![]() ![]() Requires OverDrive Read (file size: N/A KB) or Adobe Digital Editions (file size: 360 KB) or Amazon Kindle (file size: N/A KB). Debut author Jacqueline Kelly deftly brings Callie and her family to life, capturing a year of growing up with unique sensitivity and a wry wit. As Callie explores the natural world around her, she develops a close relationship with her grandfather, navigates the dangers of living with six brothers, and comes up against just what it means to be a girl at the turn of the century. With a little help from her notoriously cantankerous grandfather, an avid naturalist, she figures out that the green grasshoppers are easier to see against the yellow grass, so they are eaten before they can get any larger. Calpurnia Virginia Tate is eleven years old in 1899 when she wonders why the yellow grasshoppers in her Texas backyard are so much bigger than the green ones. ![]()
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![]() ![]() Can we take full charge of the course of our lives without causing damage to others? How do global events beyond our control shape our lives and our memories? And what can we really learn from the traumas of the past?Įpic, mesmerizing, and deeply humane, Lessons is a chronicle for our times-a powerful meditation on history and humanity through the prism of one man's lifetime. His journey raises important questions for us all. Haunted by lost opportunities, Roland seeks solace through every possible means-music, literature, friends, sex, politics, and, finally, love cut tragically short, then love ultimately redeemed. ![]() As the radiation from Chernobyl spreads across Europe, he begins a search for answers that looks deep into his family history and will last for the rest of his life. Now, when his wife vanishes, leaving him alone with his tiny son, Roland is forced to confront the reality of his restless existence. Two thousand miles from his mother's protective love, stranded at an unusual boarding school, his vulnerability attracts piano teacher Miss Miriam Cornell, leaving scars as well as a memory of love that will never fade. ![]() When the world is still counting the cost of the Second World War and the Iron Curtain has closed, eleven-year-old Roland Baines's life is turned upside down. ![]() ![]() ![]() Her decision to keep the baby slows her drug use, but doesn't stop it, and the author leaves the reader with the distinct impression that Kristina/Bree may never be free from her addiction. ![]() Kristina hits her lowest point when she is raped by one of her drug dealers and becomes pregnant as a result. Soon, her grades plummet, her relationships with family and friends deteriorate, and she needs more and more of the monster just to get through the day. There is only Bree." Bree will do all the things good girl Kristina won't, including attracting the attention of dangerous boys who can provide her with a steady flow of crank. While under the influence of the monster, Kristina discovers her sexy alter-ego, Bree: "there is no perfect daughter, / no gifted high school junior, / no Kristina Georgia Snow. ![]() In it, she chronicles the turbulent and often disturbing relationship between Kristina, a character based on her own daughter, and the "monster," the highly addictive drug crystal meth, or "crank." Kristina is introduced to the drug while visiting her largely absent and ne'er-do-well father. Ellen Hopkins's semi-autobiographical verse novel, Crank, reads like a Go Ask Alice for the 21st century. ![]() ![]() ![]() There were animal whisperers, committed staff, wildly devoted volunteers, handsome heartbreakers, and a machete-wielding prom queen who carried Laura through. ![]() The humans, too, were cause for laughter and tears. They weren't alone, not with over a hundred quirky animals to care for, each lost and hurt in their own way: a pair of suicidal, bra-stealing monkeys, a frustrated parrot desperate to fly, and a pig with a wicked sense of humor. And in Wayra, she made a friend for life. Wide-eyed, inexperienced, and comically terrified, Laura made the scrappy, make-do camp her home. Fate landed her at a wildlife sanctuary on the edge of the Amazon jungle where she was assigned to a beautiful and complex puma named Wayra. Laura was in her early twenties and directionless when she quit her job to backpack in Bolivia. ![]() In this rapturous memoir, writer and activist Laura Coleman shares the story of her liberating journey in the Amazon jungle, where she fell in love with a magnificent cat who changed her life. ![]() ![]() Due to a book coming unlocked once in a while, they had to move around a lot to avoid questions and the police. ![]() ![]() Stine thought he kept her oblivious about her true nature, but Hannah knew a girl couldn't have so many Sweet 16s. She was normal, but didn't age and appeared ghostly in the moonlight. The most evil of them all was Slappy the Dummy, who was a puppet version of himself a demonic ventriloquist dummy with a serious Napoleonic complex knew what was in Stine's imagination and tormented him in his dreams.Īfter spending so many years alone, Stine decided to write a daughter into existence - Hannah. He managed to trap his monsters in their books, keeping them locked. With the help of his special typewriter, Stine wrote about monsters, demons, ghosts and ghouls that would terrorize those who tormented him. Unfortunately, because they became real to him, Stine's monsters eventually found a way to escape from his works. Having been forced to stay inside most of his childhood due to terrible allergies, Stine was picked on by kids who would call him names and throw rocks at his window. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Strong characters and evocative utterances convey how historical context shapes language and consciousness, breaking down any stable sense of self.Īs in other major modernist works, Škėma uses language and allusion to destabilise. Using multiple narrative voices and streams, the novel moves through sharply contrasting settings and stages in the narrator’s life in Lithuania before and during World War II, returning always to New York and the recent immigrant’s struggle to adapt to a completely different, and indifferent, modern world. Drawing heavily on the author’s own refugee and immigrant experience, this psychological, stream-of-consciousness work tells the story of an émigré poet working as an elevator operator in a large New York hotel during the mid-1950s. White Shroud ( Balta drobulė, 1958) is considered by many as the most important work of modernist fiction in Lithuanian. ![]() ![]() ![]() And when Jules believes one last wish rock for Sylvie needs to be thrown into the river, the human and shadow worlds collide. Shes too young to know exactly what she senses, but she knows something is very wrong. She too is fastfaster than fastand she senses danger. At the very same time, in the shadow world, a shadow fox is bornhalf of the spirit world, half of the animal world. Jules is devastated, but she refuses to believe what all the others believe, thatlike their motherher sister is gone forever. But Sylvie is too fast, and when she runs to the river theyre not supposed to go anywhere near to throw a wish rock just before the school bus comes on a snowy morning, she runs so fast that no one sees what happens and no one ever sees her again. And if only Sylvie wasnt such a fastfaster than fastrunner. Better than just sisters, more than best friends, theyd be identical twins if only theyd been born in the same year. Worlds collide in a spectacular way when Newbery and National Book Award finalist Kathi Appelt and Pulitzer Prize nominee and #1 New York Times bestseller Alison McGhee team up to create a fantastical, heartbreaking, and gorgeous tale about two sisters, a fox cub, and what happens when one of the sisters disappears forever. ![]() ![]() ‘If you stumble at mere believability, what are you living for?’ the survivor asks, once he has found land and is being interviewed by two investigators who do not credit his tale. Martel’s novel is evangelical in its defence of the shimmeringly implausible. ![]() And the reduction of the novel to its magic realist challenge would not be unfair, since the book is constituted of little other than this singular story, and moreover is explicitly – that is to say, theoretically – about the inevitability of the magical in storytelling. Doubtless, people will choose to read it insofar as they can tolerate this premise. ![]() Since this fact is now well known, as well known as the fact that the book recently won the Booker Prize, Life of Pi risks being shrunk to the monad of its narrative ‘premise’, like any Hollywood concept movie. Yann Martel’s novel tells the story of a 16-year-old Indian boy who is shipwrecked in the Pacific and survives 227 days at sea in the company of a Bengal tiger. ![]() ![]() ![]() This background knowledge would have helped when reading the book but is not essential! The library then moved to a daughter library or Serapeum and this was destroyed in the Muslim wars in about 642 AD. It housed thousands of papyrus scrolls and other scholarly works which were destroyed by a big fire in 30 BC. The Royal Library was built in the 3rd century BC and was a centre of cultural learning and knowledge. The book is based on the premise that The Royal Library of Alexandria in Egypt was not destroyed and is still standing at the time the book is set, which is in 2025. This one kind of grabbed me because of the library connection and I thought I’d give it a go. I haven’t read anything by Rachel Caine before the whole Morganville thing didn’t really appeal to me even though they were really popular in the library. ![]() ![]() She’s herself, always, even as herself changes. Harry was like no character I have read in recent memory. I was stupefied, time and again, at the poignant, careful, and authentic way she brought this neurodivergent heroine to life. Niven is a master of character and voice. I lost count of how many times I cried reading this-it’s beautifully wrought, clever, sly, and deeply tender. This story was about a room-and not Harry’s precious room of her own- but the room that Harry and Thomas learn to make for each other. But that’s not really what this story is about, at all. This is the story, on the surface, of a marriage of convenience: the exchange of money for free time. This story was about a room Oh… where to start with Harry and Thomas’s exquisite love story? Oh… where to start with Harry and Thomas’s exquisite love story? This is the story, on the surface, of a marriage of convenience: the exchange of money for free time. ![]() 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars ![]() |