Showing results by narrator "Tamara Marston" in All Categories

ls are being stalked, beaten, raped, abused, and murdered by strangers…and by the men in their lives. No girl is safe from harm, particularly in today's world where social media makes it too easy to connect with people she barely knows. There are many dangerous people out there who aren't behind bars, and parents of teen girls need to be more proactive than ever about keeping their daughters safe.

Pop culture and parody author Valerie Estelle Frankel examines the sources and predicts a Game of Thrones ending for each one. What will the Ragnarok ending look like? Or the Narnia ending? Who will live, who will die, and how goofy can the war of ice and fire possibly get?

A group finds itself taking refuge at The Sanctuary, a religious compound with an enigmatic leader called The Prophet. A serial killer finds himself leading an unlikely group of survivors. A young man searches to prove himself to his group, and avoid being bullied ever again. A young child is called to perform another miracle at great personal cost. Every decision. Every action. Every dream. Every alliance. Every secret. Every betrayal.

If Veda’s mama hadn’t pounded religion into her “the way she pounded the dirt out of Papa’s overalls”, she probably wouldn’t have married Raymond in the first place. It’s the Great Depression, and jobs are scarce, but it seems to Veda that Raymond uses religion as an excuse for why he can’t find work. He can’t work on the Sabbath, he can’t work around crude or vulgar men, and he will not join a union.

Thunder bellows as Jenny and her father pull up to the gate of Worthington Hall. As they inch onto the grounds of the ancient estate, a disheveled young woman thrusts her head through the open window. "Leave!" she yells. "Before it's too late! He'll kill you. I swear." Jenny is terrified, but her dad laughs it off. The girl is just an actress - part of the medieval fair being held on the castle grounds. But it's not long before Jenny wishes they'd heeded the warning.

After months of following one-size-fits-all advice for a 57-year-old widow, Linda Crill is still miserable, until she makes a rebellious spur-of-the-moment decision: she trades her corporate suits for motorcycle leathers and commits herself to a 2,500-mile road trip down America’s Pacific Northwest coast on a Harley. The problem: she doesn’t know how to ride and has only 30 days to learn. Four short weeks later, Linda joins two men and a woman for a white-knuckled, exhilarating road trip along the west coast from Vancouver, Canada, to the wine country of Mendocino, California....

New technologies have provided both incredible convenience and new threats. The same kinds of digital networks that allow you to hail a ride using your smartphone let power grid operators control a country's electricity - and these personal, corporate, and government systems are all vulnerable. In Ukraine, unknown hackers shut off electricity to nearly 230,000 people for six hours. North Korean hackers destroyed networks at Sony Pictures in retaliation for a film that mocked Kim Jong-un.

Carrie unravels her life the way her grandma used to unravel the sweater she was knitting, to make it again, better and more meaningful. A ghost story with politics and blue bunny slippers.

A woman flees the hospital even as her infant son is breathing his last breaths. An aging construction worker comes to grips with the end of the only life he's ever known. A deadbeat father meets his son for the first time, only to be blindsided by the boy's birth defect. A man steals a corpse in order to give his father the burial he wanted.

Written when she was just 24 years old, Riverfinger Women is Elana Dykewomon’s beloved, intimate coming-of-age novel about Inez and her circle of friends - the Riverfinger women - struggling to find themselves amid the changing social mores of the Civil Rights era. Inez has known she was a lesbian since childhood, and while moving between Highland, her boarding school, and her friends’ Greenwich Village apartment, she experiences longing and disappointment, friendship and romance, and her first real relationship, with schoolmate Abby.

Ten years after the fall of Saigon, a tentative friendship blossoms between a Portland writer and the Vietnamese woman who sells her morning coffee and cigarettes, framing a powerful and original meditation on class, gender, and the power of storytelling to heal the wounds of war.

There's a college affordability crisis happening in the US right now. Tuition rates have soared, while increases in blue collar wages have slowed to a crawl. This adds up to a painful realization for lower-income young people desperately hoping to go to college: there's no way to pay for it. Bobbi Dempsey shares her brutally honest first-person account of the struggle to pay for her children's and her own education on a working-class salary.

Maxine Whitshaw, a middle-aged copyeditor frustrated with her humdrum existence, wins a lottery for a trip to the moon alongside the rich and famous. But once she leaves her husband in charge of their two boys in order to take flight, she lets go not only of gravity, but of the rules and expectations that have been guiding her all along.

What made Silicon Valley happen, and why has it persisted? The Valley’s premier historian tackles these questions in a lively blend of history and storytelling.

What begins as a deliciously wicked portrait of a midcentury marriage, filled with pork chops, cinnamon rolls, golden shoe string fries, and mashed potato mountains crowned with lakes of butter, quickly transforms into a food story on acid, eating its way to the heart of a loveless relationship.

Addie doesn't know who left the footprints in the snow outside her house, but she's convinced it's someone seeking revenge for the horrific crime her autistic son committed a year ago. Follow Addie as she tries to uncover the trespasser's identity and come to terms with the actions of a son she loves but can't understand.

Go behind the window displays. Behind the racks. Two personal shoppers for Manhattan's biggest department stores have written a wildly dishy novel that goes behind the dressing rooms of New York's fashion elite. At Frankel's New York, the wives of billionaires and Hollywood celebrities sip champagne while stylists and tailors cater to every whim. And one person has made it her career to help these Amex-wielding shoppers create the perfect look.

Maddy and Clark never had much - just each other, the kids, and a never-sink spirit. When Maddy enters a jingle contest and wins a trip for two to Venice and half a million dollars, they're singing for joy. But sudden change can be a mixed blessing....

An unlikely criminal, Andy Durant is robbing gas stations to buy back land once connected to his wife's farm in upstate New York. But when he's shot and killed during a robbery, he leaves his wife, Grady, and their three children to fend for themselves. Moving back to the debt-laden farm, Grady ignites a plan that involves getting in the middle of an adjoining neighbor's marriage. Meanwhile, one by one the whole family is charmed by Royal Provo, a young and charismatic orphan working on the property.

It's been years since the woman in "Biting the Moon" has seen her former lover, Felix, a famous, Oscar-winning composer. But upon hearing the news of his sudden death, she mourns his loss by revisiting moments of their former life. Jumping in time from the pair's first encounter at an artists' colony to their rendezvous in cities across the US, the path the narrator takes toward acceptance is much like the jazz the couple loved so much: winding, unexpected, and beautiful.