Showing results by narrator "Andrew Eiden" in All Categories

This one-of-a-kind treasury brings together the talents of nearly two dozen best-selling middle-grade authors - including Shannon Hale, Brandon Mull, Ally Condie, and Jennifer A. Nielsen - who have created original short stories and modern-day fairy tales based on the lives and dreams of children they have met who all have two things in common: They have very big hopes and dreams, and they are all cancer patients.

Twenty-five-year-old Sgt. Gray Phillips is at a crossroads in his life: stay in the Marine Corps, or get out and learn to be a civilian? He's got 45 days of leave to make up his mind, but the people in his life aren't making the decision any easier. His dad wants him to get out; his grandfather wants him to stay in. And his growing feelings for Sam Anderson are wreaking havoc with his heart...and his mind.

Joseph Johnson has lost just about everyone he's ever loved. He lost his pa in an accident. He lost his ma and his little sister to sickness. And now, he's lost his pony - fast, fierce, beautiful Sarah, taken away by a man who had no right to take her. Joseph can sure enough get her back, though. The odds are stacked against him, but he isn't about to give up. He will face down deadly animals, dangerous men, and the fury of nature itself on his quest to be reunited with the only family he has left.

Family means safety. Family means protection. Until it doesn't. Eleven-year-old Kate Whitby, the youngest member of her odd family, leads an invisible life. They live in their historic small-town hotel, where she is an expert at keeping everyone's secrets: Her sister's a thief, her great-grandmother isn't as crazy as people think, her mother lives in the past, and her beloved grandfather might have killed his best friend.

Wintric Ellis joins the army as soon as he graduates from high school, saying goodbye to his girlfriend and to the backwoods California town whose borders have always been the limits of his horizon. Deployed for two years in Afghanistan in a directionless war, he struggles to find his bearings. Two career soldiers, Dax and Torres, take Wintric under their wings. The aftershocks echo long after each returns home to a transfigured world, where his own children may fear to touch him and his nightmares still hold sway.

Mia Galliano is an aspiring filmmaker. Ethan Vance has just played his last game as a collegiate soccer star. They're sharp, hungry for success, and they share a secret. Last night, Ethan and Mia met at a bar, and, well, one thing led to another, which led to them waking up the next morning together. Things turned awkward in a hurry when they found themselves sharing a post-hookup taxi to the same place: Boomerang headquarters.

It was just your typical, run-of-the-mill scout field trip - that is, until Kit spotted an object from space plummeting to Earth.

"I live in a coastal town in the deep south of the Mekong Delta. During the war this was IV Corps, which saw many savage fights. Although the battles might have long been forgotten, some places cannot forget." Thus begins the harrowing yet poignant story of a North Vietnamese communist defector who spends 10 years in a far-flung reform prison after the war, and now, in 1987, a free man again, finds work as caretaker at a roadside inn in the U Minh region. One day new guests arrive at the inn: an elderly American woman and her daughter, an 18-year-old adopted Vietnamese girl....

In rural North Georgia two decades after the Civil War, 13-year-old Lulu Hurst reaches high into her father's bookshelf and pulls out an obscure book, The Truth of Mesmeric Influence. Deemed gangly and undesirable, Lulu wants more than a lifetime of caring for her disabled baby brother, Leo, with whom she shares a profound and supernatural mental connection.

Ethan is living a solid, rational life as a bail bondsman in Florida when he’s compelled to make a seemingly irrational decision: abandon his job and his girlfriend and head south to rescue the daughter of his ex-lover, Michelle. She appears to have been kidnapped by the Mara - vicious street gangs ripping apart the fabric of Central American life - and there’s every reason to believe the girl is dead already. Except for the one that Ethan has been hiding from everyone: she is calling to him in his dreams with three desperate words…I’m still alive.

Meet Jack Jordan. He’s a smooth-talking con artist with a penchant for the fast life. He’s snuck into Lufkin, Texas, in the dead of night with little more than a beat-up Honda, a hollowed-out King James Bible full of cocaine, and enough emotional baggage to sink a steamship. He’s charming, dedicated, and extremely paranoid.

Thirty years ago, Martin Owenby came to New York City with dreams of becoming a writer. Now his existence revolves around cheap Scotch and weekend flings with equally damaged men. When he learns that his older brother, Leon, has gone missing, he must return to the Owenby farm in Solace Fork, North Carolina, to assist in the search. But that means facing a past filled with regrets, the family that never understood him, the girl whose heart he broke, and the best friend who has faithfully kept the home fires burning.

For better or for worse, Google and social media - “Big Tech”, collectively - have become the new public square. Unfortunately, this public square has a watchful referee standing behind them, ready and waiting to blow the whistle if they veer too far from the preferred narrative. Americans have given these companies enormous power to select the information they read, share and discuss with their neighbors and friends.

An encompassing, visionary, many-threaded work, Now It’s Time to Say Goodbye is an American novel of great scope and nearly mythological intensity. This is the third volume of Gospel Harmonies, a series of seven stand-alone books that follow the character of John in various guises as he attempts to navigate the uneasy relationship between the self and the postmodern world.

Winchester, Virginia, is an emblematic American town. As the US economy and American culture have transformed in recent decades, the ground under centuries-old social codes has shifted, throwing old folkways into chaos. Homeplace teases apart the tangle of class, race, and family origin that still defines the town and illuminates questions that now dominate our national conversation - about how we move into the future without pretending our past doesn't exist, about what we salvage, and what we leave behind.

Nashville Sound enforcer Thor Eastrom has been married, divorced, engaged, and dumped. But the hardest thing he’s ever done is bury his twin babies. The last thing he wants or needs in his life right now is a relationship. All he wants is one more year in the NHL, so he can go out as a member of the 20-year club. Tradd Davenport’s dream is to succeed in the hardscrabble world of country music. She has the talent and the drive - and she’s ready to work hard for something that her father’s money can’t buy her.

Ambitious and straight-laced, Nashville Sound forward Jarrett MacPherson is determined to walk in the footsteps of his All-American hockey-playing grandfather. He prides himself on doing the right thing above all, with ethics so sharp they could cut the heart out of a saint. Merry Sweet toils by day in a paper shop and coffee bar in Sound Town and at night at the arena, cleaning, selling concessions, and taking tickets. Jarrett notices and admires Merry’s determination and believes her when she says she needs money for law school, even offering to help solve her financial problems.

Emile Giroux has vowed he will be everything his stepfather is not: cultured, charming, sophisticated, and - above all else - a rich, successful NHL star. One of the top goalies in the league, the French Canadian strives for more, still haunted by his troubled childhood. Amy Callahan was a freelance professional organizer until an ambitious, domineering boyfriend took over her life and cleaned out her bank account. When Emile finds Amy literally kicked to the curb, he seizes his latest chance to rescue a damsel in distress - only Amy doesn’t want to play that game.

Twin brothers Ethan and Jack Stone have built the ultimate transparency app - Stalker - and it's going to make them rich. But when Ethan's girlfriend dumps him, and his brother bails for their biggest competitor, Ethan is convinced they've run off together. Using Stalker to find out, he tracks them from Silicon Beach to Silicon Valley, and the secret he reveals is even more twisted than he imagined. Between his faith in people and the technology he designed to expose the truth, Ethan is forced to rethink everything he had believed regarding privacy, freedom, and trust.

Though Savannah Rose - “Sparrow” to her friends and family - is a gifted ballerina, her real talent is keeping secrets. Schooled in silence by her long-dead mother, Sparrow has always believed that her lifelong creed - “I’m not the kind of girl who tells” - will make her just like everyone else: Normal. Happy. Safe. But in the aftermath of a brutal assault by her seemingly perfect boyfriend Tristan, Sparrow must finally find the courage to confront the ghosts of her past, or lose herself forever....