Showing results by narrator "Cassandra A Campbell" in All Categories

When Misty was six years old, her family started to live and dress like the Amish. Misty and her sister were kept as slaves on a mountain ranch where they were subjected to almost complete isolation, sexual abuse, and extreme physical violence. When Misty reached her teens, her parents feared she and her sister would escape and took them to an Amish community where they were adopted and became baptized members. Misty was devastated to once again find herself in a world of fear, animal cruelty, and sexual abuse.

For years, rumors of the 'Marsh Girl' have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. So in late 1969, when handsome Chase Andrews is found dead, the locals immediately suspect Kya Clark, the so-called Marsh Girl. But Kya is not what they say. Sensitive and intelligent, she has survived for years alone in the marsh that she calls home, finding friends in the gulls and lessons in the sand. Then the time comes when she yearns to be touched and loved.

The year is 1883, and in New York City it's a time of dizzying splendor, crushing poverty, and tremendous change. With the gravity-defying Brooklyn Bridge nearly complete and New York in the grips of antivice crusader Anthony Comstock, Anna Savard and her cousin, Sophie - both graduates of the Woman's Medical School - treat the city's most vulnerable, even if doing so may put everything they've strived for in jeopardy.

Enter a vanished and unjust world: Jackson, Mississippi, 1962. Where Black maids raise white children, but aren't trusted not to steal the silver. There's Aibileen, raising her 17th white child and nursing the hurt caused by her own son's tragic death; Minny, whose cooking is nearly as sassy as her tongue and white Miss Skeeter, home from college, who wants to know why her beloved maid has disappeared. No one would believe they'd be friends; fewer still would tolerate it. But as each woman finds the courage to cross boundaries, they come to depend and rely upon one another.

Ghosts don't exist in our world of today. Life is too pragmatic, too consuming, too busy for past lives to linger on longer than their allotted time, or so Halcyon had believed, until she received a letter from a lawyer claiming that her mother, whom she had thought long dead, had actually been living in another part of the country since Halcyon's early childhood. She had only recently passed away, leaving Halcyon heir to an unexpected fortune and an estate on an isolated island in the middle of the Great Lakes.

At home full-time with her two-year old son while his father travels for work, a woman finds herself struggling with solitude, monotony and exhaustion. If she has to manage one more bedtime alone, she fears she will lose her mind. So far, so familiar, you might say? But one night, a strange metamorphosis occurs.

Tayla Mancuso is a demon-slayer who hungers for sensual pleasure - but fears it will always be denied her. Until she lands in a hospital run by demons in disguise, and the head doctor, Eidolon, makes her body burn with unshakable desire. But to prove her ultimate loyalty to her peers, she must betray the surgeon who saved her life. Eidolon cannot resist this fiery, dangerous woman who fills him with both rage and passion.

The science of emotion is in the midst of a revolution on par with the discovery of relativity in physics and natural selection in biology. Leading the charge is psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, whose research overturns the long-standing belief that emotions are automatic, universal, and hardwired in different brain regions. Instead, Barrett shows, we construct each instance of emotion through a unique interplay of brain, body, and culture.

As children, Eva Rosselli and Angelo Bianco were raised like family but divided by circumstance and religion. As the years go by, the two find themselves falling in love. But the church calls to Angelo and, despite his deep feelings for Eva, he chooses the priesthood. Now, more than a decade later, Angelo is a Catholic priest and Eva is a woman with nowhere to turn. With the Gestapo closing in, Angelo hides Eva within the walls of a convent.

During missions as a CIA assassin, Fortune Redding saw and overcame most every obstacle, but Sinful, Louisiana, keeps producing new challenges for her. When a hurricane blows through, it brings a shower of counterfeit money raining down on the tiny bayou town. When the money is linked back to Ahmad, the arms dealer who issued the kill order on Fortune, everyone is worried that her nemesis is far too close for comfort.

Every woman makes choices. And no one has made more difficult choices than Olivia Grayson. The enormously successful businesswoman missed out on much of her children’s lives while she built her legendary home-furnishings empire. In Danielle Steel’s character-rich novel, Olivia faces the past, tries to balance the present and make amends where due, while still running her vastly successful business. As a way of making up to them for time lost, Olivia spends months each year planning a holiday that everyone in her family will enjoy.

Written with wisdom, warmth, and clarity, this inspirational and practical handbook offers tools for overcoming problems and enjoying more fulfilling lives. Judy Tatelbaum contends that while hurt is inevitable in life, suffering is not. We cannot control our circumstances and tragedies, but we can choose how much we suffer over them. The author suggests "We can use powerful experiences like losses, illness, hardship, and disappointment as stepping stones to our own growth."

Twenty years ago Emily Mills's father was murdered, and she found his body hanging in the backyard. Her younger sister, Madison, claims she was asleep in her room. Her older sister, Tara, claims she was out with friends. The tragedy drove their mother to suicide and Tara to leave town forever. The killer was caught. The case closed. Ever since, Emily and Madison have tried to forget what happened that night - until an eerily similar murder brings it all back.

When Elizabeth Endicott arrives in Syria, she has a diploma from Mount Holyoke College, a crash course in nursing, and only the most basic grasp of the Armenian language. The First World War is spreading across Europe, and she has volunteered on behalf of the Boston-based Friends of Armenia to deliver food and medical aid to refugees of the Armenian genocide. There, Elizabeth becomes friendly with Armen, a young Armenian engineer who has already lost his wife and infant daughter.

If the power grid fails, how far will you go to survive?Madison spends her days tending plants as an agriculture student at the University of California, Davis. She plans to graduate and put those skills to work only a few hours from home in the Central Valley. The sun has always been her friend, until now.

The morning that the world ends, Katie is getting ready for court and housewife Jenni is taking care of her family. Less than two hours later, they are fleeing for their lives from a zombie horde. Thrown together by circumstance, Jenni and Katie become a powerful zombie-killing partnership, mowing down zombies as they rescue Jenni's stepson, Jason, from an infected campground.

High school wasn’t a grand time for everyone, but when a group of friends decide to meet up at a B and B ahead of their 10-year reunion, old grudges resurface, and one of them ends up dead. Now the owners, a kindly older couple, are on the hook for the accidental death due to anaphylaxis, but they insist no mistakes were made on their part. Fortune is asked to look into the situation before the inept local sheriff railroads the couple or simply allows gossip to run them out of business, which will cost them their home. Swamp Team 3 heads to Voodoo Island to find a way to clear the couple.

Small-town librarian Kathleen Paulson never wanted to be the crazy cat lady. But after Owen and Hercules followed her home, she realized her mind wasn't playing tricks on her - her cats have magical abilities.

When the body of elderly do-gooder Agatha Shepherd is found near Kath's favorite local cafe, she knows Owen's talent for turning invisible and Hercules's ability to walk through walls will give the felines access to clues Kath couldn't get without arousing suspicion.

When Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm published their Children's and Household Tales in 1812, followed by a second volume in 1815, they had no idea that such stories as "Rapunzel", "Hansel and Gretel", and "Cinderella" would become the most celebrated in the world. Yet few people today are familiar with the majority of tales from the two early volumes, since in the next four decades the Grimms would publish six other editions, each extensively revised in content and style.

In a secret, subterranean world beneath the prairie of the Old West, a homesteader risks her life in search of a safe haven. A workman in Andrew Carnegie's steel mills is turned into a medical oddity by the brutal power of the furnaces. A young woman created through genetic manipulation is destroyed by the same force that gave her life. With her distinctive blend of magical realism, science, and poetic prose, Anjali Sachdeva demonstrates a preternatural ability to laser in on our fears, our hopes, and our longings in order to point out intrinsic truths about society and humanity.