Showing results by narrator "Julia Whelan" in All Categories

When Fiona Dunn is approached in a bar by a man who claims he's the devil, she figures it's just some kind of postmodern-slash-ironic pickup line. But a few drinks in, he offers her a wish in exchange for her immortal soul, and in addition Fiona must perform a special favor for him whenever the time comes. Fiona finds the entire matter so absurd that she agrees. Bad idea. Fiona soon discover that she really was talking to the devil incarnate.

Vera Bellington has beauty, pedigree, and a penthouse at The Angelus - the most coveted address on Park Avenue. But behind the sparkling social whirl, Vera is living a life of quiet desperation. Her days are an unbroken loop of empty, champagne-soaked socializing while her nights are silent and cold, spent waiting alone in her cavernous apartment for a husband who seldom comes home.

After the drama of discovering that she’s a member of the Storks, an ancient order of women endowed with mystical abilities, Katla Leblanc is finally settling in to life in chilly Minnesota. The ex–California girl even hopes for a white Christmas. So when the snow starts to fall on a romantic sleigh ride with her boyfriend, Jack, it seems like the perfect present. However, before she knows it, Katla’s wintry wish spirals out of control, turning into the snowstorm of the century. The unusual weather draws unexpected attention. Scientist Brigid Fonnkona is far too interested in Jack....

Popular girl Bliss Merino is ready to have the perfect prom. But when she catches her boyfriend making out with her best friend in the back of the limo, she has only one thought: revenge.... Bad girl Jolene Nelson is the last person anyone expected to see at prom. Yet here she is, dressed in pink ruffles and feeling like a fool for believing that he would actually show up.... Meg Rose Zuckerman is ready to stop being a wallflower and start experiencing life firsthand. But when her date stands her up, she finds herself on the outside yet again....

Moving from LA to nowhere Minnesota, 16-year-old Katla Leblanc expected the local fashion scene to be frozen in time. What she didn’t expect was induction into the Icelandic Stork Society, an ancient order of women charged with a unique mystical duty. Not only is Katla the youngest member, but Hulda, the society’s omen-guided leader, immediately bestows the coveted Second Chair on her - a decision that ruffles a few feathers.

Having barely survived an 11th grade of adventures rivaling any mythological tale, Katla Leblanc is hoping for an ordinary senior year. But when two Icelandic exchange students turn up at Norse Falls High - Marik, a merman-in-disguise, and Jinky, a rune-reading shaman-in-training - an uneventful school year seems out of the question. Not only has Katla enraged the Snow Queen by rescuing her boyfriend, Jack, she was tricked into promising her frail newborn sister, Leira, to the Water Queen.

Sol Le Coeur is a Smudge - a night dweller in an America rigidly divided between people who wake, live, and work during the hours of darkness and those known as Rays, who live and work during daylight. Impulsive, passionate, and brave, Sol concocts a plan to kidnap her newborn niece - a Ray - in order to bring the baby to visit her dying grandfather. Sol's violation of the day/night curfew is already a serious crime, but when her kidnap attempt goes awry, she stumbles on a government conspiracy to manipulate the Smudge population.

When Audrey Casella arrives for an unplanned stay at the grand Hotel Ruby, she's grateful for the detour. Just months after their mother's death, Audrey and her brother, Daniel, are on their way to live with their grandmother, dumped on the doorstep of a DNA-matched stranger because their father is drowning in his grief.

The first time violinist Julia Ansdell picked up the Incendio Waltz in a darkened antique shop in Rome, she knew it was a strikingly unusual composition. The minor key and complex feverish arpeggios have a life of their own. But when she plays the piece, Julia blacks out and awakens to find her small daughter implicated in acts of surprising violence.

What do you do with your last day on Earth? There are 27 hours and 15 minutes left until a meteor strikes North America, and for Emerson and everyone else who didn't leave, the world will end. But Emerson's world already ended when she ran away from home last year. Since then she has lived on the streets, relying on her wits and her friend, Vince, to help her find places to sleep and food to eat.

With those she's closest to dying around her, Adele embarks on a secret mission to the Sun Realm to assassinate the president. Along the way she'll uncover secrets about her relationship with Tristan that she might not be ready to face.

Dana Nolan was a promising young TV reporter until she was kidnapped by a notorious serial killer. A year has passed since she defeated her attacker, but Dana is still physically, emotionally, and psychologically scarred by her ordeal, with aftereffects including PTSD and memory loss. In an attempt to put herself back together after surviving the unthinkable, Dana returns to her hometown. But it doesn't provide the comfort she expects.

On an ordinary day, at an air show like that in any small town across the country, a plane crashes into a crowd of spectators, killing and injuring dozens. But when the dust clears, a thirteen-year-old girl named Ava is found huddled beneath a pocket of rubble with her best friend, Wash. He is injured and bleeding, and when Ava places her hands over him, his wounds miraculously disappear. Ava has a unique gift: she can heal others of their physical ailments.

Leopold Portman, a young IT manager a few years out of college, dreams of settling down in Philly's bucolic suburbs with his fiancé, Nora. A talented singer in mourning for her mother, Nora has abandoned a promising opera career and wonders what her destiny holds. Her best friend, Stephen, Leopold's brother, dithers in his seventh year of graduate school and privately questions Leo and Nora's relationship. On June 16, 2004, the three are brought together - first for a funeral, then for an annual Bloomsday party. As the long-simmering tensions between them come to a head, they are forced to confront the choices of their pasts and their hopes for the future.

Nell worships her older sister, Layla. They're one unit, intertwined: Nellayla. As Nell and her best friend, Felix, start their freshman year in high school, on Layla's turf, there's so much Nell looks forward to: Joining Layla on the varsity soccer team. Parties. Boys. Adventures. But the year takes a very different turn. Layla is changing, withdrawing. She's hiding something, and when Nell discovers what it is, and the consequences it might have, she struggles. She wants to support Layla, to be her confidante, to be the good sister she's always been. But with so much at stake, what secrets should she keep?

Hailed as "the anti - Skinny Bitch," Eat Like a Fatass, Look Like a Goddess: The Untold Story of Healthy Foods cuts through countless popular myths about nutrition, weight loss, disease-prevention, sustainability and planetary health with razor-sharp wit, hardcore research, and a whole lot of heart. A Nutritional consultant, holistic health expert, incisive researcher and food-lover, Herman reveals what it actually takes to be a vibrant truth-seeking modern woman.

Mayu. Mayu. Mayu. His whispered plea intertwines with a girl's silent cry. Help. Help. Somebody help. Everywhere Mayu turns she can feel the unspoken cries of the suffering. No one else seems to notice those most in need - but Mayu is compelled to do something. When she meets seven-year-old Anna, whose eyes speak to the unthinkable abuses in her past, Mayu knows the only escape for this victim is more violence. Mayu must unearth a brutal courage she never knew she had…Help. Help. Somebody help.

When Cora Holman’s mother dies, she assumes the inevitable: that her mother overdosed on the painkillers she’d been taking for years. So she’s shocked to learn that her mother and a neighbor both died of a brain aneurysm the same night. When Cora and other neighborhood teens become ill with a mysterious flu, and government-type strangers arrive in her small town, they all fear the unthinkable - a terrorist attack. Meanwhile, a world away in Pakistan, a 16-year-old computer genius named Shahzad is working as a virtual spy....

Meg Clark believes in the “hokey pokey” theory of life, Love comes to Meg in the form of Ahmed Bourhani, an exotically handsome Iranian-American who befriends her over a game of chess in a coffee shop. Meg knows that second chances require a leap of faith, and the result is more often a complicated mixed bag than a neatly packaged happily-ever-after. Sometimes in order to heal you have to hurt, but most of all you have to live your life and put your whole self in.

As a teenager, Chloe’s sketch of a killer linked two dead cult members found in the Everglades to a beach party massacre, closing the case as far as the cops were concerned. Chloe works as a psychologist specializing in art therapy to help traumatized victims, and on the side she finds release in her passion for the martial arts. Police who hire her as a consultant know she’s a literal kick-ass advocate for victims who can’t always speak for themselves.