Lisa Dietz

Dragons are trained to fight to the death, and two determined teens help free them in this spellbinding saga. Training a dragon to be a fighting champion is the only way to freedom for 15-year-old Jakkin.

Seven-year-old Chula and her older sister, Cassandra, enjoy carefree lives thanks to their gated community in Bogotá, but the threat of kidnappings, car bombs, and assassinations hover just outside the neighborhood walls, where the godlike drug lord Pablo Escobar continues to elude authorities and capture the attention of the nation. When their mother hires Petrona, a live-in-maid from the city's guerrilla-occupied slum, Chula makes it her mission to understand Petrona's mysterious ways.

In 2014, novelist Leslie Schwartz was sentenced to 90 days in Los Angeles County Jail for a DUI and battery of an officer. It was the most harrowing and holy experience of her life. Following a 414-day relapse into alcohol and drug addiction after more than a decade sober, Schwartz was sentenced and served her time with only six months' sobriety. The damage she inflicted that year upon her friends, her husband, her daughter, and herself was nearly impossible to fathom. Incarceration might have ruined her altogether, if not for the stories that sustained her while she was behind bars.

From the mid-century metropolis of Chicago to the windswept ancestral lands of the Dakota people, to the bleak and brutal Indian boarding schools, A Council of Dolls is the story of three women, told in part through the stories of the dolls they carried….

As the bold daughter of the Raider leader, Lila yearns to transform her people’s plundering ways into something noble. Her dream? To unite the Raiders with dragons as mercenaries defending merchant fleets and kingdoms. But fate has other plans. When Lila bonds with a wild, untamable dragon, their partnership sets her on a path of danger and discovery. A desperate plea from the West Witches sends Lila and Danu, a novice magician, to the Isle of Sebol to uncover a threat looming over the Western Isles. What they find could spell doom for all.

When her dying mother reveals a horrifying truth about her identity, Kaelan is thrust into a world for which she is ill-prepared. Faced with a new life at the proving grounds for humans and dragons alike, Kaelan must reconcile not just her past, but embrace the future laid out before her. When her responsibilities as an Akademy tamer collide with her feelings for a powerful dragon shifter, it will take everything she has to prepare for the danger threatening them both. The fate of the dragons she has sworn to serve rests in her hands.

In Elena's world words have power over life and death - but none more so than hers. As the daughter of shopkeepers, Elena has always known that the mysteries of reading and writing are closed to her. Only the mageborn can risk harnessing the power unleashed from putting pen to paper. Until Elena discovers an impossible new ability and joins the elite ranks of the mages. But with the kingdom at war, the authorities can't agree if Elena is an asset, or a threat they need to eliminate.

As the daughter of shopkeepers, Elena has always known that the mysteries of reading and writing are closed to her. Only the mageborn can risk harnessing the power unleashed from putting pen to paper. Until Elena discovers an impossible new ability and joins the elite ranks of the mages. But with the kingdom at war, the authorities can't agree if Elena is an asset, or a threat they need to eliminate. Thrust into the unknown world of the Royal Academy without friends or experience, Elena will need all of her wits, strength, and new power to carve a place for herself.