Whether we are following WB through a grim future where human meat is on the market, or trailing slowly behind while she introduces us to Marie Laveua's daughter, you can be certain of one thing: you will be surprised. The best and the most brutal of WB's works has been brought together in this all-too-believable collection. Includes a total of eighteen tales. Stories include: - Her - Undo - Slipping - Siren - Alone in the House - Antics - House Arrest - Mall Food - Meat Aisle - The Water Stain - Heart Problems - Laveau - The Birth - The Look - Love/Death - Beneath the Surface - Nighttime Terror - Girl in the Pink Coat

    Wanting out of that life, she left for college, but on her first morning back home for the holidays, she’s back to chasing after a bail jumper. When she realizes the jumper is her ex-boyfriend, Jax, Dale gets dragged into helping him evade her brothers so he can win an underground fighting competition. Jax has to win the competition to help his sister, but soon sparks fly between Jax and Dale. Old wounds are reopened, and Dale may need help herself because she’s close to falling back in love with her Fighter. Novella*

    A famous short story

    He was the cute, athletic, boy genius on campus that everybody wanted to be friends with. She was the overweight, shy and withdrawn girl who the bullies teased mercilessly.But they were friends and the older they got the deeper their friendship became. As friendship turns into something more, do April and Taj have a love that can last a lifetime? Or will time and separate paths rip them apart?

    So when he asks her to help him find out if another woman is interested in him, she agrees, deciding it's the best and fastest way to permanently remove him from her heart. But the more time they spend together, the more her crush grows. Can she really let Jack go once and for all?

    

    Illustrator and writer's Carolyn Marie Castagna's first shared short story.A small icicle hanging from a roof peers inside a window at a small reading room, and learns about magical human qualities, and the importance of the one most special human feeling.

    In the midst of dealing with her dad's stubbornness and poor health, her mom's stress, the new competition in town and a cute stranger, will Jane's constant prayers of complaints turn into something else? Or has God brought her home to drive her completely insane?

    Ann and her two younger siblings fight constantly, as do their parents. When the doctors announce that Ann's only hope of survival is a heart transplant by the end of the summer, the Bennetts decide to wait for news of a donor at a family vacation home on the Oregon coast, near Haystack Rock. But rather than healing their differences, the time away only widens the rifts between them. That is, until they learn about The Winner's Game, a game their great grandparents invented to save their marriage decades ago. It doesn't work immediately, it takes some time to figure out the right way to play, but little by little things start to change. It seems everything might be okay, until the day tragedy strikes, and they are confronted with what it really means to love -- and to be a family.

    Everyone she loves has abandoned her and opening her heart to others is just asking for more pain. She can't help but blame herself for her brother's tragic death six years ago, and in her guilt, she shuts herself off from the world. No one could love her-not even the God who promised to be there for her but wasn't. For paramedic Ezra Bryant, failure is not an option. He's had enough of it, and only by God's grace is he able to put it behind him. But when a traumatic event brings Piper's greatest fear and Ezra's failures to light, can they use that event to allow God to mend their broken pieces? Can love triumph over fear, and grace over guilt?

    She didn't expect to dig up those painful memories when she returned home for her high school reunion. But, paired with Jake Volez on a project at her parents' ranch, Brianna must face the issue of forgiveness. Will she have the courage to put her heart at risk again?

    She’s only there because it was her mother’s dying wish that she get to know her father. But what kind of father isn’t around for sixteen years? All Lina wants to do is go back home.But then she is given a journal that her mom had kept when she lived in Italy. Suddenly Lina’s uncovering a magical world of secret romances, art, and hidden bakeries. A world that inspires her, along with the ever-so-charming Ren, to follow in her mother’s footsteps and unearth a secret that has been kept for far too long. It’s a secret that will change everything she knew about her mother, her father—and even herself.People come to Italy for love and gelato, someone tells her, but sometimes they discover much more.

    She had a backpack filled with three days worth of clothing, and old photograph, and a letter dated 1997. With one goal in mind she set out to find the man from the letter, the man named Benjamin Cooper. The only thing that she knew about this man was that he was married to her mother many years ago, and according to his letter he loved her. That was the only conformation she needed to search for him. Tori Holt had no family left that she knew of, and one chance to find someone to share her last days with. Otherwise, she’d die alone. The doctors said she wouldn’t live to see her twenty-first birthday, the birthday that was only three months away. Time was not on her side, but she didn’t care. Tori knew right from the beginning that this journey wouldn’t be easy. But it didn’t stop her, because nothing about her life had been easy. Then she met Bo, the handsome boy who kept her company on a park bench. Bo was the son of a man named Benjamin, the man from a letter dated 1997. The hardest part about finding love is letting it go. The easiest part about the journey is the moment it all makes sense. *Sensitive subject matter. Tissues may be needed*

    

    A tourist from Montenegro desperately seeks a magic soup dumpling that can cure his fear of death. An aspiring chef realizes that butter and soul are the key ingredients to win a cooking competition that could win him the money to save his mother’s life. Welcome to Hungry Hearts Row, where the answers to most of life’s hard questions are kneaded, rolled, baked. Where a typical greeting is, “Have you had anything to eat?” Where magic and food and love are sometimes one in the same. Told in interconnected short stories, Hungry Hearts explores the many meanings food can take on beyond mere nourishment. It can symbolize love and despair, family and culture, belonging and home.