Showing results by publisher "Dreamscape Media, LLC" in Coming of Age

It is 1993, the last year of school, and Laurie’s final spring before adulthood. She works part time at a restaurant and looks after Cindy, her neglected potty-mouthed little neighbor. Like her mother, Laurie devours books and dreams big. Her father works at a garage, where she constantly struggles to keep her car running.

The Wall Street banker is single in New York City and overwhelmed by the pressure to scramble up the corporate and romantic ladders. Feeling her biological clock ticking, she analyzes her love life like a business deal and vows to lock in a husband before her 30th birthday. The Manhattan dating-app scene has as many ups and downs as the stock market, and outsourcing dates to an algorithm isn’t exactly Rae’s idea of romance.

In the first line of Ocean State, we learn that a high school student was murdered, and we find out who did it. The story that unfolds from there with incredible momentum is thus one of the buildup to and fallout from the murder, told through the alternating perspectives of the four women at its heart. The murderer Angel, her mother Carol, and the victim Birdy, all come alive on the page as they converge in a climax both tragic and inevitable. Watching over it all is the retrospective testimony of Angel’s younger sister, Marie.

Mona Mireles is a quintessential overachiever: a former spelling-bee champion and valedictorian of her college class, she has a sterling résumé and a wall of plaques and medals in her bedroom that stretches floor to ceiling. She's also broke, unemployed, back at home with her parents, and completely adrift in life and love. Seven months out of college, she’s desperately trying to reassemble the pieces of her life after the Wall Street job she had waiting for her post-graduation dissolves in the wake of the Great Recession.

The Fehler sisters wanted to be more than bug girls but growing up in a fourth-generation family pest-control business in rural Missouri, their path was fixed. The family talked about Fehler Family Exterminating at every meal, even when their mom said to separate the business from the family, an impossible task. They tried to escape work with trips to their trailer camp on the Mississippi River, but the sisters did more fighting than fishing. If only there was a son to lead rural Missouri insect control and guide the way through a crumbling patriarchy.

Danny Yzemski is a husky, pop-radio-loving loner balancing a dysfunctional home life with the sudden harsh realities of freshman year at a high school marked by racial turbulence. He finds refuge through bonding sessions with his father - listening to records on their brand new hi-fi and taking in his advice on dealing with bullies and driving a car with authority. But when Danny's father passes away suddenly, he's left alone to deal with his mother, a fragile woman who's angry at the loss of her husband and the increasingly seismic cultural shifts in the world.

During her senior year of college, Clare Michaels takes a spring break trip to Florida with three other girls, including her best friend, Lee. She's hoping for adventure and a few stories to share back at school. Instead, a string of bad choices leads to a horrific encounter, and Lee offers herself up so that Clare can escape. In the months that follow that fateful incident, Lee, once so dynamic and ambitious, flounders and withdraws. Clare was the only person to whom she'd ever confided about her troubled past. For Clare, that role felt like an honor - until it became a burden.

This classic novel takes place in Lantern Yard, a slum street in an unnamed city in Northern England, during the early 19th century. There, Silas Marner, a weaver and a member of a small Calvinist congregation, is falsely accused of stealing the congregation's funds while watching over their very ill deacon. Two pieces of evidence are against Silas: his possession of a pocket knife and the bag that formerly contained the money.

Written in 1954, this controversial story cracked down on the public school system and dramatized student violence as no other novel of its time did. Hunter used his own teaching experience to create protagonist Richard Dadier, who lands his first real job as an English teacher at North Manual Trades High School in New York City. Dadier knows the students here will be tough, but nothing has prepared him for the world he enters.

On his first day of college, farm boy Asa Hearthrug enthusiastically jumps out of bed - and discovers that his pajama pants are caught in the bedsprings. He learns that his dog has died, and his father, in an effort to soften the blow, tells an absurd story about a female bullfighter. Next, the freshman pays a visit to his high school sweetheart to say a heartfelt good-bye, but Lodestone La Toole is more interested in hamburgers than vows of devotion.

It's the middle of the Great Depression, and Morris Katz and his cousin, Albert, are broke. But that's all about to change when they head off to college on a mission from Morris' mother to find rich, unattractive Jewish girls to marry. The boys arrive on campus armed with a secret weapon: the poetry of Morris' cousin, Crip. Within a day Morris is courting Celeste Zimmerman, the frumpy heir to a movie theater franchise.

In December 1992 three groups of teenagers head to the theater to see the movie version of the famed Eons & Empires comic books. For Adam it's a last-ditch effort to connect with the girl he's had a crush on for years. Passionate fan Sharon skips school in Cincinnati so she can fully appreciate the flick without interruption from her vapid almost-friends--a seemingly silly indiscretion with shocking consequences.

At age 35, Morris Bliss is clamped in the jaws of New York City inertia. Enter Stefani, an 18-year-old girl in a Catholic school uniform, and Morris's once static life quickly unravels when Stefani's father calls on Morris to work for him. Morris's life becomes further entangled when his best friend, N.J., is recruited by an international cartel that controls global economics and local sex markets, and Morris is called in to save N.J.'s bacon.

Summer, 1934: Anne Dodge was raised by her old-money, New England Protestant father in the small coastal town of Warwick, Rhode Island. She has always been told that her Portuguese mother abandoned them when Anne was a small child, and died without ever contacting them again. After her mother's death, Anne learns that she has a half-sister, Maria Cristina, who was raised among Portuguese immigrants - and when Maria Cristina comes to stay with Anne and her father, ugly truths begin to surface....

Tommy and I grew up together in a foster home that nearly killed us both. We loved each other with our whole hearts until the world tore us apart. And now I’m in the back seat of his car, and he won’t tell me where he’s taking me. As the days pass, one thing is clear: The attraction between us is as powerful as ever. His kisses are still sweet. His touch is irresistible. But I don’t know if the boy I loved is going to save me or ruin me.

It was simple: Pay the debt and I stay out of jail. Pay the debt and I stay alive. But I sacrificed it all for Beth. Punishment is coming, but I can take it - as long as Beth is safe. Away from her mother and everyone else who would hurt her. I gave it all up for two days with her. And it was worth it. She always was. The secrets we keep are what tears us apart...

Jules Carmichael needs to get her life together. Pronto. School's been hell, there was that tiny stint in rehab, and worst of all, she's lost her cushy summer job. The only available work is at Office Jax, home of horrid '90s music and the biggest jerk on this side of the galaxy.... Recovering from a brutal break-up and taking a hiatus from college, Ryan DeShane has just discovered the Six Ultimate Steps to the Perfect Summer Fling. It's a brilliant distraction, and Jules is a tantalizing target. But the steps work a little too well - because he and Jules are definitely, uh, flinging.

The summer of 1960 was the hottest ever for Summit, Wisconsin. For kids seeking relief from the heat, there was a creek to be swum in, sprinklers to run through, and ice cream at Whitcomb's Drugstore. But for Frankie, Viv, and Biz, 11-year-old best friends, it would forever be remembered as the summer that evil paid a visit to their small town - and took their young lives as they'd known them as a souvenir.

The year is 1922, and young Nick Carraway moves to the village of West Egg, where he discovers that his neighbor is the eclectic millionaire Jay Gatsby. As he and Gatsby become acquainted, Nick is thrown into a world full of dazzling parties, unrequited love, and unchecked idealism. Gatsby, surrounded by riches, yearns for the love of a woman who chose another man. He waits for her every night, using a green light at the end of his dock to call out to her from across the water.

With the rapidly cascading Asian Financial Crisis threatening to go global and Korea in imminent meltdown, investment banker Dae Joon finds himself back in his native Seoul as part of an international team brought in to rescue the country from sovereign default. For Dae Joon - also known by his American name of Shane, after the cowboy movie his father so loved - the stakes are personal. Raised in the US and Harvard Business School - educated, Dae Joon is a jangnam, a firstborn son, bound by tradition to follow in the footsteps of his forebears.