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

This one-of-a-kind treasury brings together the talents of nearly two dozen best-selling middle-grade authors - including Shannon Hale, Brandon Mull, Ally Condie, and Jennifer A. Nielsen - who have created original short stories and modern-day fairy tales based on the lives and dreams of children they have met who all have two things in common: They have very big hopes and dreams, and they are all cancer patients.

Nick Antosca's The Girlfriend Game is a tumble through the looking glass into a vortex of violence and desire. The 12 stories in the newest collection by the Shirley Jackson Award-winning author are brutal, urgent and unforgettable. In "Predator Bait", a decoy in a sex-sting news show questions her job and the man who shares her bed. An undependable son watches his mother become a creature he hardly recognizes in "Amphibian". A young man plots the death of his girlfriend's killer in "Winter Was Hard".

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.

Twenty-five-year-old Ivy Rowan rises from her sickbed after being struck by the great influenza epidemic of 1918, only to discover that the world has been torn apart in just a few short days. But Ivy's lifelong gift - or curse - remains. She sees the uninvited ones - ghosts of loved ones who appear to her, unasked for and unwelcomed, for they always herald impending death.

Things I will never forget: my name, my made-up birthday...the dark of the hospital at night. My mother’s face when she was young. Things other people will forget: where they come from, how old they are, the faces of the people they love. The right words for bowl and sunshine...what is a beginning and what is an end. Joy spends her days working the graveyard shift at a store outside Boston and nursing an addiction to cough syrup, an attempt to suppress her troubled past.

It's been three months since Lane made her first kill - the sadistic Decapitator - and now she feels both closer and more alienated than ever from her united, grieving family. Haunted by conflicting memories of her mother, Lane resumes her role as the vigilante Masked Savior out of a feeling of obligation - but her heart just isn't in it anymore. Now that Lane has felt the rush of deeper, darker thrills, a growing part of her wants to revisit its seductive power, and she's not sure how long she can resist.

By 2035, 11.5 million Americans will be over the age of 85 - more than double today's five million - and living longer than ever before. To enable all of us to age with dignity and security in the face of this coming Age Wave, our society must learn to value the care of our elders. The process of building a culture that supports care is a key component to restoring the American dream and, as Ai-Jen Poo convincingly argues, will generate millions of new jobs and breathe new life into our national ideals of independence, justice, and dignity.

Betrayed by everyone she loves, Valerie Dearborn will do anything to get out of Fey and avoid becoming Cerdwellyn's queen. Even if it means she has to rely upon Lucas, the monster who betrayed her.

Judy Chicurel's exquisitely written debut evokes the atmosphere of a 1970s summer in a close-knit working class community on Long Island. For readers of Jennifer Egan and Anne Tyler. Katie and her young friends face a changing world, with prospects very different from those presented to their parents. The Vietnam War seems pointless to many but has devastated lives that remain broken even after the fighting is over.

Princeton University, 1980. A young and unambitious librarian named Anna Roth is assigned the task of retrieving the records of Kurt Gödel - the most fascinating and hermetic mathematician of the 20th century. Her mission consists of befriending and ultimately taming the greatman's widow, Adele, a notoriously bitter woman set on taking belated revenge against the establishment by refusing to hand over these documents of immeasurable historical value.

Twenty-five, Chinese-American, and agoraphobic, Marcy Chen navigates love, sex, gourmet food, family and a desperate fear of people and intimacy. Living in the trendy Fremont district of Seattle, Washington, Marcy has created a life insulated from the people around her. Slowly she realizes that she must make a choice between seclusion and safety, or living the life she wants - in fear.

Lane is a typical teenager - loving family, good grades, after-school job at the local animal hospital, martial arts enthusiast - but her secret obsession is studying serial killers. She understands them, knows what makes them tick. Why? Because she might be one herself. Lane channels her dark impulses by hunting criminals - delivering justice when the law fails. The vigilantism stops shy of murder. But with each visceral rush the line of self-control blurs. And then a young preschool teacher goes missing - only to return in parts.

When she is thirteen years old, Evalina Toussaint, the orphaned child of an exotic dancer in New Orleans, is admitted as a mental patient to Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. The year is 1936, and the hospital, under the direction of celebrity psychiatrist Robert S. Carroll, is famous for its up-to-the-minute shock therapies and for Dr. Carroll's revolutionary theory of the benefits of non-introspection. Evalina finds herself in the midst of a kaleidoscope of characters, including the estranged wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Kimi’s Obaachan, her grandmother, had always been a silent presence throughout her youth. Sipping tea by the fire, preparing sushi for the family, or indulgently listening to Ojichan’s (grandfather’s) stories for the thousandth time, Obaachan was a missing link to Kimi’s Japanese heritage, something she had had a mixed relationship with all her life. Growing up in rural Pennsylvania, all Kimi ever wanted to do was fit in, spurning traditional Japanese cuisine and her grandfather’s attempts to teach her the language.

Lin Zhe is one of China’s foremost authors. In this gripping novel, Zhe incorporates the War of Resistance against Japan, New China's arduous journey from Liberation in 1949 through Mao's Cultural Revolution, and up to the present day to form a compelling backdrop for her portrayal of three generations of a Chinese family struggling to survive war, revolutionary politics, the demands of a timeless patriarchal social order, and the conflict between family obligations and individual aspirations.

The year 2099. Riley Taylor has defeated the terrorist group the Champions and is now faced with a different sort of enemy: the State. Trouble is, there isn’t one single person to blame for the way life in America is now, and instead of confronting a foe, she must root out the evil in the system piece by piece, law by insidious law. To do this, Riley will need the help of the Volunteers. But rebuilding her crew from scratch will not be an easy task, and taking on the government will require a team of specialized allies. 

Celebrated author Sarah Kuhn reinvents the modern fairy tale in this intensely personal yet hilarious novel of a girl whose search for a storybook ending takes her to unexpected places in both her beloved LA neighborhood and her own guarded heart.