Showing results by narrator "Billie Bryant" in All Categories

It is my father’s fault that I love soccer so much. He doesn’t know much about girls, but as a former professional soccer player, we built a bond as he perfected my skills. My aunties have kept an extra eye on me since my mother died. I’ve avoided their insistence on dance classes that would take precious time away from my beloved girls’ soccer team.

Narrated by 11-year-old Orla Gwen Gleason, Orla’s Canvas opens on Easter Sunday, in St. Suplice, Louisiana, a “misspelled town” north of New Orleans, and traces Orla's dawning realization that all is not as it seems in her personal life or in the life of her community. The death of St. Suplice’s doyenne, Mrs. Bellefleur Dubois Castleberry, for whom Orla’s mother keeps house, reveals Orla’s true paternity, shatters her trust in her beloved mother, and exposes her to the harsh realities of class and race in the Civil Rights-era South.

These 16 short tales delve into realms of existential investigation, from dark horror and science fiction futures to fantastical flights of scientific wonder. Each story is a self-contained world of its own, a moment in time that illuminates a thought, a person, an experience or a curiosity.

The Queen’s birth was supposed to bring peace, but it only caused animosity between her and her husband’s Mistress. Now, with the Àraid rising in the west, and enemies surrounding her in court, Cerynn is torn between her desire to strengthen her powers, and the maddening need to squash the woman distracting her husband from the war rising against them. But conflict rules his mind, tormenting him with what must be done while filling him with longings from the past to confuse his loyalties.