Showing results by publisher "Recorded Books" in Teen & Young Adult

The past is not past. We may think something ancient history, or something that doesn’t affect our present day, but we would be wrong. Those Who Saw the Sun is a collection of oral histories told by Black people who grew up in the South during the time of Jim Crow. Jaha Nailah Avery is a lawyer, scholar, and reporter whose family has roots in North Carolina stretching back over 300 years. These interviews have been a personal passion project for years as she’s traveled across the South meeting with elders and hearing their stories.

Lydia Jones and her younger sister Penny have had it with boy drama. Last year was marred by relationship disasters for both of them, threatening Lydia’s standing with her school’s theater tech club and Penny’s perfect GPA. Penny has, naturally, diagnosed the problem and prescribed a drastic solution: a summer off from boys. Lydia and Penny decide to stay with their Aunt Grace and her boyfriend Oscar in Los Angeles while their parents are off on a European cruise. Penny follows her dreams with an internship at Oscar’s office, and Lydia gets a part-time job at Grace’s neighborhood coffeeshop.

Ethel Rosenberg's story is seldom told and not widely known. What tends to be told is the life of a convicted spy who was killed for her beliefs, a victim of social injustice. Barbara Krasner pays tribute to this complex and misunderstood woman and lets her sing—sing out about her childhood, her dreams to perform on stage, her love for a college boy with shared ideals, her tender love for her husband and sons, and her deep love for what she felt was right for her country and the world.

Beaked. Feathered. Monstrous. Avita was born to be a star. Her circus tent sells out nightly, and every performance incites bloodcurdling screams. She’s the most lucrative act from Texas to Tacoma, the crown jewel of the Family Fortuna. Avita feeds on the fear, the screams, the gasps. But when a handsome young artist is commissioned to create new posters of the performers, Avita is appalled by his rendering of Bird Girl. Is that truly all she is—a hideous monster, all sharp beak and razor teeth, obsidian eyes and ruffled feathers?

Neo Beijing, 2201. Two years after the Battle of Neo Seoul, eighteen-year-old telepath Ama works in a cafe by day and moonlights as a lounge singer in a smoky bar at night. She’s anonymous, she’s safe from the seemingly never-ending war, and that’s how she’d like to stay. But then PHNX, a resistance group specializing in espionage, approaches her with an offer to expose a government experiment exactly like the one she fled. Soon, Ama is traveling with PHNX on a series of dangerous assignments, using her telepathic powers to bring down the authoritarian Alliance.

16-year-old Raquel lives in a small town in Portugal, the kind of place where everyone knows everyone else’s business. Her parents are divorced and she’s just been suspended for cursing out a school aide asking about her father’s new marriage. She has two best friends, Luísa and Fred, but wants something more. Then, from afar, she sees Pardalita, a senior and a gifted artist who’s moving to Lisbon to study in the fall. The two girls get to know each other while working on a play. And Raquel falls in love.

Felicity Becker loves watching an event come together. There’s something magical about crafting an experience people will remember. So when her mom gets engaged, Felicity sees the wedding as the perfect opportunity to show off her skills. After Felicity’s friend Nancy offers up her family’s apple orchard as a venue, wedding planning gets even better. But the more time Felicity and Nancy spend together dress shopping and hunting for mismatched china, the more it starts to seem like there might be something besides friendship between them.

Attending community college for the first time, talking to the boy next door, and working toward her goals all help Grace recover, but her estrangement from Mercy takes a deep toll. And as Grace's echoes bring ghosts and premonitions, they also bring memories of when Grace fled to Mexico to the house of her maternal grandmother—a woman who Grace had been told died long ago. Will piecing together the truth heal Grace and her sister, or will the echoes destroy everything that she holds dear?

Fifteen-year-old Kermit Sanders knows grief and its all-encompassing shadows. After losing his beloved older sister in a tragic car accident, nothing quite punctures through the feelings of loss. Everywhere Kermit goes, he is reminded of her. But then Kermit finds a mysterious invitation in his locker, signed anonymously with “-1.” He has no idea what he’s in for, but he shows up to find out. Dubbed the “Minus-One Club,” a group of his school-mates has banded together as a form of moral support. The members have just one thing in common—they have all suffered the tragic loss of a loved one.

It’s not because she hates weddings. It’s not because the groom is her boyfriend’s dad (although yuck). It’s not even because Vegas weddings are cliché as hell. It’s because her mom is an evil incarnate vamp known as The Executioner. Nothing good can come of someone marrying a person named The Executioner. Nothing.

Adopted as a child by a noble family, Lizabeth is in search of her origins. Endowed with a fiery temper, she fights against the injustices and injunctions of her time. Also, when her best friend, Millie, a servant, is humiliated by Stelian Rakoczy, an arrogant and full of himself aristocrat, Liz provokes a scandal in retaliation. This scandal will lead her to the gentle Peter Rakoczy, whom everything opposes to his older brother. The young man then decides to help Lizabeth in her research, but their discovery will quickly overtake them...

Buenos Espíritus es una colección de once cuentos, interconectados con la diáspora dominicana, de la autora debut Camille Gomera-Tavarez. Es un libro centrado en una familia, los Belén, a través de múltiples generaciones. Está ambientado en la pequeña ciudad ficticia de Hidalpa, y también en Santo Domingo, Paterson, San Juan y Washington Heights. Está narrado en un estilo absolutamente real y claramente mágico. Estos cuentos exploran el machismo, la salud mental, la familia y la identidad.

Brian, a 20-something reporter on the Niagara Cascade's City Desk, is navigating life as the only Indigenous writer in the newsroom, being lumped into reporting on stereotypical stories that homogenize his community, the nearby Tuscarora reservation. But when a mysterious roadside assault lands Tim, the brother of Brian's mother's late boyfriend in the hospital, Brian must pick up the threads of a life that he's abandoned.

Struggling to deal with the pain of her parents’ impending divorce, fifteen-year-old Sara is facing a world of unknowns and uncertainties. Unfortunately, the one person she could always lean on when things got hard, her beloved Bibi Jan, has become a mere echo of the grandmother she once was. And so Sara retreats into the family business, hoping a summer working on her mom’s latest home renovation project will provide a distraction from her fracturing world. But the house holds more than plaster and stone.

Cicely Destin lives for the West Indian Day Parade, the joyous celebration of Caribbean culture that takes over the streets of her neighborhood. She loves waving the Haitian flag, sampling delicious foods, and cheering for the floats. And this year? She’ll get to hang with her stylish aunt, an influencer known for dabbling in Haitian Vodou. And maybe spot her dreamy crush, Kwame, in the crowd. But fate has other ideas. A rogue, mischievous spirit seems to take possession of Cicely’s aunt during a spiritual reading. And it’s up to Cicely to set things right.

Charlotte Salomon was a German-Jewish artist born in Berlin. She is remembered for her autobiographical series of paintings, Life? or Theater?, which consists of 769 individual works painted between 1940 and 1942 while she was in hiding from the Nazis in the south of France, and which has been called a painted parallel to Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl and an early graphic novel. In 1943, she entrusted her collection of paintings to a friend.

Seventeen-year-old Ginny Park is about to get expelled from high school—again. Stephanie, the picture book author who took Ginny into her Oregon home after she was kicked out of school in Hawaii, isn’t upset: she only wants to know why. But Ginny has always been in-between. She can’t bring herself to open up to anyone about her past, or about what prompted her to flee her native Japan. Then, Ginny finds a mysterious scrawl among Stephanie’s scraps of paper and storybook drawings that changes everything: The sky is about to fall. Where do you go?

In the seaside town of Nautilus, Minerva Gutiérrez absolutely hates her job at the local ice cream stand, where her sexist boss makes each day worse than the last. But she needs the money: kicked out of school and stranded by her mom's most recent hospitalization, she dreams of escaping her dead-end hometown. When an armed robbery at the ice cream stand stirs up rumors about money hidden on the property, Min teams up with her neighbor CeCe, also desperate for cash, to find it. The bonus? Getting revenge on her boss in the process.

The city of Leithon is under Imperial occupation and Arian Athensor has made it her playground. In stealing magical artifacts for the Resistance, bounding over rooftops to evade Imperial soldiers, and establishing herself as the darling thief of the underground, Arian lives a life wrapped in danger and trained towards survival. She’ll steal anything for the right price, and if she runs fast enough, she can almost escape the fact that her mother is dead, her father is missing, and her brother, Liam, is tamping down a wealth of power in a city that has outlawed magic.

Historical fiction at its best, this novel by bestselling author Marissa Moss tells the story of Sarah Emma Edmonds, who masqueraded as a man named Frank Thompson during the Civil War. Among her many adventures, she was a nurse on the battlefield and a spy for the Union Army, and was captured by (and escaped from) the Confederates. The novel is narrated by Sarah, offering listeners an in-depth look not only at the Civil War but also at her journey to self-discovery as she grapples with living a lie and falling in love with one of her fellow soldiers.