Showing results for "The Cassandra" in Coming of Age

I'll be the first to admit that I live at extremes. After going 10 years locked in what felt like a dysfunctional marriage, I'm now decidedly boy-free. In nearly three years I've had no boyfriends, no flings, no dates, and no sex. For the sake of my dream career, the sacrifice has been easy. At least it was. Until he came along. Lukas Hendricks. He's rude, gorgeous, arrogant - a stone-carved wall of muscle and distraction. He's everything I know to avoid but there's no avoiding your next-door neighbor.

Cassandra Edwards is a graduate student at Berkeley: gay, brilliant, nerve-racked, miserable. At the beginning of this novel, she drives back to her family ranch in the foothills of the Sierras to attend the wedding of her identical twin, Judith, to a nice young doctor from Connecticut. Cassandra, however, is hell-bent on sabotaging the wedding.

I found Reed and loved him more than I loved myself. We were young... beautiful... entitled. Money and private schools, our families' lavish parties, and posh New York City apartments - it was all mere window dressing. What was real was our obsessive love, which grew right along with us as we moved toward adulthood. It consumed me, and only in his arms did I feel wanted and safe. But I have a secret. It's big and, to some, unforgivable. And it's why I let Reed destroy me, or maybe I destroyed us.

For the last 10 years, he never stayed with a woman longer than it took to screw them. But then she walked in. Back then she was nothing but a little girl, but now she’s all grown up, with curves, and a smile that reminds him of everything he’s spent the last 10 years trying to forget. His attraction to her is instant, and wrong, on so many levels. He’ll do anything he can to stop it, even make her hate him if he has to.

He’s the popular jock everyone loves. Funny, gorgeous, and a flock of girls to choose from. But she’s the bullied and antisocial girl no one notices. She has no friends and she likes it that way - until he walks into her life. They shouldn’t be friends, they definitely shouldn’t be roommates, but that doesn’t stop him though. When friendship blooms into something more, she’s not sure if she should hold on or let go. She’s hiding things, secrets so dark, and deep. If he ever discovers them she is certain he won’t want her anymore.

I thought I knew the truth, but I didn’t. Secrets surround me. Every aspect of my life was a lie. The Bishop brothers are the only beacon of light in my dark world. They’re the only ones that can protect me, the only ones that truly care. Finally, I have the leverage I need to escape my father’s clutches, to fight back. But when the truth comes out and the puzzle pieces of our pasts come together, I’m left wondering if there will ever be a future for the Bishop’s and me?

USA TODAY BESTSELLER “Wade into the Lowcountry of South Carolina with Mary Alice Monroe's sweeping Southern epic.""—People ""This is book club fiction at its finest!"" —Lisa Wingate, #1 New York Times bestselling author From the New York Times bestselling author, the first of two epic and...

From the internationally bestselling author of The Children’s Train comes an unforgettable coming-of-age novel, set in 1960s Sicily and based on a true story, of how a young Sicilian girl defied centuries old tradition to win the right to control her own life. As provincial Sicily bursts into...

A bold, heartfelt tale of life at Green Gables . . . before Anne: A marvelously entertaining and moving historical novel, set in rural Prince Edward Island in the nineteenth century, that imagines the young life of spinster Marilla Cuthbert, and the choices that will open her life to the...

The ""wonderfully talented"" (Dwight Garner, New York Times) author of Mislaid returns with a fierce and audaciously funny novel of families—both the ones we’re born into and the ones we create—a story of obsession, idealism, and ownership, centered around a young woman who inherits her...

On Halloween, 1991, a popular high school basketball star ventures into the woods near Battle Creek, Pennsylvania, and disappears. Three days later, he’s found with a bullet in his head and a gun in his hand—a discovery that sends tremors through this conservative community, already unnerved...

A Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick! Written with the haunting emotional power of Elizabeth Strout and Barbara Kingsolver, an astonishing debut novel that explores the lingering effects of a brutal crime on the women of one small Texas oil town in the 1970s. Mercy is hard in a place like...

With the heart, daring, and evocative atmosphere of Winter’s Bone and True Grit, and driven by the raw, whip-smart voice of Percy James, a blistering debut about a fearless sixteen-year old girl whose search for her missing mother leads to an unexpected discovery, and a life or death struggle...

Spanning over a decade, told in alternating voices, The Grown Ups explores the indelible bonds of friends and family and the connections that form between Sam, Suzie, and Bella as they navigate parents, siblings, and one another on the way to becoming who they really want to be when they grow up...

Early in The Sweetness, an inquisitive young girl asks her grandmother why she is carrying nothing but a jug of sliced lemons and water when they are forced by the Germans to evacuate their ghetto. "Something sour to remind me of the sweetness," she tells her, setting the theme for what they must remember to survive. Set during World War II, the novel is the parallel tale of two Jewish girls, cousins, living on separate continents, whose strikingly different lives ultimately converge.

In 1837, seven-year-old Thomas Wright followed in his family’s footsteps into one of England’s most dangerous coal mines. He struggled with childhood fears, working twelve-hour days, six days a week in the darkness 500 feet below ground. That was until disaster struck in one of England’s most horrific accidents that changes the direction of his life and the course of history. This is the fast-moving story of a young boy overcoming the iron-fisted rule of the massively wealthy lord of the land.

Jenny is thirteen when an epic dust storm rolls into her central California town in December 1977. Bedridden after contracting a life-threatening illness in the storm and suffering a shocking loss, Jenny realizes she will never be cared for by the mother who both neglects and terrifies her or the father who allows it. She relies on her cousin, Heather, who has the loving home Jenny longs for; her beloved great-uncle, Gino, the last link between generations; her best friend, Henry, a free spirit with whom she shares an inexplicable bond; and baseball star, Billy, who becomes her first love.

Newly transplanted to the big city of Chicago, she is one of the rare few to leave her small working-class town in Iowa, let alone for a prestigious university. She is not driven by academic ambition, nor is she a social butterfly. Her true gift is an ability to understand the needs of others and to reflect back the version of themselves they wish to see, rendering herself invisible. Deftly, she conceals her deeply troubled past - especially from her charismatic yuppie-in-the-making best friend and roommate.

In this riveting, heartfelt debut, a young woman assumes a new name to escape her dark past and find the redemption she desperately seeks. “It’s impossible not to root for this strong, willful girl as she finds her place in the world and for her brother as he tries to make sense of it...

An unforgettable cast of characters is unleashed into a realm known for its cruelty—the American high school—in this captivating debut novel. The wealthy enclaves north of San Francisco are not the paradise they appear to be, and nobody knows this better than the students of a local high...