Showing results by narrator "Allyson Johnson" in All Categories

Fourteen-year-old Susan Backstrom seems to have a charmed life - she's smart and beautiful, the only child of wealthy, attentive parents. But there are secrets inside her expensive house that Susan would never tell. One day, at the library, she overhears their housekeeper's son talking with some friends about sneaking into a nearby abandoned house. Much to her own surprise, Susan very much wants to join them - and soon, she's part of the best secret of all. The house has a resident teenage ghost. More important than that, the house itself is a living, supernatural thing.

To Inquisitor Angel Xia, it was just another corporate killing on a backwater planet. But as the bodies begin to pile up and she finds herself a target, she realizes she's stepped on one toe too many. Barely escaping attempts on her life by powerful agents with seemingly limitless reach and influence, Angel senses even her co-Inquisitors can't be trusted. But as the web tightens, she receives a cryptic message from a computer program claiming to be a little girl in desperate need of her help.

A women’s boxing class is the perfect place for betrayed wife Katherine to work out her aggressions. Ideal too for Geneva, a teacher disgraced and ruined by a vengeful ex, and Luz, a software engineer battling an unjust system. Maggie, their instructor and mentor, guarantees she can right the wrongs they’ve endured. And if Katherine, Geneva, and Luz really want to unleash their rage, they must do what Maggie says.

In Coming to Our Senses, cognitive scientist Viki McCabe argues that prevailing theories of perception, cognition, and information cannot explain how we know the world around us. Using scientific studies and true stories, McCabe shows that the ecological disasters, political paralysis, and economic failures we now face originate in our tendency to privilege cognitive processes and products over the information we access with our perceptual systems.

Since they were children running barefoot about Toulouse Plantation, Josie and Cleo have been as close as sisters, forging an unbreakable bond that defies their roles as mistress and slave. Together, the two have shared secrets and protected each other through happiness and heartbreak. They never dream they could also share an intense passion for the same man, the elegant, charming, and irresistibly seductive Bertrand Chamard.

Wren Matthews thought she’d outgrown nursery rhymes a long time ago. But that was before she knew that songs of twinkling little stars and four-and-twenty blackbirds were the key to an ancient, hidden magic. Wren’s discovery catapults her into a world of buried secrets, strange dreams, and a mountain fortress under an aurora-filled sky. But just as she starts to master her unique abilities, her new world begins to crumble around her...and only she can save it.

Ananke and the rest of the Excoms team thought they would get a little bonding time to kick back and relax. But the world has different ideas. After the organization that they work for discovers that over 100 prisoners from a now dismantled human trafficking operation are missing, the team is sent out to find them and bring them back. With few clues, they must follow a trail that leads from Washington State to Panama and beyond. And when they reach the end, what they find is far beyond anything they ever expected.

Like all A-Z books, this one illustrates the alphabet - but instead of "A is for apple", A is for Angela - as in Angela Davis, the iconic political activist. B is for Billie Jean King, who shattered the glass ceiling of sports; C is for Carol Burnett, who defied assumptions about women in comedy; D is for Dolores Huerta, who organized farmworkers; and E is for Ella Baker, who mentored Dr. Martin Luther King and helped shape the civil rights movement.

This short story is from the anthology Mitigated Futures. Twelve science fiction stories about the oncoming future, each of them representing a possible glimpse of what could be just around the corner... or much further down the corridor. These stories previously appeared in places like Clarkesworld Magazine, The Year's Best SF, Subterranean Magazine, and in various anthologies. They deal with the future of war, our climate, and technology's effect on our lives.

Ava Kalle's empty soul devours magic. And her hunger is deadly. She's sharp, quick and can live in shadow, making her work as a spy for the Mages a natural choice. She lives on the fringes of society and likes it that way. When the man she loves takes another woman for his mate, the darkness in her heart unravels and she'll do anything to get him back. She makes a dangerous deal with a fire elemental, Heyerdar, who has a vested interest in agreeing.

There is a tribe in Africa where, the first time a woman leaves home following the confinement period after giving birth, everyone she meets along the road greets her with a sacred song otherwise reserved for warriors returning from battle. She's honored as having lived through a rite of passage that will forever mark her womanhood as abundant and powerful and blessed. She's respected as a fully franchised member of the most ubiquitous and yet most extraordinary group of beings in our collective experience: Mothers.

Self-exile became Sira's only choice when she discovered how deeply she'd been betrayed by the leaders of her own people. Rather than allow them to continue to use her for their own ruthless purposes, Sira, the most powerful being ever born to the alien race known at the Clan, fled with the human telepath, Jason Morgan. Now, living on a distant world in an environment over which she has control, Sira is striving to carve out a new life for herself.

South Carolina, 1862. Emily Jarvie is determined to send her family's slave-owning history to its grave. When the Union Army captures the Sea Islands, she returns to the south to teach the former slaves, part of the Army's unusual experiment in racial equality. Despite her loyalty to the Union cause, her Southern heritage raises a brick wall of Yankee suspicion.

Not bound as a book. Free. Like Unfettered before it, the contributing writers of Unbound were allowed to submit the tales they wished fans of genre to hear - without the constraints of a shackling theme. The result is magical. Twenty-three all-original stories are sure to captivate you - some will move you to tears while others will keep you listening long into the night. The power of Unbound lies in its variety of tales and the voices behind them. If you are a fan of discovering new writers or hearing the works of beloved authors, Unbound is for you.

When Isaac Newton died in 1727 without a will, he left behind a wealth of papers that, when examined, gave his followers and his family a deep sense of unease. Some of what they contained was wildly heretical and alchemically obsessed, hinting at a Newton altogether stranger and less palatable than the one enshrined in Westminster Abbey as the paragon of English rationality. These manuscripts had the potential to undermine not merely Newton's reputation, but that of the scientific method he embodied.

In the summer of 1860, more than 50 years after the United States legally abolished the international slave trade, 110 men, women, and children from Benin and Nigeria were brought ashore in Alabama under cover of night. They were the last recorded group of Africans deported to the United States as slaves. This book reconstructs the lives of the people in West Africa, recounts their capture and passage in the slave pen in Ouidah, and describes their experience of slavery alongside American-born enslaved men and women.

Nicolette Chamard, a woman of color in the most color-conscious city in the world, rejoices when the Union Army marches into New Orleans. At last her people will be free, and even knowing her collaboration with the Union will put her in danger, she means to help make it happen. Marcel Chamard, Nicolette's privileged white half-brother, surveys the same parade and sees conquerors, not liberators.

Beautiful young widow Elise Laffont embraces her freedom during the daylight hours, running the farm she loves so dearly, but the night brings with it painful reminders of the torment she endured at the hands of her abusive husband. Fate may have taken her husband, but it hasn't erased the scars he left, and Elise wonders if she will ever be able to bear the touch of a man again. From the moment he laid eyes on the beautiful widow, Reynaud Chevalier wanted her. When disaster offers him the chance to claim her as his own, Reynaud seizes the opportunity to bind Elise to him.

The stage is set for a possibly cataclysmic confrontation in non-space-and the Speaker for the Clan Council and her human mate are about to find themselves in the heart of the conflict.

Beyond 1619 brings an Atlantic and hemispheric perspective to the year 1619 as a marker of American slavery's origins and the beginnings of the Black experience in what would become the United States by situating the roots of racial slavery in a broader, comparative context.