Showing results by narrator "Michael Crouch" in All Categories

Laura: a teenage girl struggling to fit into her small, sleepy town in upstate New York, slowly drifting away from reality, into the secret life she inhabits online. Paul: a twentysomething wannabe rock star, back home from NYC, broke and jobless, living with his mother. April: a math teacher with two kids, running her church's vacation Bible school, discontent with another summer planning crafts and regurgitating verses. Ben: a boy stuck at VBS, still adjusting to the presence of his foster brother, DeShawn, a quiet, brooding kid from Brooklyn. Over summer, their paths will collide.

Puppies Hocus and Pocus are still waiting to be adopted from the Shelter for Slightly Magical Pets. Even though Hocus can see two minutes into the future and Pocus can turn bad feelings into bubbles (which he eats!), nobody seems to want them. This could be because the two keep causing mischief so they won’t be separated. When Jinx the witch uses a “spell for home” potion to help a color-changing tortoise find his match, the puppies know what to do: sneak both their hairs into the mixture to ensure they get adopted together.

On a walk around the neighborhood delivering potions with their magical family, puppies Hocus and Pocus discover that the wizard next door, Jade, has a new pet—a dragon named Bye-Bye. Hocus is excited! She loves making new friends and thinks Bye-Bye’s wings and fire breath are cool. But Pocus is afraid. He already has five friends, which feels like a lot. Plus Bye-Bye might eat them! Right? When Hocus bounds into Bye-Bye’s yard wanting to play, the dragon shies away, then chases her off. Could it be that Bye-Bye isn’t scary—she’s scared? How can the puppies help?

Pesha and Fen have shouldered the grief, pain, and fear for the people they love for as long as they can remember. Fen as his sister’s protector and handler, and Pesha as his brother’s trusted right hand. Neither has given thought to their own happiness, because a life of crisis only allows for chaos. Contentment is an affliction neither can afford. When Pesha embarks on a desperate, risky journey to a homeland he’s never been to, in a final attempt to save his dying sister, Fen doesn’t hesitate to come along to help the man he’s been slowly falling in love with.

Dexter Foreman is twelve going on eighty. He has lived at The Pines retirement village with his grandmother since he was six years old, and as a result he gets along better with senior citizens than kids his own age. He's homeschooled by the residents up until the day the county’s truancy officer shows up and announces that Dex has to go to a “real” school, to the local middle school.

When Aidan Cross yeeted his very secret journal into the house on Yeet Street, he also intended to yeet his feelings for his best friend, Kai, as far away as possible. To Aidan’s horror, his friends plan a sleepover at the haunted house the very next night. Terrance, Zephyr, and Kai are dead set on exploring local legend Farah Yeet’s creepy mansion. Aidan just wants to survive the night and retrieve his mortifying love story before his friends find it.

A meteorite carrying an alien virus of unknown origin falls to Earth off the US coast. Three boys find fragments washed ashore and sell them online, unknowingly spreading the contagion around the US. One of the fragments comes to the town of Stark’s Hill, Colorado. When exposed to this virus, human beings turn into flesh-eating zombies, or as Ben Michaels and his small group of allies come to call them "the Changed".

The secrets of Bellwound’s lineage and lifelong love have led him away from a once quiet life and into the Dark Beyond, the realm where Lucifer and his Fallen Stars were imprisoned. The once sacred land has turned into a luscious prison, riddled with mystery, guarded by the judged goddess Romiria. The arrival of Lucifer’s son disrupts an ancient order, stirring chaos in this doomed paradise. While the Dark Beyond is shaken by Bellwound’s presence, Lucifer and his servants plot against mortals and the Creator with an army of Shadows.

When sixth grader Silas Wade does a school presentation on former Major Leaguer Glenn Burke, it’s more than just a report about the irrepressible inventor of the high five. Burke was a gay baseball player in the 1970s―and for Silas, the presentation is his own first baby step toward revealing a truth about himself he’s tired of hiding. Soon he tells his best friend, Zoey, but the longer he keeps his secret from his baseball teammates, the more he suspects they know something’s up―especially when he stages one big cover-up with terrible consequences.

It’s been a rough year for Alex Collins. In the past twelve months, he’s lost his best friend, become the target of the two biggest bullies at school, and been sentenced to community service. But on June 25, 2013, he gets a call for help from Cassie Ramirez, the prettiest girl in school. At last, he feels like his luck might be changing. Cassie is at the Texas State Capitol to protest Wendy Davis’s historic filibuster of the abortion bill HB2, and she’s rallying everyone she knows to join her.

Radiant Basket of Rainbow Shells, scholar of curses and magical history, has spent several years on a research expedition abroad in Quruscan, one of the four kingdoms of the Tetrarchia. When Radiant’s home country of Loasht suddenly revokes his citizenship—and that of his entire ethnic enclave—he soon finds that Quruscan is no longer a safe haven either. He needs someone to help him escape: someone with the sheer cunning to escort him to safety. The perfect candidate is Kalyna Aljosanova: a crafty, mysterious mercenary with an uncanny reputation.

Growing up in Newark, New Jersey, in the 1930s, Benjy Puterman and Tommy Anspach have always done everything together. It never mattered that Benjy was Jewish and Tommy was of German heritage. But as Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party come to power in Germany and war brews in Europe, everything changes. Tommy is sent to Camp Nordland, a Nazi youth camp for German Americans, where he quickly learns that Jews are the enemy.

When classmates Baxter, Abigail, Turner and Emerson are forced to go to the middle of nowhere for a school project, they think things can’t get much worse. Why on earth do they need to learn how to survive in the wilderness by an eccentric instructor? But what starts off as a weekend of team building turns dangerous when their instructor goes missing and they are left with nothing but the pages of a survival handbook to complete a series of challenges.