opened her world to time-honored baking techniques under owner Olaya Solis’s guidance - as well as the freshest small-town gossip, courtesy of chatty regulars known as the Blackbird Ladies. Ivy even begins accepting that she and restaurateur Miguel Baptista may never again rekindle their romance - despite the undeniable tension between them. But she’s tied to Miguel again when his trusted produce supplier goes missing.

The American Adrenaline Narrative considers the nature of perilous outdoor adventure tales, their gendered biases, and how they simultaneously promote and hinder ecological sustainability. To explore these themes, Kristin J. Jacobson defines and compares adrenaline narratives by a range of American authors published after the first Earth Day in 1970, a time frame selected as a watershed moment for the contemporary American environmental movement.

After a small-town southern girl turned New Yorker watches her American Dream implode, she musters the courage to begin again - resurrecting the powerful woman her daughters had glimpsed during their family's darkest times. A raw and riveting memoir, Disassembly Required invites listeners along, moment by gut-wrenching moment, on one woman's journey from betrayal and devastation to resilience and recovery.

The question of how Donald Trump won the 2016 election looms over his presidency. Drawing on path-breaking work in which she and her colleagues isolated significant communication effects in the 2000 and 2008 presidential campaigns, the eminent political communication scholar Kathleen Hall Jamieson marshals the troll posts, unique polling data, analyses of how the press used the hacked content, and a synthesis of half a century of media effects research to argue that, although not certain, it is probable that the Russians helped elect the 45th president of the United States.