Showing results by narrator "Therese Plummer" in All Categories

When Jill McCorkle feels a short story coming on, she goes right ahead and "wastes" wonderful ideas instead of hoarding them for a novel. The result is another extraordinary collection of stories and characters. In "It's a Funeral! RSVP," the storyteller is a woman who takes up self-styled "careers" that suit her circumstances. Now she's stumbled onto one that's so successful that she just can't quit. It's planning funerals, what she calls Going Out Parties, in which the clients are the soon-to-be-deceased themselves.

An unexpected clue to the Order of Ananke's diabolical scheme rattles Jolie Benoit, and she turns to Sargent Wesley Haukton for comfort. It's been years since Hauk took comfort from the touch of another person, though his love for Jolie is deep and powerful. Uncomfortable in his skin, scarred by a terrible fire, he is unable to give in to the pleasures that Jolie so desperately wants to grant him. Meanwhile, the Order is lurking in the shadows - and when they strike, the blow is swift and terrible.

Somewhere people act normal - but not in the Downy Mount Mobile Home Park, where recently widowed Marfa Bacot lives with her mother-in-law, Lulu, who cleans from hell to breakfast and has her make-up tattooed on so she's always ready for the rapture.

Niki Ky spends her days in a medicated haze, haunted by the ghosts of those she left behind 10 years ago after a confrontation against an unspeakable evil that left her shattered. To find peace, Niki must return to the house on the side of Red Mountain in Birmingham, Alabama-to face creatures no human should ever have to face.

Julia just graduated as her high school valedictorian, has a full ride to college in the fall and a coveted summer internship clerking for a federal judge. But when her older sister, Sophie, shows up at the graduation determined to reveal some long-buried secrets, Julia's carefully constructed plans come to a halt. Instead of the summer she had painstakingly laid out, Julia follows Sophie back to Vermont, where Sophie is opening a bakery - and struggling with some secrets of her own.

The dusty files of a venerable dictionary publisher, a hidden cache of coded clues, a story written by a phantom author, an unsolved murder in a gritty urban park: all collide memorably in Emily Arsenault's magnificent debut, at once a teasing literary puzzle, an ingenious suspense novel, and an exploration of definitions: of words, of who we are, and of the stories we choose to define us.

When Heather and Matt Campbell find 10-year-old Tatiana Rusesa on the side of the highway, she is thousands of miles away from her village in Sierra Leone. She hasn't seen her family in almost two decades, not since she and her mother were killed by rebel soldiers. Now Tatiana has inexplicably returned, a lost orphan with no place to call home. As the world dives deeper into uncertainty and chaos, Heather is determined to save Tatiana and help her find her way back to her family. But how much is she willing to lose to protect a girl she doesn't even know?

Whether laughing to tears reading Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great or clamoring for more unmistakable "me too!" moments in Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, girls all over the world have been touched by Judy Blume's poignant coming-of-age stories. Now, in this anthology of essays, 24 notable female authors write straight from the heart about the unforgettable novels that left an indelible mark on their childhoods and still influence them today. After growing up from Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing into Smart Women, these writers pay tribute to one of the most beloved authors of all time.

Denise Farber has just moved back to New Orleans with her mom and stepdad. They left in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and have finally returned, wagering the last of their family's money on fixing up an old, rundown house and converting it to a bed and breakfast. Nothing seems to work around the place, which doesn't seem too weird to Denise. The unexplained noises are a little more out of the ordinary, but again, nothing too unusual. But when floors collapse, deadly objects rain down, and she hears creepy voices, it's clear to Denise that something more sinister lurks hidden here.

Multi-award winning author Greg Bear established himself as the most ambitious and imaginative of the potential successors to Arthur C. Clarke with his bestselling space operas Eon and Eternity. Tangents is his first collection of short stories and includes two tales that won both Hugo and Nebula Awards: Tangents a remarkable account of contact with beings from another dimension, and the original short version of his classic novel Blood Music.

As Titan command positions themselves to stop the android space fleet hurling toward their moon, Victoria finds her wings clipped as she's thrust into a ground war against a cybernetic horde known as the Mave. With humanity's fate in jeopardy, an alliance is formed between humans from both Titan and Earth to fight the machines. But there is a wild card: the Engineer, a legendary swordsman of the Legion knights that wields a blade of fire. Victoria is forced to tread carefully as not only do her enemies pose a threat but potentially her allies as well.

They said I would never finish flight school. Never rank at the top of my class. Never fly with the top aces. Never return from combat against the Kelton androids. Never survive emergency surgery. Here I am. The year is 2151. Earth is gone. A hellscape. I've been unfrozen after 72 years of cryosleep on a medical facility on Saturn's moon, Titan. I have nothing - no home, no friends, no concept of this new world, these Titans. All that remains is the old conflict that has blackened my veins and memories of the ones I loved still fresh in my heart. Forgotten for decades.

The del Cisne girls have never just been sisters; they’re also rivals, Blanca as obedient and graceful as Roja is vicious and manipulative. They know that, because of a generations-old spell, their family is bound to a bevy of swans deep in the woods. They know that, one day, the swans will pull them into a dangerous game that will leave one of them a girl, and trap the other in the body of a swan.

In 2008, after recovering from a few years of hard drinking and harder drug use, after building back up a life as a successful and happy New York writer, Eva Hagberg woke up dizzy. She spent the next five years searching for a diagnosis, a treatment, and most of all an answer. In February 2013, an MRI revealed a mass in her brain. A blood test revealed an elevated tumor marker: A sign of cancer. And that’s when the second journey started - one grounded in physiology, in steadily rising marker numbers, and in the brutal invasion of a brain biopsy.

As teenagers, Kristin Dane and her two best friends took a vow to make the world a better place. Twenty years later, she's fulfilling that pledge through her fair trade shop that features products from around the world. All is well until, one by one, people connected to the shop begin dying. Detective Luke Carter, new to the St. Louis PD, wants to know why. Before he can answer that question, however, the FBI weighs in, and Kristin suddenly finds herself in the middle of international intrigue - and in the sights of the ruthless mastermind behind an ingenious, and deadly, scheme.

Food consumption is a significant and complex social activity - and what a society chooses to feed its children reveals much about its tastes and ideas regarding health. In this groundbreaking historical work, Amy Bentley explores how the invention of commercial baby food shaped American notions of infancy and influenced the evolution of parental and pediatric care. Until the late 19th century, infants were almost exclusively fed breast milk. But over the course of a few short decades, Americans began feeding their babies formula and solid foods....

The citizens of San Antonio, Texas, are threatened with extermination by a terrifying outbreak of the flu. Quarantined by the military to contain the virus, the city is in a desperate struggle to survive. Inside the quarantine walls, Detective Lily Harris is working burial statistics duty at the Scar, San Antonio's mass graveyard, when she finds a murder victim hidden amongst the plague dead.

Gen's family is more comfortable spending time apart than together. Then Gen's mom signs them up for Camp Frontiera vacation that promises the "thrill" of living like 1890s pioneers. Forced to give up all of her modern possessions, Gen nevertheless manages to email her friends back home about life at "Little Hell on the Prairie", as she's renamed the camp. But it turns out frontier life isn't without its good points, like the cute boy who lives in the next clearing.

Cassidy Kincaide runs Trifles & Folly in modern-day Charleston, an antiques and curios shop with a dangerous secret. Cassidy can read the history of objects by touching them, and along with her business partners Teag and Sorren, they get rid of cursed objects and keep Charleston and the world safe from supernatural threats. When zombies rise in Charleston cemeteries, dead men fall from the sky, and the whole city succumbs to the "grouch flu", Cassidy, Teag, and Sorren suspect a vengeful dark witch who is gunning for Teag and planning to unleash an ancient horror.

Female entrepreneurs are a growing force to be reckoned with. Each year, more and more women take the initiative and start their own business ventures - at twice the rate of men. Women continue to reshape the business world with innovative models, both large and small. So why is there a lack of clear-cut, expert advice aimed at this dynamic female audience?