Showing results by narrator "Emily Woo Zeller" in All Categories

Born blind in Vietnam, Julie Yip-Williams narrowly escaped euthanasia at the hands of her grandmother, only to have to flee the political upheaval of the late 1970s with her family. Loaded into a rickety boat with 300 other refugees, Julie made it to Hong Kong and, ultimately, America, where a surgeon gave her partial sight. Against all odds, she became a Harvard-educated lawyer, with a husband, a family, a life. Then, at the age of 37, with two little girls still at home, Julie was diagnosed with terminal metastatic colon cancer, and a different journey began.

Tunguska, Roswell, the Bermuda Triangle, the Mary Celeste... For hundreds of years, the danger posed by colliding worlds has been ignored as a crackpot theory, until now, and now it's too late.

Ev has a mysterious ability, one that she feels is more a curse than a gift. She can feel the emotions people leave behind on objects and believes that most of them need to be handled extremely carefully, and - if at all possible - destroyed. The harmless ones she sells at Vancouver’s Chinatown Night Market to scrape together a living, but even that fills her with trepidation. Meanwhile, in another part of town, Harriet hoards thousands of these treasures and is starting to make her neighbors sick as the overabundance of heightened emotions start seeping through her apartment walls.

Jialing is only seven years old in 1908, when she is abandoned in the courtyard of a once-lavish estate near Shanghai. Jialing is zazhong - Eurasian - and faces a lifetime of contempt from both Chinese and Europeans. Without her mother's protection, she can survive only if the estate's new owners, the Yang family, agree to take her in.

When her sister is bitten by a poisonous spider, Mulan does everything she can to help, including seeking out a renowned healer. However, it quickly becomes apparent that there is more to both the mysterious spider bite and the healer than meets the eye. On a quest with the Jade Rabbit of legend, Mulan visits extraordinary places, meets Immortals, and faces incredible obstacles while searching for an antidote for her sister.

Ruth and Nat are orphans packed into a house full of abandoned children run by a religious fanatic. To entertain their siblings, they channel the dead. Decades later Ruth's niece, Cora, finds herself accidentally pregnant. After years of absence, Aunt Ruth appears, mute and full of intention. She is on a mysterious mission, leading Cora on an odyssey across the entire state of New York on foot. Where is Ruth taking them? Where has she been?

Ellie Buchanan has one goal: to share her stained-glass creations with the world. She's lucky to be blessed with a billionaire father who encourages her dream. He’s treasured all of the art she’s made: from her macaroni necklace in kindergarten to every piece in her Etsy store. Literally every piece—because in trying to be supportive, he buys everything she makes. She has only one patron—her dad. How can she share her art if he insists on owning all of it?

Women Talk Money is a groundbreaking collection that lifts the veil on what women talk about when they talk about money; it unflinchingly recounts the power of money to impact health, define relationships, and shape identity. The collection includes previously unpublished essays by trailblazing writers, activists, and models, such as Alice Walker, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Rachel Cargle, Tracy McMillan, Cameron Russell, Sonya Renee Taylor, Adrienne Maree Brown, and more, with Rebecca Walker as editor.

After mother of five and former FBI profiler Andie Stern solved a murder—and unraveled a decades old conspiracy—in her New Jersey town, both her husband and the West Windsor police hoped that she would set aside crime-fighting and go back to carpools, changing diapers, and lunches with her group of mom-friends, who she secretly calls The Cellulitists. Even so, Andie can't help but get involved when the husband of Queen Bee Molly Goode is found dead.

A group of young girls descends on Camp Forevermore, a sleepaway camp in the Pacific Northwest, where their days are filled with swimming lessons, friendship bracelets, and camp songs by the fire. Filled with excitement and nervous energy, they set off on an overnight kayaking trip to a nearby island. But before the night is over, they find themselves stranded, with no adults to help them survive or guide them home. The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore traces these five girls through and beyond this fateful trip.

Gunslinging, chain-smoking, and Stetson-wearing Taoist psychopomp Elouise "Lou" Merriwether might not be a normal 19-year-old, but she's too busy keeping San Francisco safe from ghosts, shades, and geung si to care much about that. It's an important job, though most folks consider it downright spooky. Some have even accused Lou of being more comfortable with the dead than the living, and, well...they're not wrong.

Once, Emi believed the heavenly gods were righteous and wise, while the earthly yokai spirits were bloodthirsty and evil. But with a traitorous deity poised to destroy her world, and the yokai standing as humanity's only defense, the lies of her upbringing have toppled to reveal a far more terrifying reality. Despite the looming threat, Emi can't escape her greatest distraction: Shiro, the fox yokai who has so deftly claimed her heart for his own.

Faolan Kelly’s grandfather is dead. She’s alone in the world and suddenly homeless, all because the local powers that be don’t think a young man of seventeen is mature enough to take over his grandfather’s homestead…and that’s with them thinking Faolan is a young man. If she revealed that her grandfather had been disguising her for years, they would marry her off at the first opportunity. The mayor finds a solution that serves everyone but Faolan: He hires a gunslinger to ship her off to the Settlement, a remote fort where outcasts live under the leadership of His Benevolence Gideon Dillard.

You can’t have a good tale of monster hunting without monsters. And sometimes the monsters don’t need to be hunted. Sometimes it’s fun sitting back at minimum safe distance and watching the mayhem.

Molly Teng sees things no one else can. By touching the belongings of people who have died, she gets brief glimpses into the lives they lived. Sometimes the "zaps" are funny or random, but often they leave her feeling sad, drained, and lonely. The last thing Jade remembers from life is dying. That was over one hundred years ago. Ever since then she's been trapped in the same house watching people move in and out. She's a 'hungry ghost' reliant on the livings' food scraps to survive. To most people she is only a shadow, a ghost story, a superstition.

On the eve of International Women's Day in 2015, the Chinese government arrested five feminist activists and jailed them for 37 days. The Feminist Five became a global cause célèbre, with Hillary Clinton speaking out on their behalf and activists inundating social media with #FreetheFive messages. But the Five are only symbols of a much larger feminist movement of civil rights lawyers, labor activists, performance artists, and online warriors prompting an unprecedented awakening among China's educated, urban women.

Time Gate 8, one of humanity's portals between the stars, has been overrun by a mysterious alien intelligence, and the planet Luddeccea is now cut off. Haunted by those she left behind, Commander Noa Sato is on a desperate mission to save her homeworld. Navigating the ancient Ark, she seeks a hidden gate that will transport her ship to Earth and the Galactic Fleet. But the Luddeccean system harbors dangers, and so does her crew.

Megan Bennet no longer believes in fairy tales. Her life certainly isn’t one. Widowed at 30-ish with a young son isn’t the happily ever after she’d envisioned when she was a kid. She needs a new fairy godmother. Except now that she’s living in the quaint Irish town of Caisleán, she can feel magic in the air, and it’s not just the local matchmaking ghost. It’s in everyone she meets - especially Kade Donovan, the owner and operator of a pony therapy farm.

Sit around, leave sh*t all over the place, drink, forget about deadlines...being lazy is pretty easy. But the real art to being chill is when someone without any real ambition can fly under the radar and live unscathed by the never-ending reams of self-help and inspiration rained upon anyone who just wants to watch Netflix. Find that magical place where doing what comes naturally keeps the do-ers at arm's length. Rather than doing less, do just enough.

Is it possible to eat well, drink wine, and still lose weight? Melanie Avalon is living proof that, heck yeah, it's not only possible, it's unbelievably simple and straightforward. It's all about the what (mostly paleo, but she's not a monster about it), the when (believe it or not, brief fasting can mean freedom rather than restriction), and the wine (red wine can be a secret bullet for weight loss). It's a combination that Avalon discovered after years of self-experimentation and intense research on the mechanics of body fat regulation.