Showing results for "Present" in Literature & Fiction

Sixteen-year-old Manisha is no stranger to monsters—she’s been running from them for years, from beasts who roam the jungle to the King’s army, who forced her people, the naga, to scatter to the ends of the earth. You might think that the kingdom’s famed holy temples atop the floating mountains, where Manisha is now a priestess, would be safe—but you would be wrong.

Ruby Chen has always played the part of the dutiful eldest daughter: excelling in school; excelling in piano lessons; excelling at keeping her younger sister, Tina, focused on extracurriculars meant to impress college admissions officers. But when a ghost from the spirit world attacks Ruby in the middle of Vancouver’s Chinatown neighborhood, her life is plunged into a darkness that no amount of duty can free her from. Overnight, Ruby’s sister seems to change.

Unlike the other residents of St. Virgil, Selina DaSilva does not believe in magic. With a logical mind and a knack for botany, Selina used to dream of leaving the island to study Pharmacology—until a vicious, unsolved attack left her father dead and her mother in a coma. Now her guilt over her mother’s condition keeps her tethered to the island, relegated to conning gullible tourists with useless talismans and phony protection rituals. But when one of those tourists ends up at the center of a string of strange murders, the truth that Selina has been denying can no longer be avoided.

Healer. Destroyer. Creator. Mateo Matisse and Chela Hidalgo are not just two teenagers in love—they're powerful gods in human form. Powerful enough to have saved their Brooklyn diaspora community from the wrath of an ancient enemy and to have raised their once-sunken native island of San Madrigal from the sea. But soon they discover that their problems are far from over.

Saki's (H. H. Munroe) wonderfully precocious Reginald expounds on the proper manner of gift giving, focusing on the proper presents (rubies are very good, mittens not so much), and instructing his elders on the presents most lilkely to receive a proper and polite "thank you."