just a girl

Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, Demon Copperhead is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. Relayed in his own unsparing voice, Demon braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses.

Kirsten Raymonde will never forget the night Arthur Leander, the famous Hollywood actor, had a heart attack on stage during a production of King Lear. That was the night when a devastating flu pandemic arrived in the city, and within weeks, civilization as we know it came to an end.

Dr. James Lavoisier was a product of the Great Atchafalaya, the torpid waters of the black water swamps and the Mississippi. But for the love of his mother, James would have been set adrift to live life as a Delta farmer, forsaking his heritage as a descendant of the Noblesse Societe, the pure lineage of French Nobility who had fled France after the defeat of Napoleon.

In My Badass Book of Saints, Johnson shares her experience as a first-generation Cuban-American, educator of at-risk college students, and caregiver for a husband with Lou Gehrig's disease. Through humorous, empowering, and touching portraits of 24 spiritual mentors who inspired her, Johnson describes how their bravery, integrity, selflessness, perseverance, and hope helped her and can help others have courage to reach for a closer connection to God.

We are capable of so much more than we think. You have no idea what you are capable of. None of us do. God is constantly trying to open our eyes to the amazing possibilities that he has enfolded in our being. The saints continue this work, encouraging us to explore all our God-given potential, not with speeches but with the example of their lives. When we have the courage to collaborate with God and pursue our truest self, he lights a fire within us that is so bright and warm, it keeps shining long after our days on this earth have come to an end.

Dick Young is lent a house in Cornwall by his friend Professor Magnus Lane. During his stay he agrees to serve as a guinea pig for a new drug that Magnus has discovered in his scientific research. When Dick samples Magnus' potion, he finds himself doing the impossible: traveling through time while staying in place, thrown all the way back into Medieval Cornwall. The concoction wears off after several hours, but its effects are intoxicating and Dick cannot resist his newfound powers.

By chance, John and Jean - one English, the other French - meet in a provincial railway station. Their resemblance to each other is uncanny, and they spend the next few hours talking and drinking - until at last John falls into a drunken stupor. It's to be his last carefree moment, for when he wakes, Jean has stolen his identity and disappeared. So the Englishman steps into the Frenchman's shoes, and faces a variety of perplexing roles.

Atheistic and agnostic writers are aggressively attacking traditional religious beliefs. Philosopher and prolific writer Peter Kreeft is up to the challenge in this work of popular apologetics aimed at both teens and adults. The masterful Kreeft tackles 16 crucial issues about the deeper meaning of life. The questions that Kreeft explores range from, "Is faith reasonable?" "Can you prove there is a God?" and "Why is Jesus different?" to "Why is sex so confusing?" "Why is there evil?" and "Why must we die?"

A portrait of Colonel Pyncheon looms over his family in the house of the seven gables - an ominous reminder of the curse he left behind over a century ago. The shadow still falls over the New England mansion's current residents, siblings Clifford and Hepzibah - unless they can expose the one secret that offers an escape from the hex. Set in seventeenth- and nineteenth-century Massachusetts, Nathaniel Hawthorne's gothic tale was inspired by the Salem Witch Trials and by a family home that still stands today.

Academy Award, Golden Globe, and Emmy winner Emma Thompson lends her immense talent and experienced voice to Henry James' Gothic ghost tale, The Turn of the Screw. When a governess is hired to care for two children at a British country estate, she begins to sense an otherworldly presence around the grounds. Are they really ghosts she's seeing? Or is something far more sinister at work?