Barb McLin

Being 40 is supposed to be freaking fabulous, not fatal. Taking on a daunting new job minus the description isn’t the smartest move I’ve ever made, even if it was to save a friend. Hopefully, it doesn’t turn out to be the stupidest...or deadliest. Why can’t things stay the way they were? I love my old job. Supergluing ghosts back together and solving their issues is its own reward. Not to mention, I’m seriously good at it. Although, I must say, I’m ridiculously excited for the new Death Counselor’s arrival in nine months....

Thirty-nine was a fantastic year. I was married to the man I loved. I had a body that worked without creaking. My grandma, who raised me, was still healthy, and life was pretty damned good. But as they say, all good things come to an end. One year later, I’m a widow. My joints are starting to ache. Gram is in the nursing home, and dead people think my home is some kind of supernatural bed-and-breakfast. Gluing body parts onto semi-transparent people has become a side job - deceased people I’m not even sure are actually there.

Caroline Wilton has no time for romance. She’s too busy running her family’s bar to even think about dating. She’s also one of Starfall Point’s resident witches, responsible for keeping the local ghost population in check. But even the most magical of witches can use a shoulder to lean on, which is what happens when Ben Hoult, the handsome doctor she never quite got over, walks back into her life. Ben is a single dad now, and as he and Caroline reconnect, they discover that they both have a knack for helping and protecting the people near and dear to them.

Nineteen-year-old Carrie Dobbs has a secret; when her parents discover what she has desperately tried to hide, Carrie's mother, Florrie takes matters into her own hands and arranges a marriage with Arnold Bateman to get Carrie out of Whitechapel and away from the gossips. He is a man Carrie could never love, the opposite of Johan, the young man she adores. Arnold has been posted to India and expects her to go with him and be the wife he needs to further his promotion and position in the army.

Tom Felton’s adolescence was anything but ordinary. His early rise to fame in beloved films like The Borrowers catapulted him into the limelight, but nothing could prepare him for what was to come after he landed the iconic role of the Draco Malfoy, the bleached blonde villain of the Harry Potter movies. For the next ten years, he was at the center of a huge pop culture phenomenon and yet, in between filming, he would go back to being a normal teenager trying to fit into a normal school. Speaking with great candor and his signature humor, Tom shares his experience.

When a friend is forced to consider a marriage of convenience, Lady Amelia Staunton is determined to rescue her. But her plans trap her in an illicit seduction, and Amelia must marry him herself. Malcolm's all-consuming kisses and devilish humor might make up for her lost freedom, but she believes he will force her to abandon the Gothic romances she yearns to write. Since she can't escape him, she must distract him from her secret.

I’ve been in this life for fifty years, been trying to work out its riddle for forty-two, and been keeping diaries of clues to that riddle for the last thirty-five. Notes about successes and failures, joys and sorrows, things that made me marvel, and things that made me laugh out loud. How to be fair. How to have less stress. How to have fun. How to hurt people less. How to get hurt less. How to be a good man. How to have meaning in life. How to be more me. Recently, I worked up the courage to sit down with those diaries.

From YouTube star and Facebook Video sensation Laura Clery comes a collection of comedic essays in the vein of We Are Never Meeting in Real Life by Samantha Irby and You’ll Grow Out of It by Jessi Klein.