Showing results by narrator "Michael Crouch" in All Categories

When Lucas and Jessa parted ways, everything fell apart. No matter how foolish, no matter what it takes, Jessa is determined to learn the truth. Is Lucas really dead? But the price of answers might be higher than the cost she’s willing to pay. Turns out, the stakes are higher than ever. Sasha knows that better than anybody. She’s stranded on the wrong side of the border, caught between two amazing men. It seems both of them hold a piece of her conflicted heart. But there’s a war waging, lives are on the line, and true love must wait.

Wyatt is 15, and nobody in his homophobic small town of Lincolnville, Oregon, knows that he’s gay. Not even his best friend (and accidental girlfriend) Mackenzie. Then he discovers a secret from actual history: Abraham Lincoln was in love with another guy! Since everyone loves Lincoln, Wyatt’s sure that if the world knew about it, they would treat gay people differently, and it would solve everything about his life.

A joyful collection of the most popular, provocative and unforgettable essays from the New York Times 'Modern Love' column. A young woman goes through the five stages of ghosting grief. A man's promising fourth date ends in the emergency room. A female lawyer with bipolar disorder experiences the highs and lows of dating. A widower hesitates about introducing his children to his new girlfriend. A divorcée in her 70s looks back at the beauty and rubble of past relationships.

They think I’m an idealistic young law student, that I’m passionate about reforming a corrupt and brutal system. They think I’m working hard to impress them. They think I’m here to save an innocent man on death row. They're wrong. I’m going to bury him.

On the outskirts of a town too tired for its own happenings, the boys were found dead inside a tent. Three years later, their fathers have disappeared too. Ruth Fenn's son was the boy they blamed. For three years, Ruth has accepted her lot as pariah, focusing on her ailing mother and the children left in her care by the struggling single parents of North Falls, Vermont. But now the additional loss of her husband is too much to bear. As she edges closer to the truth, she begins to uncover some secrets that are better left buried.

A Key to Treehouse Living is the adventure of William Tyce, a boy without parents, who grows up near a river in the rural Midwest. In a glossary-style list, he imparts his particular wisdom on subjects ranging from ASPHALT PATHS, BETTA FISH, and MULLET to MORTAL BETRAYAL, NIHILISM, and REVELATION. His improbable quest - to create a reference volume specific to his existence - takes him on a journey down the river by raft. But as he goes about defining his changing world, all kinds of extraordinary and wonderful things happen to him.

From James Leo Herlihy (author of Midnight Cowboy) comes a series of grim yet insightful short stories in his first collection, The Sleep of Baby Filbertson. Both an examination of the darker themes of alienation and isolation and an elevation of the oddities and quirks that make up human nature, Herlihy’s seven tales tackle the anxieties of fragile people and get to the heart of a world inhabited by perennial outsiders.

Kyle Baker thought his family was happy. Happy enough, anyway. That’s why, when Kyle learns that his mother has been having an affair and his father has been living with the secret, his reality is altered. He quits baseball, ghosts his girlfriend, and generally checks out of life as he’s known it. With his older sisters out of the house and friends who don’t get it, the only person he can talk to is his cousin Emily - who is always there on the other end of his texts but still has her own life, hours away.

Sixteen-year-old Dale Cardigan is a loner who’s managed to make himself completely invisible at his all-boys high school. He doesn’t fit with his classmates (whom he gives nicknames in his head), his stepbrother (whom nobody at school knows he’s related to), or even his mother (who never quite sees how gifted a musician Dale might be)—but they don’t fit with him, either. And he’s fine with that. To him, high school and home are stages to endure until his real life can finally begin.

Throughout this striking debut collection, we meet characters who have lied, who have sometimes created elaborate falsehoods, and who now must cope with the way that those deceptions eat at the very fabric of their lives and relationships. In the title story, the narrator, desperate to save a love affair on the rocks, hires an actor to play a friend he invented in order to seem less lonely, after his boyfriend catches on to his compulsion for lying and demands to know this friend is real.

All 11-year old Alex wants is to launch his iPod into space. With a series of audio recordings, he will show other lifeforms out in the cosmos what life on Earth, his Earth, is really like. But for a boy with a long-dead dad, a troubled mum, and a mostly-not-around brother, Alex struggles with the big questions. Where do I come from? Who's out there? And, above all, how can I be brave?

When your namesake is Pablo Neruda - the greatest love poet of all time - finding "the one" should be easy. After all, 16-year-old aspiring artist Neruda Diaz has been in love many times before. So it's only a matter of time before someone loves him back. But as Neruda begins to fall faster and harder than ever before, he is blindsided by the complicated nature of love - and art - in more ways than one.

It’s been a rough year for Alex Collins. In the past twelve months, he’s lost his best friend, become the target of the two biggest bullies at school, and been sentenced to community service. But on June 25, 2013, he gets a call for help from Cassie Ramirez, the prettiest girl in school. At last, he feels like his luck might be changing. Cassie is at the Texas State Capitol to protest Wendy Davis’s historic filibuster of the abortion bill HB2, and she’s rallying everyone she knows to join her.

One warm, West Texas November night, a shy boy named Oliver Loving joins his classmates at Bliss County Day School's annual dance, hoping for a glimpse of the object of his unrequited affections, an enigmatic junior named Rebekkah Sterling. But as the music plays, a troubled young man sneaks in through the school's back door. The dire choices this man makes that evening - and the unspoken story he carries - will tear the town of Bliss, Texas, apart.

When Theo gets off a bus in Destiny, Florida, he's left behind the only life he's ever known. Now he's got to live with Uncle Chester, a Vietnam War vet and a loner who wants nothing to do with this longlost nephew. Thank goodness for Miss Sister Grandersole's Boarding House and Dance School. The piano that sits in Miss Sister's dance hall calls to Theo. He can't wait to play those ivory keys. When Anabel arrives, things get even more enticing.

Austin, Texas is a town in the throes of social upheaval and the Rush Creek Saloon, five miles on its outskirts, is a bar without a crowd. Until a strange new house band transforms it from moribund honky-tonk to thriving blues bar. But are the throngs of people and the rowdy music worth the chaos that comes with them? Walk Softly on This Heart of Mine is told through three perspectives, each of whom is in some ways responsible for the rebirth of Rush Creek and for the violence that follows in the afterbirth.

A meteorite carrying an alien virus of unknown origin falls to Earth off the US coast. Three boys find fragments washed ashore and sell them online, unknowingly spreading the contagion around the US. One of the fragments comes to the town of Stark’s Hill, Colorado. When exposed to this virus, human beings turn into flesh-eating zombies, or as Ben Michaels and his small group of allies come to call them "the Changed".

After a mostly successful stint at Hills Village Middle School, Rafe is excited to visit the incredible city of London with his class. Sightseeing around a foreign country sounds like a blast - until Rafe finds out his roommate will be none other than Miller the Killer, bully extraordinaire! Then Rafe is forced to work on a class project side by side with his crush, Jeanne Galletta, and her too-perfect boyfriend, which might be even more torturous than rooming with Miller.

Holly Larson wants to step out of her family's shadow and live her own life. Her mind is full of sexy fantasies, but she doesn't have anyone to share them with - until she calls upon her gorgeous childhood crush, Dalton Thomas. Now she's ready to check every box on her list....

All Alex Dassan needs to do is win second place in the debate team finals. The second place prize is a trip to the Nottingshire Retreat in London, where she'll have a chance to take a class with her writing idol, Mary Noelle Simmons. Alex knows that once she meets Mary, then her life will fall into place and her dreams of becoming a writer will be possible (and less scary). Nothing is going to stand in Alex's way - especially not a dad who's never home and a mom who left to go "find herself" in India.