Showing results by narrator "Jennifer Pickens" in All Categories

To be a bookseller or librarian… You have to play detective. Be a treasure hunter. A matchmaker. An advocate. A visionary. A person who creates “book joy” by pulling a book from a shelf, handing it to someone and saying, “You’ve got to read this. You’re going to love it.” Step inside The Secret Lives of Booksellers and Librarians and enter a world where you can feed your curiosities, discover new voices, find whatever you want or require. This place has the magic of rainbows and unicorns, but it's also a business. The book business.

Single mom Cynthia Pace has her hands full with her uniquely gifted child. She has no idea how or why Maddie does the things she does, and neither does her daughter. But there is an answer, discovered by mother and child only after tragedy strikes.

Becca's life is turned upside down when she finds Jenn dead in the bathtub. Soon she begins to unspool the secrets Jenn kept in life, including a troubled marriage to Rick and two dead wives in his past. The more Becca learns, the more determined she becomes to get justice for Jenn, even if the clues surrounding her death aren't quite adding up . . . Over a year before her death, Jenn begins to notice her husband acting strangely. Using her skills as a librarian, she digs into Rick's past—and falls down a rabbit hole far deeper and darker than she bargained for.

Kept busy by her obligations as a wife and mother, art history professor Ava Zaretsky has little time to devote to her research and writing. Now tagging along on her film-producer husband’s shoot in Bulgaria for the summer, where she’s mostly solo parenting her sweet son and rebellious budding tween daughter, she has a chance encounter with her fierce feminist mentor from college, which changes everything.

On your journey toward a more health-conscious life, you’ve likely been bombarded by an overwhelming amount of information Over the past decade, Colleen and Jason Wachob, co-founders of mindbodygreen, have cultivated a leading wellness lifestyle media brand for everyone seeking to cut through the noise, and live a happier, healthier, and greener lifestyle. The Joy of Well-Being is a distillation of almost fifteen years of this experience on the forefront of the well-being conversation: they’ve done the legwork so you don’t have to.

The Velkwood Vicinity was the topic of occult theorists, tabloid one-hour documentaries, and even some pseudo-scientific investigations as the block of homes disappeared behind a near-impenetrable veil that only three survivors could enter—and only one has in the past twenty years, until now.

Over the past decade, Colleen and Jason Wachob, co-founders of mindbodygreen, have cultivated a leading wellness lifestyle media brand for everyone seeking to cut through this noise, and live a happier, healthier, and greener lifestyle. The Joy of Well-Being is a distillation of almost fifteen years of this experience on the forefront of the well-being conversation: they've done the legwork so you don't have to.

Alone on a small Missouri farm after a thirty-year marriage, Sue Hubbell found a new love—of the winged, buzzing variety. Left with little but the commercial beekeeping and honey-producing business she started with her husband, Hubbell found solace in the natural world. Then she began to write, challenging herself to tell the absolute truth about her life and the things she cared about. Describing the ups and downs of beekeeping from one springtime to the next, A Country Year transports listeners to a different, simpler place.

Henry David Thoreau's connection to nature was tied to his feelings of grief: before he was twenty-seven years old and went to live at Walden Pond, two of those closest to him had died. The forests were being destroyed by the logging industry. Wildlife was increasingly slaughtered for profit and sport. The railroad clanged through his quiet hometown. And the catastrophes of the American Civil War were beginning to stir. Haunting in its quiet spaces, Followed by the Lark is a novel of meditations—on loss, on change, on the danger and healing that come from communion with the natural world.

Want to be part of the 50 percent who complete their doctoral program? In just seven steps, you’ll learn tools and techniques to help you start strong, stay the course, and finish on time. Each step contains action items so you can apply the information for immediate results. You’ll learn how to position yourself for success, manage overwhelming emotions, build a supportive network, work smarter, and more. Informed by 20 years of work with hundreds of students and faculty, The Happy Doc Student Handbook demystifies the process so you can successfully navigate your program.

It was supposed to be a road trip to reconnect with my younger sister. We weren’t getting any younger and life had thrown us a few curves lately. Like her divorce and my…well, I’m not getting into that. Just two days into the trip, (getting lost, but that’s beside the point!) our world tipped off its axis. It began that frightening morning when we woke up, still sitting in the front cab of the RV. We were never the same women after that.

In December 1935, Zdenek Koubek, one of the most famous sprinters in European women’s sports, declared he was now living as a man. Around the same time, the celebrated British field athlete Mark Weston, also assigned female at birth, announced that he, too, was a man. Periodicals and radio programs across the world carried the news; both became global celebrities. A few decades later, they were all but forgotten. In The Other Olympians, Michael Waters uncovers, for the first time, the gripping true stories of Koubek, Weston, and other pioneering trans and intersex athletes from their era.

It’s been fourteen years since Greer Dunning’s older sister, Eliza, was murdered, and Greer’s family has never been the same. And now there’s been a similar killing in Greer’s small Kansas hometown. A copycat, according to the authorities, but Greer is convinced there is more to the story. That Eliza’s murderer had help all those years ago. So Greer returns home after more than a decade away, desperate to answer the questions that have haunted her for years

Former FBI agent Karen Pantelli lives by a simple philosophy: never, ever care. Three years after a tragic mistake ends her once-stellar career, she drifts from one dead-end job to another, quickly moving on when she finds herself getting too attached. A new city. A new life. A new way of forgetting and being forgotten. Until one chilly night behind a seedy bar, when a frightened girl leaps out of the back of a speeding van.

In a small, secluded town that thrives on gossip and superstition, Dottie offers plenty of both when the scandal breaks about a missing girl, a ghost, and the affair that started it all. Having suffered a history of miscarriages, reclusive Dottie develops a strange motherly interest in her fifteen-year-old neighbor, Magdalena. Somewhere between fantasy and reality, Dottie finds new life in her relationship with the mysterious girl.

Americans have been leaving their churches. Some drift away. Some stay home. Many search for more authentic ways to find and follow Jesus. Circle of Hope tells of one such “radical outpost of Jesus followers” in Philadelphia, dedicated to service, the Sermon on the Mount, and working toward justice for all in this life, not just salvation for some in the next. Part of a little-known yet influential movement at the edge of American evangelicalism, Circle grows for forty years, plants four congregations, and then finds itself in crisis.

Kae Roscoe's daughter went missing in the woods 16 months ago, but when she returns, she's not the same person. She hardly speaks, doesn't eat, responds with extreme violence, and things get worse when she's released from the hospital. There's definitely something very different about Molly, and her reappearance is making strange things happen to everyone around her.

Diane Williams, "godmother of flash fiction" (The Paris Review), returns with thirty-three brilliant short stories. In Williams's stories, life is newly alive and dangerous; whether she is writing about an affair, a request for money, an afternoon in a garden, or the simple act of carrying a cake from one room to the next, she offers us beautiful and unsettling new ways of seeing everyday life.

Another state. Another city. Another dead-end job. A stellar FBI agent until tragedy set her adrift, Karen Pantelli finds herself working at a pizza joint in Billings, Montana, trying to ignore the increasing global unrest dominating the news, when three armed men walk through the door. Soon a shocking turn of events launches her on a cross-country quest for a former college classmate, an alluring but manipulative woman with just one goal in life: to marry rich. Very rich.

Mary floated across the room, shaking her hands in frustration. Finally, she turned back to Mike. “When will the men in my life realize that no one is responsible for watching over me?” she asked sadly. “I am a grown woman. I am a former police officer. I am not some hot-house flower that can’t handle my own life and my own safety.” Victoria sighed loudly and rolled her eyes.