Showing results by narrator "Jade Wheeler" in All Categories

Funny, candid and unconventional: the wildly famous but elusive Josephine Baker tells her own story in this enchanting memoir. Baker took Paris by storm in the 1920s, dazzling audiences with her humour, beauty and effervescence on stage. She became an icon. Hemingway, Jean Cocteau and Picasso admired her; Shirley Bassey adored her. It was told she strolled the streets of Paris with her pet cheetah who wore a diamond collar.

Harlow Ford has spent her entire life running, caught in her mother’s wake as they flit from town to town, hiding from a presence that Harlow isn’t even sure is real. In each new place, Harlow takes on a new name and personality, and each time they run, she leaves another piece of herself behind. When Harlow and her mom set off on yet another 3 a.m. escape, they are involved in a car accident that leaves Harlow’s mother fatally wounded. Before she dies, she tells Harlow two things: where to find the key to a safety deposit box and to never stop running.

Best friends Waffles and Mochi know that delicious food brings people together. So, when they start new jobs at a supermarket, they want to make a special treat for their coworkers. But what should it be? Their search for an answer will take them around the world as they investigate ingredients, find flavors, and make new friends.

Born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in small-town North Carolina, Nina Simone was a musical child. She sang before she talked and learned to play piano at a very young age. With the support of her family and community, she received music lessons that introduced her to classical composers like Bach who remained with her and influenced her music throughout her life. She loved the way his music began softly and then tumbled to thunder, like her mother's preaching, and in much the same way as her career.

In River City, where magic used to thrive and is now fading, the witches who once ruled the city along with their powerful King have become all but obsolete. The city's crumbling government is now controlled primarily by the new university and teaching hospital, which has grown to take over half of the city. Moving between the decaying Old City and the ruthless New, four young queer people struggle with the daily hazards of life—work, school, dodging cops—not realizing that they have been selected to play in an age-old drama that revives the flow of magic through their world.

Fable has been cursed by what the people in her village call the Blight, a twisted enchantment that leaves her without a face of her own. To stay alive, Fable has to steal the faces of others, making her an outcast that no one trusts. When the fierce Blighthunter Vycorax comes to kill Fable to stop her curse from spreading, Fable narrowly escapes by fleeing into the thorny woods surrounding her small village.

It is winter, north of the Arctic Circle. A few hours of pale light is all the sun has to offer before the landscape is once more enveloped in complete darkness. This is Sápmi, land of the Sámi, Scandinavia’s Indigenous people. Nine-year-old Elsa is the daughter of Sámi reindeer herders. Her community is under constant threat. One morning, when Elsa goes skiing alone, she witnesses a man brutally killing her beloved reindeer calf. Elsa is terrified by what she sees. Fearing for her own life and for the lives of her family members, she remains silent.

The bewitching second book in the Witches of Brooklyn series captures what it means to be a friend, and how growing up can be a little less scary if you throw some magic in the mix.

Nine-year-old Elsa lives just north of the Arctic Circle. She and her family are Sámi – Scandinavia’s indigenous people – and make their living herding reindeer. One morning when Elsa goes skiing alone, she witnesses a man brutally killing her reindeer calf, Nástegallu. Elsa recognises the man but refuses to tell anyone – least of all the Swedish police force – about what she saw. Instead, she carries her secret as a dark weight on her heart.

A group of women contemplate violence after they’re sent into foreign territory to make husbands of the enemy. A support network of traumatized joggers meets to discuss the bodies they’ve found on their runs. And a town replaces its Confederate monument with a rotating cast of local residents. Slippery but muscular, sly but electric, this stunning debut collection moves from horror to magical realism to satire with total authority. In these stories, characters build and remake their sense of home, be it with one another or within themselves.

An new historical anthology from transatlantic slavery to the Reconstruction curated by the Schomburg Center, that makes the case for focusing on the histories of Black people as agents and architects of their own lives and ultimate liberation, with a foreword by Kevin Young.

Clara Ketterling-Dunbar is one of twenty-eight crew members of The Resolute—a ship meant for an Antarctic expedition now marooned on an ice floe one hundred miles from the shore of the continent. An eighteen-year-old American, Clara has told the crew she’s twenty-one years old and Canadian. Since the war broke out, sentiment toward Americans has not been the most favorable, and Clara will be underestimated enough simply for being a woman without also giving away just how young she is.

Rosalyn Quest was raised by a legendary family of thieves with one rule: trust no one. Trapped in a glamorous world of riches and double-crosses, she is about to escape the family business when her parents are kidnapped. Her only chance to save them is to win the Thieves’ Gambit – a deadly competition for the world’s up-and-coming thieves, where the victor is granted one wish. To win, she must outwit all of her backstabbing competitors, including her archnemesis. But can she take victory from the handsome, charming boy who makes a play for her heart?

James and Michelle find themselves in the Atlanta airport on a layover. They couldn't be more different, but seemingly interminable delays draw them both to a mysterious flashing green light—and each other. Where James is passive, Michelle is anything but. And she quickly discovers that the flashing green light is actually...a button. Which she presses. Which may or may not break the rules of the universe—at least, as those rules apply to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta. The team up to find their families and either escape the airport, or put an end to its chaos—before it's too late.

You can take a witch out of Brooklyn...and put her in the woods? As if learning magic wasn’t hard enough, now Effie has to go to SUMMER CAMP! The hit middle-grade graphic novel series continues with this new adventure that's filled to the brim with magic and mayhem!

From the family that brought you the Lena in the Spotlight series and the popular For Girls Like You magazine comes Ashton’s Dancing Dreams, book two in the Daniels Sisters series. This realistic fiction story of family, friendship, and the challenges that so many young girls face each day growing up will appeal to girls 8-12 looking to express their talents and individuality alongside their faith.

Before Waffles and Mochi can make a special meal for their friends, they need to learn about a very important ingredient - water. Follow them around the world as they learn how necessary water is and the different ways it can be used.

Genevieve, a single mother, flies from New York to Port-au-Prince with her teenage son, Miles. The trip is meant to be an education for fifteen-year-old Miles—a chance to learn about his family’s roots while coming to terms with his father’s departure—but it’s also an excuse for Genevieve to escape the city, where her life is dominated by her failed marriage and the daily pressures of raising Black children in America.

Cousins Rose and Cora Seville aren’t your typical eighth graders. They are matchmakers-in-training, learning how to magically make love connections out of San Francisco’s Hotel Coeur, where they live in the penthouse suite. As young Fledglings, Rose and Cora must perfect their charms and enchantments to pass a test that will determine their future, but they are not prepared for all the drama ahead!

A young woman born in the suburbs of Paris—whose skin color and memories of occasional childhood visits alone connect her to her father’s native Guadeloupe—yearns to understand her lineage and her métis identity. Upon her request, her old aunt Antoine, the eccentric and indomitable family matriarch, unveils the history of the Ezechiel clan, and with it, that of the island over the course of the twentieth century. In a spirited account, punctuated by interludes from other family members, Antoine tells her life story.