She's seen it fail a number of times and knows the probability of it working out is not great. She is a scientist, after all. Over the years, she's found it smarter to invest in something that will pay back the effort she puts into it. Something like her career. But she wakes up one morning to realize she's overworked, underpaid, with no one to share her life with, and she wonders if she's been right about love. Jack Wheeler not only just lost his dad, but he's about to lose their family ranch and home. Unable to allow that to happen, Jack does everything he can, including selling all of his personal belongings to protect the land that has been in their family for generations. But when even that isn't enough, Jack isn't sure what to do.  When Tessa flies to Blue Falls to spend Christmas with her family and she meets Jack, the chemistry is immediate. But she's from New York, and his life is in Blue Falls. She's one of the heirs to the Heathcliff billions, and he can barely scrape together his next mortgage payment. Can they see past their differences and find some common ground to cultivate their fledging love? Or will this Christmas come and go without any miracles? Grab your copy today!The ninth book in the sweet and wholesome Heathcliff Family Romances series. Read all of the Heathcliff Family Romances by Julia Keanini! 1. His to Save2. His to Marry3. His to Protect4. Her Favorite Risk5. Her Forever Love6. Her Perfect Mistake7. Their Second First Kiss8. The Island Patriot9. Their White Christmas

    By providing students with this important foundation, this title offers a fresh approach to teaching American culture while expanding fluency.

    Sarah Jones was only eight years old in the summer of 1964, but with her mother Esther Mae on eight prayer lists and flipping around town with the generally mistrusted civil rights organizers, Sarah believed it was time to get baptized and take responsibility for her own sins. That would mean sitting on the mourner’s bench come revival, waiting for her sign, and then testifying in front of the whole church. But first, Sarah would need to navigate the growing tensions of small-town Arkansas in the 1960s. Both smarter and more serious than her years (a “fifty-year-old mind in an eight-year-old body,” according to Esther), Sarah was torn between the traditions, religion, and work ethic of her community and the progressive civil rights and feminist politics of her mother, who had recently returned from art school in Chicago. When organizers from the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) came to town just as the revival was beginning, Sarah couldn’t help but be caught up in the turmoil. Most folks just wanted to keep the peace, and Reverend Jefferson called the SNCC organizers “the evil among us.” But her mother, along with local civil rights activist Carrie Dilworth, the SNCC organizers, Daisy Bates, attorney John Walker, and indeed most of the country, seemed determined to push Maeby toward integration. With characters as vibrant and evocative as their setting, Mourner’s Bench is the story of a young girl coming to terms with religion, racism, and feminism while also navigating the terrain of early adolescence and trying to settle into her place in her family and community.

    All were acquitted of brutally torturing and killing African-Americans during the most explosive period of the civil rights movement. And all are being murdered in the same way as their victims—hung, burned to death, gutted. Now one district attorney must play a deadly game of cat and mouse as he prosecutes the most wrenching case of his career—and walks a dangerous line between retribution, duty, and revenge…For James Reynolds, Mississippi’s only black deputy district attorney, success is almost enough to heal the pain of growing up during brutal segregation—and ease the recurring, unexplained nightmares he’s had sinc childhood. But he knows this case will be more disturbing than anything he’s ever faced—especially when he discovers a local university class that is exposing the perpetrators of “unsolved” civil rights-era murders. Among the class’s unshakable and most dedicated attendees: Brandon Hamilton, a graduate student as relentless about the truth as he was ferocious on the playing field; and teaching assistant Regina Davis, beautiful, brainy, and ruthlessly calculating. Then there’s their renowned, charismatic instructor, Professor Martin Matheson. The handsome son of a venerated African-American civil rights leader, he exhibits a gift for rhetoric that is gaining him fervent public support…and enabling him to play all too well on Reynolds’s professional and personal vulnerabilities.Amid an overwhelming media blitz and mounting racial tensions, Reynolds must not only confront the secrets he’s run from all these years—but play out a devastating endgame against a killer willing to use the law against itself and go to the most deadly extremes for “justice.”A riveting game of intellectual chess that crescendos into a powerful courtroom confrontation, Blood on the Leaves will leave you disturbed, surprised, and, ultimately, dazzled.

    This book is about, what some may call, the alternative explanation.Picked up by a larger publisher--the retitled, second, and final edition of the cult hit, Spent Shell Casings.Created as a counterweight for all the politicized and ghost-written books about the Global War on Terror, No Joy is the transgressive memoir to set the record straight! Dark. Hilarious. Disturbingly Honest—this collection of short stories from your average frustrated American teen turned one of its most elite brand of warriors, No Joy rips the veneer off the thank-you-for-your-service Boy Scout façade.Centered on the 2004 Battle of Fallujah, this mosaic of meditation and madness asks the necessary question: what really draws modern young men to war?

    But unknown to her, the program was on its last leg, and a working sample needed to be shown soon or the funding would dry-up. So the head of the program did what any mad scientist would do in such a situation… used his unpaid intern, Katie, as his guinea pig; tricking her into unknowingly ingesting several mass-producing, self-sufficient, self-powering nanites. After successfully forming a physical and psychological bond with the nanites, and becoming the corporation’s most valuable asset, Katie found herself the subject of brutal, inhuman testing. But now, to escape, Katie will have to rely on the nanites’ vast database of knowledge and uncanny adaptive abilities, along with the advanced strength and speed gifted her by their inclusion into her system.

    LeClaire delivers a heartbreaking–and breathtaking–novel of two very different but equally loving mothers who face the most painful of losses and then find the courage not only to go on but to find meaning and hope in their lives.Rose Nelson is a middle-aged woman with a broken past, a sorrow from which she cannot recover. Secretly guilty about her role in her teenaged son’s death five years ago, she has sealed herself off from life, enveloped by a grief that has slowly eaten away at her relationship with her husband.Against her will, Rose is drawn into the world she has avoided when Opal Gates and her five-year-old son, Zack, move in next door. Determined to start an independent life for herself, twenty-year-old Opal has left her family and the father of her son in North Carolina. But when she quickly begins an affair with Tyrone Miller, a part-time mechanic and local musician, Opal unwittingly breaks the tacit rules of both her family and her new hometown.Initially, Rose cannot bear the sight of Opal and her son. But later when Zack is injured, she instinctively lies to protect Opal from a single mistake that changes the lives of everyone involved.Faced with a custody suit brought by Zack’s father and her own parents, Opal faces a trial in which each choice she has made will be used as ammunition in the battle to take Zack away from her. Confronting such devastating loss and the questions it poses are at the heart of Entering Normal. How does one go on after great tragedy? What is a family? What sacrifices must a mother be willing to make for her child? And how can a good mother sometimes make bad choices? Entering Normal is a story of family, a novel about courage, loss, risk, and betrayal. It is a story that goes to the heart of love.From the Hardcover edition.

    The time has come to move from Queen B to Queen Bee. But how is she supposed to fly when life keeps pinching her wings? Her lovesick brother is determined to mortify her in public. She’s in charge of her school’s talentless talent show, where at any moment someone could pull back the curtain and expose her (many) insecurities. The people she cares about most are mad at her. (Again.) And her nemesis, Sterling, has an evil new clone, one who’s making a hobby of humiliating Cassie—and a beeline for Cassie’s boyfriend. Does being popular mean you have to sting like a bee? Or can a girl become queen without losing her honey? Let the buzz begin! “Short chapters with cute titles . . . imagine a novelized blend of Pretty in Pink and Mean Girls.” —Booklist “A fun read that should appeal to teens going through the first joys and trials of young love.” —KLIATT, starred review “A super summer read.” —Sweet 16 A New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age A Flamingnet Top Choice Award Winner For the first time in my life, I have an actual shot at being someone at school. I’ve always been more of a Queen B than a Queen Bee—you know, B as in not A. Second tier. (Fine, if you have to get technical, sometimes even lower.) But this year, out of nowhere, I have a chance to be a real Queen Bee. Not that I intend to be snobby, or cliquish, or any of the other rude things sometimes stapled to that label. I just want people to love me.

    What caused his once stable, gentle sister to take her own life? Why did she marry Jameson Sweet, giving a man she barely knew a claim to the family home? What caused her flamboyant twin, Gem, to return to Harlem from Paris, forge new bonds, and suddenly depart again? Most important, why did Lilian feel compelled to keep David in the dark about it all?Burdened by a secret of his own, David dares to stay in Harlem just long enough to stave off the threat to his family home and answer questions about Lilian's death. Entering her world, he rediscovers what he left behind -- a place of suffocating class strictures, seductive patrons, and aristocratic civil rights leaders. His inquiry takes him from the wealthy salons of Renaissance Harlem to the crowded tenements of its poor. He uncovers old loves and festering hatreds. But the deeper he probes, the closer he comes to unleashing forces that threaten to reveal his own crippling secret -- a secret that could destroy him or redeem him.This gripping novel, at once taut and lyrical, evokes the mystique of Harlem's most fascinating era. Absorbing and powerful, "Harlem Redux" combines incisive comment on race and class with a tragic tale of unrequited love.

    A college-bound honors student, she has aspirations to be a poet. But an unplanned pregnancy changes everything. Suddenly, she isn’t so sure her life will go the way she wants. Then, she starts receiving threatening notes and wonders who is trying to destroy her. As the due date approaches, secrets come to life and events spiral out of control. Is Sophie losing her mind? Or is she finding her soul?

    When arty new girl Dina gets the opportunity to do a video project with queen bee Chelsea, she thinks this is her ticket to a great new social life. But Chelsea has bigger problems than Dina can imagine: her father has lost his job, and her family is teetering on the brink. Without knowing it, Dina might just get caught in Chelsea’s free fall. Filled with honest truths about status and self-confidence, as well as the bubbly, infectious voice Lisa Greenwald mastered in her breakout, My Life in Pink & Green, this book is sure to charm tween readers everywhere.

    The Baltimore Sun declared Eprile's "horrifying yet heartrendingly beautiful" prose to be "comparable to his fellow authors of Apartheid Andre Brink and Nadine Gordimer." As the novel builds to a harrowing conclusion, the protagonist, a veteran of the secret war in Angola and Namibia, is forced to appear before the Truth and Reconciliation Committee with astonishing results. Nobel Prize-winning author J. M. Coetzee calls The Persistence of Memory "a story of coming to maturity in South Africa in the bad old days. Always warm-hearted, sometimes comic, ultimately damning."

    For Eneas McNulty, a happy, innocent childhood in County Sligo in the early 1900s gives way to an Ireland wracked by violence and conflict. Unable to find work in the depressed times after World War I, Eneas joins the British-led police force, the Royal Irish Constabulary—a decision that alters the course of his life. Branded a traitor by Irish nationalists and pursued by IRA hitmen, Eneas is forced to flee his homeland, his family, and Viv, the woman he loves. His wandering terminates on the Isle of Dogs, a haven for sailors, where a lifetime of loss is redeemed by a final act of generosity. The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty is the story of a lost man and a compelling saga that illuminates Ireland's complex history.

    But the more he tries to forget, the more uprooted he feels. Then, while in Jamaica, he crosses paths with a radiant woman who attracts him like a flame. Their undeniable attraction is much more than chemistry. As Carey soon discovers from a “reader” of the spirit world, he and Frances share a history that has linked their souls for more than four hundred years. Though Carey views past lives with skepticism, he cannot explain knowing the language of an ancient African people—in particular the phrase: “Mulewe anekoso kuduwe bana” (“I will search until I find you”).Yet Frances conceals secrets of her own, with devastating consequences. And while Carey visits his best friend, a bond that was once thought to be unbreakable will be put to the ultimate test as startling truths at last emerge. . . .

    Rejecting the lure of success, Ursa turns her back on a well-paid corporate research job and a stable, if loveless, relationship with a black academic. Instead, she seeks power and solace in her friendship with Viney. Remaining true to herself involves returning to Triunion, her Caribbean island, where she is forced to confront the moral and political ambiguities that underpin the charisma of her father, a leading politician. With compassion and honesty, Paule Marshall shows how the past always intrudes on the present. For Ursa, this means accepting that her life in the United States is bound by events that took place a long time ago in the Caribbean.