Showing results by narrator "Madeleine Lambert" in All Categories

After finding Jesus at a suburban megachurch, young Jamie Wright trades in the easy life on the cul-de-sac for the green fields of Costa Rica. There, along with her husband, kids, and the family cat, she intends to serve God and make converts. But she soon loses faith and falls into a funk of cynicism and despair. Fortunately, Knives the cat is there, looking on with just enough disinterest to make her laugh...and dare her to try another way. That other way turns out to be telling the truth. She launches a renegade blog, Jamie the Very Worst Missionary, which wins a large following.

Two years ago, the aliens made contact. Now Cara Sweeney is going to be sharing a bathroom with one of them. Handpicked to host the first-ever L'eihr exchange student, Cara thinks her future is set. Not only does she get a free ride to her dream college, she'll have inside information about the mysterious L'eihrs that every journalist would kill for. Cara's blog following is about to skyrocket. Still, Cara isn't sure what to think when she meets Aelyx. Humans and L'eihrs have nearly identical DNA, but cold, infuriatingly brilliant Aelyx couldn't seem more alien.

Maysie Ardin is soaking up the summer before her junior year of college, shopping, hanging by the pool, and shopping some more. But when her black belt in spending lands her in trouble with her parents, she is forced to take a second job at a local bar to dig herself out of a deep financial pit. She thought she'd be miserable. But then Maysie didn't count on Jordan Levitt, the hot, pierced and tattooed, drum-playing bartender who also happens to be very interested in her. And the feelings are totally mutual. It had the makings of the perfect romantic setup. Boy meets girl. Boy likes girl. Boy has girlfriend? Okay, maybe not....

Evie's older sister Cilla is gone. Their parents sent her away to a strict boarding school after she got pregnant during her junior year of high school - because getting pregnant is not something the Morgan girls are supposed to do. They're supposed to go to church and eat fish on Fridays. They're supposed to be good little Catholics. But Evie can't believe her parents could be that cruel, and she doesn't understand why Cilla isn't responding to her almost daily letters - letters about the school play she didn't get cast in, the distance that's growing between her best friends, and the possibility that she's developing some decidedly un-Catholic feelings about the new girl in her class.

The perfume-scented letter that turns Tommie McCloud’s world upside down arrives from a stranger only days after her father’s death. The woman who wrote it claims that Tommie is her daughter—and that she was kidnapped as a baby thirty-one years ago. Tommie wants to believe it’s all a hoax, but suddenly a girl who grew up on a Texas ranch finds herself inextricably linked to a horrific past: the slaughter of a family in Chicago, the murder of an Oklahoma beauty queen, and the kidnapping of a little girl named Adriana.

Kat Howard has already been called a “remarkable writer” by Neil Gaiman, and her “dark and enticing” (Publishers Weekly) debut novel, Roses and Rot, was beloved by critics and fans alike. Now you can experience her collected shorter works, including two new stories. In these stories, equally as beguiling as her novels, Howard expands into the enchanted territory of myths and saints, as well as Arthurian legend, with a novella set upon a college campus, retelling the story of King Arthur through women’s eyes.

After thwarting a deadly coup and saving the alliance between their worlds, Cara and Aelyx have finally earned a break. Their tiny island colony is everything they dreamed it would be - days spent gathering shells on the beach and nights in each other's arms. But the vacation is short-lived. The treaty between Earth and L'eihr has awakened an ancient force that threatens to destroy them all.

Amanda is a new mother, and she is breaking. After a fight with her partner, she puts the baby in the car and drives from Queens to her hometown in rural Ohio, where she shows up unannounced on the doorstep of her estranged childhood best friend. Amanda thought that she had left Carrie firmly in the past. After their friendship ended, their lives diverged radically: Carrie had a baby the summer after high school, became a successful tattoo artist, and never escaped Ohio’s conservative grid of close-cut grass.

It's been almost a year since Jenna Samuels' stoner brother, Casey, bit the dust and returned as her guardian angel; a year since Casey and his "angel boss", Amber Velasco, saved Jenna's life and helped her foil the bad guys, more or less; a year in which Jenna has solved the true mystery of the universe: how to get one Ryan Sloboda to ask her out.

What you may have known about Marilyn Monroe before was only the tip of the iceberg. For 20 years, the men and women who knew Marilyn best saw what they knew suppressed because certain important people were still living and the tenor of the times prohibited frankness. Instead, rumors ballooned. This audiobook finally sets the record straight. Fred Lawrence Guiles - whom Norman Mailer acknowledges as the chief source of facts about Marilyn Monroe - has written about the life behind the legend.

At the age of 18, Tré Miller Rodríguez gave her newborn daughter up for adoption. At 19 her only sibling was killed in a car accident. At 34 her husband, Alberto, died of a sudden heart attack. But at 36 her teenage daughter found her on Facebook and began to reshape the course of Tré's life.

"Bloom where you're planted," is the advice Christine Bolz receives from her beloved Oma. But 17-year-old domestic Christine knows there is a whole world waiting beyond her small German village. It's a world she's begun to glimpse through music, books - and through Isaac Bauerman, the cultured son of the wealthy Jewish family she works for.

Yet the future she and Isaac dream of sharing faces greater challenges than their difference in stations. In the fall of 1938, Germany is changing rapidly under Hitler's regime....

In Pulitzer Prize-winner Jennifer Egan's highly acclaimed first novel, set in 1978, the political drama and familial tensions of the 1960s form a backdrop for the world of Phoebe O'Connor, age eighteen. Phoebe is obsessed with the memory and death of her sister Faith, a beautiful idealistic hippie who died in Italy in 1970. In order to find out the truth about Faith's life and death, Phoebe retraces her steps from San Francisco across Europe, a quest which yields both complex and disturbing revelations about family, love, and Faith's lost generation.

A long-lost Modigliani portrait, a grieving brother’s blood vendetta, a Soviet secret that's been buried for eighty years - Parisian private investigator Aimée Leduc's current case is her most exciting one yet. When Aimée’s long-term partner and best friend Rene leaves their detective agency for a new job in Silicon Valley, Aimée knows she can handle the extra workload. At least, that what she tells herself...repeatedly. But all bets are off when Yuri Volodya, a mysterious old Russian man, hires Aimée to protect a painting.

In her first story collection since Love in Infant Monkeys, which became a Pulitzer Prize finalist, Lydia Millet explores what it means to be home. Nina, a lonely real-estate broker estranged from her only relative, is at the center of a web of stories connecting fractured communities and families. She moves through the houses of L.A.'s wealthy and elite and finds men and women both crass and tender, vicious, and desperate. 

Maggie Young had the market on normal. Normal friends, normal parents, normal grades...normal life. Until him. Clayton Reed was running from his past and an army of personal demons that threatened to take him down. He never thought he had a chance at happiness. Until her. Maggie thought their love could overcome anything. Clay thought she was all he needed to fix his messy life. That together, they could face the world. But the darkness is always waiting.

Always Happy Hour weaves tales of young women who are deeply flawed, intensely real, and who struggle to get out of their own way. These women love to drink and have sex; they make bad decisions with men who love them too much or too little; they haunt gas stations, public pools, and dive bars, seeking understanding in the most unlikely of places; and, although each shoulders the weight of different baggage, they all suspect they deserve better.

Priscilla Short lived off the grid for a year in a straw bale house in Taos, New Mexico, with no electricity, no running water, and a wood burning stove for heat. At the end of the year, Short returned home to Denver committed to making a smaller ecological footprint by consuming less and conserving more. In Thrifty Green, Short offers a unique, resource-by-resource approach that shows us that the best way to practice conservation, the real win-win, involves saving money as we lighten up.

Cara always knew that life on planet L'eihr would be an adjustment. With Aelyx, her L'eihr boyfriend, back on Earth working to mend the broken alliance between their two planets, Cara is left to fend for herself at a new school, surrounded by hostile alien clones. Even the weird dorm pet hates her. Things start to look up when Cara is appointed human representative to a panel preparing for a human colony on L'eihr. A society that melds their two cultures is a place where Cara and Aelyx could one day make a life together.

Ghost Songs charts McBride's teenage struggle to separate madness from imagination and sorrow from devastation in the wake of the shocking deaths of both her parents. Traveling from New York City to the desert of New Mexico to the shores of Ireland, McBride searches for herself, home, and a way to return to the family that remains. Harrowing and haunting, Ghost Songs is a meditation on love and loss and, in the end, a celebration of the tenacity of the human spirit.