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Last Hope School for Magical Delinquents
A middle grade magic school fantasy perfect for fans of The School for Good and Evil and Witchlings, in which a girl with unparalleled power must work with her misfit classmates to save her new school. Lavinia "Vin" Lucas is out of control and out of options. Stranded by parents who would rather use their average magical abilities to study dung beetles than raise her, Vin's been on her own for years. But she's never been able to corral her own powerful, unpredictable magic. After years of detention, suspension, and expulsion from magic schools far and wide, she's now being sent to the Last Hope School for Magical Delinquents. If she gets expelled, it's the end of the line. Now, Vin is determined to behave. Except no one at Last Hope seems to want her to. Her new teachers--particularly the school's kind headmistress--push her to explore her magic, and her mischievous classmates delight in every accident. And all the while, a mysterious fire sprite, a suspicious instructor, and her overwhelming abilities might just sabotage Vin. But for the first time, she is not alone. So when a former student begins attacking the school, Vin must question just how much she knows about the headmistress and her new home. Is this place worth saving? And are her budding abilities--and every trick, trap, and deception in her friends' delinquent arsenal--enough to protect Last Hope? -
Inheritance Games Paperback Collection
OVER 5 MILLION COPIES SOLD OF THE #1 BESTSELLING SERIES! Fall in love with the books everyone is talking about with this four-book collection of the #1 New York Times bestselling Inheritance Games series! Avery Grambs has a plan for a better future: survive high school, win a scholarship, and get out. But her fortunes change in an instant when billionaire Tobias Hawthorne dies and leaves Avery virtually his entire fortune. The catch? Avery has no idea why--or even who Tobias Hawthorne is--and she must move into Hawthorne House and live alongside the four dazzling Hawthorne brothers. Every room in the sprawling, secret passage-filled Hawthorne House bears the deceased old man's touch--and his love of puzzles, riddles, and codes. Unfortunately for Avery, Hawthorne House is also occupied by the family that Tobias Hawthorne just dispossessed. This includes the four Hawthorne grandsons: dangerous, magnetic, brilliant boys who grew up with every expectation that one day, they would inherit billions. Heir apparent Grayson Hawthorne is convinced that Avery must be a conwoman, and he's determined to take her down. His brother, Jameson, views her as their grandfather's last hurrah: a twisted riddle, a puzzle to be solved. Caught in a world of wealth and privilege, with danger around every turn, Avery will have to play the game herself just to survive. With swoonworthy romance, deadly stakes, thrilling twists, juicy secrets, and billions of dollars hanging in the balance, this "impossible to put down" (Buzzfeed) series is together in paperback, including the latest book in the series--The Brothers Hawthorne--where Jameson and Grayson take center stage in thrilling games of their own. This collection includes:- The Inheritance Games
- The Hawthorne Legacy
- The Final Gambit
- The Brothers Hawthorne (with a sneak peek of Games Untold)
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Trespassers at the Golden Gate: A True Account of Love, Murder, and Madness in Gilded-Age San Francisco
The sensational, forgotten true story of a woman who murdered her married lover in Gilded Age San Francisco and the trial that epitomized the city's transformation from raucous frontier town into modern metropolis--from the New York Times bestselling author of Empire of Sin Shortly before dusk on November 3, 1870, just as the ferryboat El Capitan was pulling away from its slip into San Francisco Bay, a woman clad in black emerged from the shadows and strode across the crowded deck. Reaching under her veil, she drew a small pistol and aimed it directly at a well-dressed man sitting quietly with his wife and children. The woman fired a single bullet into his chest. "I did it and I don't deny it," she said when arrested shortly thereafter. "He ruined both myself and my daughter." Though little remembered today, the trial of Laura D. Fair for the murder of her lover, A. P. Crittenden, made headlines nationwide. As bestselling author Gary Krist reveals, the operatic facts of the case--a woman strung along for years by a two-timing man, killing him in an alleged fit of madness--challenged an American populace still searching for moral consensus after the Civil War. The trial shone an early and uncomfortable spotlight on social issues like the role of women, the sanctity of the family, and the range of acceptable expressions of gender, while jolting the still-adolescent metropolis of 1870s San Francisco, a city eager to shed its rough-and-tumble Gold Rush-era reputation. Trespassers at the Golden Gate brings readers inside the untamed frontier town, a place where--for a brief period--otherwise marginalized communities found unique opportunities. Readers meet a secretly wealthy Black housekeeper, an enterprising Chinese brothel madam, and a French rabble-rouser who refused to dress in sufficiently "feminine" clothing--as well as familiar figures like Mark Twain and Susan B. Anthony, who become swept up in the drama of the Laura Fair affair. Krist, who previously brought New Orleans to vivid life in Empire of Sin and Chicago in City of Scoundrels, recounts this astonishing story and its surprisingly modern echoes in a rollicking narrative that probes what it all meant--both for a nation still scarred by war and for a city eager for the world stage. -
Narwhal: Unicorn of the Arctic
Venture to the Arctic Ocean and discover real life underwater unicorns--narwhals--in this stunningly illustrated nonfiction picture book. A HORN BOOK AND BOOKLIST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR You are a narwhal.
Shy... Swift... Small...
Humans call you unicorn of the Arctic. When winter ice covers the Arctic Ocean, a narwhal pokes his head through a patch of open water, his tusk--a six-foot long tooth--pointed to the sky. Join this mammal as he jousts with another narwhal, floats with his pod, and uses echolocation to find his prey. When warmer weather arrives, he will migrate towards summer ground. But he must be careful! Predators--orcas and polar bears--will be hungry and looking for a meal.... How will the narwhal escape? Will he be able to return to the winter bay? Paired with atmospheric illustrations by debut illustrator Deena So'Oteh, nonfiction master Candace Fleming delivers a picture book, uniquely told in second person, that expertly explores the mysterious and fascinating unicorn of the Arctic. -
Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi
The instant New York Times bestseller - Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, Slate, Vanity Fair, TIME, Buzzfeed, Smithsonian, BookPage, KCUR, Kirkus, and Boston Globe "It literally changed my outlook on the world...incredible." --Shonda Rhimes
"The Barn is serious history and skillful journalism, but with the nuance and wallop of a finely wrought novel... The Barn describes not just the poison of silence and lies, but also the dignity of courage and truth." -- The Washington Post "The most brutal, layered, and absolutely beautiful book about Mississippi, and really how the world conspired with the best and worst parts of Mississippi, I will ever read...Reporting and reckoning can get no better, or more important, than this." --Kiese Laymon
"An incredible history of a crime that changed America." --John Grisham
"With integrity, and soul, Thompson unearths the terrible how and why, carrying us back and forth through time, deep in Mississippi--baring sweat, soil, and heart all the way through." --Imani Perry A shocking and revelatory account of the murder of Emmett Till that lays bare how forces from around the world converged on the Mississippi Delta in the long lead-up to the crime, and how the truth was erased for so long
Wright Thompson's family farm in Mississippi is 23 miles from the site of one of the most notorious and consequential killings in American history, yet he had to leave the state for college before he learned the first thing about it. To this day, fundamental truths about the crime are widely unknown, including where it took place and how many people were involved. This is no accident: the cover-up began at once, and it is ongoing. In August 1955, two men, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, were charged with the torture and murder of the 14-year-old Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi. After their inevitable acquittal in a mockery of justice, they gave a false confession to a journalist, which was misleading about where the long night of hell took place and who was involved. In fact, Wright Thompson reveals, at least eight people can be placed at the scene, which was inside the barn of one of the killers, on a plot of land within the six-square-mile grid whose official name is Township 22 North, Range 4 West, Section 2, West Half, fabled in the Delta of myth as the birthplace of the blues on nearby Dockery Plantation. Even in the context of the racist caste regime of the time, the four-hour torture and murder of a Black boy barely in his teens for whistling at a young white woman was acutely depraved; Till's mother Mamie Till-Mobley's decision to keep the casket open seared the crime indelibly into American consciousness. Wright Thompson has a deep understanding of this story--the world of the families of both Emmett Till and his killers, and all the forces that aligned to place them together on that spot on the map. As he shows, the full horror of the crime was its inevitability, and how much about it we still need to understand. Ultimately this is a story about property, and money, and power, and white supremacy. It implicates all of us. In The Barn, Thompson brings to life the small group of dedicated people who have been engaged in the hard, fearful business of bringing the truth to light. Putting the killing floor of the barn on the map of Township 22 North, Range 4 West, Section 2, West Half, and the Delta, and America, is a way of mapping the road this country must travel if we are to heal our oldest, deepest wound. -
Talk to Me: Lessons from a Family Forged by History
A piercingly powerful memoir, a grandson's account of the coup that ended his grandfather's presidency of Haiti, the secrecy that shrouded that wound within his family, and his urgent efforts to know his mother despite the past. "A brilliant, absorbing book...I couldn't stop reading." --Salman Rushdie, author of Knife Rich Benjamin's mother, Danielle Fignolé, grew up the eldest in a large family living a comfortable life in Port-au-Prince. Her mother was a schoolteacher, her father a populist hero--a labor leader and politician. The first true champion of the black masses, he eventually became the country's president in 1957. But two weeks after his inauguration, that life was shattered. Soldiers took Danielle's parents at gunpoint and put them on a plane to New York, a coup hatched by the Eisenhower administration. Danielle and her siblings were kidnapped, and ultimately smuggled out of the country. Growing up, Rich knew little of this. No one in his family spoke of it. He didn't know why his mother struggled with emotional connection, why she was so erratic, so quick to anger. And she, in turn, knew so little about him, about the emotional pain he moved through as a child, the physical agony from his blood disease, while coming to terms with his sexuality at the dawn of the AIDS crisis. For all that they could talk about--books, learning, world events--the deepest parts of themselves remained a mystery to one another, a silence that, the older Rich got, the less he could bear. It would take Rich years to piece together the turmoil that carried forward from his grandfather, to his mother, to him, and then to bring that story to light. In Talk to Me, he doesn't just paint the portrait of his family, but a bold, pugnacious portrait of America--of the human cost of the country's hostilities abroad, the experience of migrants on these shores, and how the indelible ties of family endure through triumph and loss, from generation to generation. -
Dream Hotel: A Read with Jenna Pick
NATIONAL BESTSELLER ● READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK AS FEATURED ON TODAY ● From Laila Lalami--the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist and a "maestra of literary fiction" (NPR)--comes a riveting and utterly original novel about one woman's fight for freedom, set in a near future where even dreams are under surveillance. Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA's algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days. The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes. With every deviation from the strict and ever-shifting rules of the facility, their stay is extended. Months pass and Sara seems no closer to release. Then one day, a new resident arrives, disrupting the order of the facility and leading Sara on a collision course with the very companies that have deprived her of her freedom. Eerie, urgent, and ceaselessly clear-eyed, The Dream Hotel artfully explores the seductive nature of technology, which puts us in shackles even as it makes our lives easier. Lalami asks how much of ourselves must remain private if we are to remain free, and whether even the most invasive forms of surveillance can ever capture who we really are. -
Katie the Catsitter 4: The Purrfect Plan: (A Graphic Novel)
Katie the Catsitter is back and this time she may need the help of an . . . elephant? This irresistibly fun, bestselling, girl--and cat--power graphic novel series is perfect for fans of Sweet Valley Twins and the Babysitters Club! "A little evil and a whole lotta fun." --Kirkus Reviews "Ideal for readers seeking the whimsy of Dav Pilkey's 'Dog Man' tempered with the reassuring tone of Raina Telgemeier's work."--School Library Journal WANTED: TOP SECRET PLAN Katie is rocking 7th grade and being a superhero sidekick, so when a new threat puts the whole city in danger she's ready to spring into action! She'll just need one super secret plan, a little help from her friends (okay a lot of help!), an invitation to the city's fanciest party, 217 slightly unusual cats, and . . . maybe a new superhero outfit. Can Katie pull off the plan of the century?! Get ready for more drama, more disguises, more fun, more friends, more secrets and more surprises than ever before! (Plus cats, definitely more cats!) Bonus: Don't miss the Which Cat Are You Quiz inside! -
Hello Beautiful: The Instant New York Times Bestseller
This is a story about family, and sisters... and how love can be redeemed -
Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of AmericanRacism
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - "A fascinating and eye-opening look at how American schools have helped build and reinforce an infrastructure of racial inequality . . . a must-read for every American parent and educator."--Esquire "Though the argument of this book is bleak, it illuminates a path for a more just future that is nothing short of dazzling."--Oprah Daily "This book will transform the way you see this country."--Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow If all children could just get an education, the logic goes, they would have the same opportunities later in life. But this historical tour de force makes it clear that the opposite is true: The U.S. school system has played an instrumental role in creating and upholding racial hierarchies, preparing children to expect unequal treatment throughout their lives. In Original Sins, Ewing demonstrates that our schools were designed to propagate the idea of white intellectual superiority, to "civilize" Native students and to prepare Black students for menial labor. Education was not an afterthought for the Founding Fathers; it was envisioned by Thomas Jefferson as an institution that would fortify the country's racial hierarchy. Ewing argues that these dynamics persist in a curriculum that continues to minimize the horrors of American history. The most insidious aspects of this system fall below the radar in the forms of standardized testing, academic tracking, disciplinary policies, and uneven access to resources. By demonstrating that it's in the DNA of American schools to serve as an effective and underacknowledged mechanism maintaining inequality in this country today, Ewing makes the case that we need a profound reevaluation of what schools are supposed to do, and for whom. This book will change the way people understand the place we send our children for eight hours a day. -
Cats of the World
*An Instant New York Times Bestseller* Hannah "Kitten Lady" Shaw and professional cat photographer Andrew Marttila journey to thirty countries to bring you hundreds of photos and stories of cats from every corner of the world. Wife and husband team Hannah Shaw and Andrew Marttila have made cats their lives' work: they rescue and rehabilitate neonatal kittens, educate the public on cat and kitten care, and capture our feline friends' unique personalities through writing and photography. Now, in the project of their dreams, they've taken their passion for cats global. In Cats of the World, Shaw and Marttila travel across thirty countries to explore feline welfare and cat culture around the globe, documenting their travels with stunning photos and stories from each location. Journey to England's charming pubs and candle-lit cathedrals, Chile's vibrant produce markets and colorful hillsides, Türkiye's spice bazaars and ancient ruins, South Africa's bustling streets and lush mountains, and so many places in between with Shaw and Marttila as they learn from cats--and the people who love them most--that compassion is truly a universal language. -
Twist
A propulsive novel of rupture and repair in the digital age, delving into a hidden world deep under the ocean--from the New York Times bestselling author of Apeirogon and Let the Great World Spin "The spirit of Joseph Conrad hovers over the text, but here the heart of darkness lies at the bottom of the ocean."--Salman Rushdie "Everything gets fixed, and we all stay broken." Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist and playwright, is assigned to cover the underwater cables that carry the world's information. The sum of human existence--words, images, transactions, memes, voices, viruses--travels through the tiny fiber-optic tubes. But sometimes the tubes break, at an unfathomable depth. Fennell's journey brings him to the west coast of Africa, where he uncovers a story about the raw human labor behind the dazzling veneer of the technological world. He meets a fellow Irishman, John Conway, the chief of mission on a cable repair ship. The mysterious Conway is a skilled engineer and a freediver capable of reaching extraordinary depths. He is also in love with a South African actress, Zanele, who must leave to go on her own literary adventure to London. When the ship is sent up the coast to repair a series of major underwater breaks, both men learn that the very cables they seek to fix carry the news that may cause their lives to unravel. At sea, they are forced to confront the most elemental questions of life, love, absence, belonging, and the perils of our severed connections. Can we, in our fractured world, reweave ourselves out of the thin, broken threads of our pasts? Can the ruptured things awaken us from our despair? Resoundingly simple and turbulent at the same time, Twist is a meditation on the nature of narrative and truth from one of the great storytellers of our times.