Back to Blog
The mother next door tara5/28/2023 ![]() ![]() She kept her fingers there until the stars came and her eyes began to hurt. There was a real world in the afterimage, too, just a different one, intense but momentary. ![]() But part of Ondine knew that it didn't really matter what happened in the real world. A butterfly, after all, had just flown out of a painting. Stared at something for a long time then shut your eyes, proving Ondine's long-held feeling that what was real was part She had learned about it in Raphael Inman's summer art class. Everything that had been orange turned blue, and all that was blue, orange. It crawled off the ceiling and flew away. Painted on her blue ceiling, the ones she was staring at as she tried to wake up. What she really hated were the orange butterflies Pabst Blue Ribbon® is a registered trademark of Pabst Brewing Company. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Visit our website at First eBook Edition: March 2010 Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced,ĭistributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Back to Blog
The league of beastly dreadfuls book 35/28/2023 ![]() ![]() "Anastasia is anything but average, and her adventures are just beginning. "Just the right mix of humor, magic, maliciousness, and suspense" - Booklist * “A yummy debut.” - Kirkus Reviews, starred review It reminds me of Roald Dahl's The Twits only in an insane asylum."- Chris Grabenstein, Escape from Mr. " Marvelously inventive and utterly demented, THE LEAGUE OF BEASTLY DREADFULS is nasty good fun from beginning to end!" - Bruce Coville, My Teacher is an Alien So when she meets Ollie and Quentin, two mysterious brothers, the three join together to plot their great escape! Anastasia soon begins to suspect that her aunties are not who they say they are. Agony’s Asylum for the Criminally Insane.īut something strange is going on at the asylum. ![]() And UNTIL she’s taken to their delightful and, er, “authentic” Victorian home, St. UNTIL she’s rescued by two long-lost great-aunties. ![]() That is, UNTIL her parents die in a tragic vacuum-cleaner accident. Join the League.Īnastasia is a completely average almost-eleven-year-old. A creepy Victorian house, secretive aunties, and a great escape combine in this debut that is part Mysterious Benedict Society, part Roald Dahl, and all quirky, smart, hilarious storytelling. ![]()
Back to Blog
The book the sum of us5/27/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() politics, because the majority of Americans will soon be people of color. This dynamic is key to the future of U.S. ![]() After Donald Trump’s election, she realized that it isn’t enough to just analyze how bad economic policies cause racial disparities we also need to understand how racism drives people to choose bad economic policies in the first place. In her introduction, McGhee explains why she quit her job leading the economic policy think tank Demos to write this book. Meanwhile, conservative politicians, media figures, and billionaires deliberately stoke white fear to win power, and when they do come to power, they continue with the same political agenda that has economically devastated the American middle class since the 1970s: cutting taxes for the wealthy, deregulating corporations, privatizing schools, defunding social programs, and suppressing labor unions. Thus, these white voters reject policies that help nonwhite people, even when those policies would actually benefit everybody. ![]() Specifically‚ she argues that many white voters view the world through a zero-sum paradigm: they see politics as a competition between themselves and people of color, and they think that, in order for themselves to win, people of color must lose. lags far behind other developed countries in fields like healthcare, education, pollution, and voting rights because of the way that racism shapes American politics. In The Sum of Us, policy researcher Heather McGhee argues that the U.S. ![]()
Back to Blog
Great expectations set5/27/2023 ![]() ![]() To the five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long which were arranged in a neat row beside the grave, were sacred to the memory of five little brothers of mine– who gave up trying to get a living exceedingly early in that universal struggle. From the character and turn of the inscription, ‘Also Georgiana Wife of the above’, I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly. ![]() ![]() The shape of the letters on my father’s, gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. It is Dickens' second novel, after David Copperfield, to be fully narrated in the first person. It depicts the education of an orphan nicknamed Pip (the book is a bildungsroman a coming-of-age story). (The Life of Charles Dickens by John Forster)ĭickens would often take friends to Cooling churchyard to show them the small tombstones of the children of the Comport family of Cooling Castle.Īs I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of them, my first fancies regarding what they were like, were unreasonably derived from their tombstones. Great Expectations is the thirteenth novel by Charles Dickens and his penultimate completed novel. In the late year or winter, when from Higham he could get to it across country over the stubble fields. The walk from Higham to Cooling was one of Dickens’ favourites: Great Expectations is set near the end of Industrial Revolution, a period of dramatic technological improvement in manufacturing and commerce that. Much of the topography of the book is thought to have been based on the marsh country and villages of the surrounding area. Charles Dickens wrote Great Expectations during his time at Gad’s Hill. ![]()
Back to Blog
The mystery of edmund drood5/27/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() But readers were hopeful, and when the first pages of The Mystery of Edwin Drood appeared on March 31, 1870, Dickens was thrilled to see that 50,000 copies sold, more in line with his great successes- Bleak House, David Copperfield, and the novel that had started it all twenty-four years earlier- The Pickwick Papers. Sales of Our Mutual Friend had disappointed fewer than 20,000 copies of the closing installment sold. Readers had waited almost five years since the end of his previous novel, Our Mutual Friend, for a new book-length story from the most famous writer in the English-speaking world. In February, 1870, Charles Dickens announced that a new novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, would start appearing in his favored format, stand-alone monthly installments, beginning at the end of March. I wish I hadn’t waited too long-it has some of Dickens’s most beautiful and strange writing. ![]() I have read all of his novels several times, but the last book I tackled was The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which I did not read until I was almost thirty. I have been reading Dickens for more than fifty years. Friends of the Dickens Project Board Member and published author, Carl Wilson, describes Dickens's final novel's instant success, along with the effect of its sudden conclusion. ![]()
Back to Blog
![]() ![]() That color its chromatic science and its cultural symbology is what Ellen Meloy (June 21, 1946November 4, 2004) explores in The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky (public library). ![]() ![]() Throughout, Meloy invites us to appreciate along with her the endless surprises in all of life and celebrates the seduction to be found in our visual surroundings. Ellen Meloy is an incredible author, a like a modern day Thoreau meets Peter Matthiessen meets Edward Abbey, but dont get me wrong her voice is still very much. But the color of that dot suspended in a sunbeam is rather between blue and green: a pixel of turquoise. She introduces us to Navajo “velvet grandmothers” whose attire and aesthetics absorb the vivid palette of their homeland, as well as to Persians who consider turquoise the life-saving equivalent of a bullet-proof vest. Her keen vision makes us look anew at ancestral mountains, turquoise seas, and even motel swimming pools. In this invigorating mix of natural history and adventure, artist-naturalist Ellen Meloy uses turquoise-the color and the gem-to probe deeper into our profound human attachment to landscape.įrom the Sierra Nevada, the Mojave Desert, the Yucatan Peninsula, and the Bahamas to her home ground on the high plateaus and deep canyons of the Southwest, we journey with Meloy through vistas of both great beauty and great desecration. ![]() Join our online discussion of our March book selection March 10 6:30 – 8 pm Discussion Leader: Elizabeth Burns ![]()
Back to Blog
Author of on chesil beach5/27/2023 ![]() ![]() But these books, obviously, aren't literature. There are certainly millions of toss-n-tug novels that can certainly get things done. You've got your erotic writers, fine, if your need for arousal and release comes from text rather than pictures or actual lovers. ".being in love was not a steady state, but a matter of fresh surges or waves, and he was experiencing one now." - Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach Almost no one can write about sex well in my opinion. On Chesil Beach is another masterwork from McEwan: a story of lives transformed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken. Ian McEwan has caught with understanding and compassion the innocence of Edward and Florence at a time when marriage was presumed to be the outward sign of maturity and independence. ![]() Edward, eager for rapture, frets over Florence's response to his advances and nurses a private fear of failure, while Florence's anxieties run deeper: she is overcome by sheer disgust at the idea of physical contact, but dreads disappointing her husband when they finally lie down together in the honeymoon suite. Newly married that morning, both virgins, Edward and Florence arrive at a hotel on the Dorset coast.Īt dinner in their rooms they struggle to suppress their worries about the wedding night to come. Florence is a talented musician who dreams of a career on the concert stage and of the perfect life she will create with Edward, an earnest young history student at University College of London, who unexpectedly wooed and won her heart. ![]()
Back to Blog
Lockdown escape from furnace 15/27/2023 ![]() Order "Lockdown: Escape from Furnace" HEREĪUTHOR INFORMATION: Alexander Gordon Smith had wanted to become an author since the age of six & that's' when he began writing. Official Alexander Gordon Smith Website - includes a trailer for the novel ![]()
Back to Blog
Awaken by Michelle Bryan5/27/2023 ![]() Let's build a #workplace where #belonging matters and microaggressions are stopped for good. Finally, you'll work through three workplace scenarios and design real solutions for effectively communicating at work. Next, we'll see what undermines effective communication at work and how to solve it. Then we learn a framework for how to address microaggressions using real-life situations. In my Inclusion LAUNCH course, we start by understanding what microaggressions are and how they reveal themselves in our organizations. The Alma Ensemble was founded by flutist Sarah Wardle Jones, clarinetist Michelle Smith Johnson, and pianist Erica Sipes. But what can you do when you experience them? And what happens after you commit them? Whether you're worried about your career or being cancelled (or both), I can help you. Awaken Apr-2014 / General Fiction New Bloods - 1 Tara is a teenager in a broken world, searching for answersand a future. So let's talk microaggressions - the hurtful conversations and interactions that need to end if we want to reach real #inclusion. ![]() ![]() ![]() I know you want to be part of an inclusive culture. I know you want to run an #inclusive team. ![]()
Back to Blog
The wolf den trilogy book 25/27/2023 ![]() ![]() Amara is cunning and daring, and because of her situation, she has been a bit cold-hearted at times to get out of her situation. Most of the book is centered around Amara trying to find a way to escape her life as a slave, as she wasn’t always one and once knew the taste of freedom. I kept wishing I had more time to read it because I wanted to get back to my book to find out what happened to Amara. This book was filled with sad moments, but despite that, it kept my attention wholly. The Wolf’s Den by Elodie Harper is an all-consuming historical fiction about Amara, a slave to a brothel owner in Pompeii. “There’s a grief deep enough to drown in, if you let it rise unchecked. Set in Pompeii’s lupanar, The Wolf Den reimagines the lives of women who have long been overlooked. But how much is her freedom going to cost her? ![]() ![]() Amara has learnt that everything in this city has its price. ![]() Out here, even the lowest slave can secure a reversal in fortune. For the streets of Pompeii are alive with opportunity. For as a she-wolf, her only value lies in the desire she can stir in others.īy day, she walks the streets with her fellow she-wolves, finding comfort in the laughter and dreams they share. Sharp, clever and resourceful, Amara is forced to hide her talents. Now she is a slave in Pompeii’s infamous brothel, owned by a man she despises. Welcome to the Wolf Den…Īmara was once a beloved daughter, until her father’s death plunged her family into penury. ![]() |