Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Audio, Inc." in Coming of Age

At a Caribbean resort built atop a former slave plantation, Myrna works as a maid by day; by night she trespasses on the resort's overgrown inland property, secretly excavating the plantation ruins that her island community refuses to acknowledge. Rapt by the crumbling walls of the once slave owner's estate, she explores the unspoken history of the plantation - a site where her ancestors once worked the land, but which the resort now uses as a lookout point for tourists.

A timely novel about the radicalization of a Muslim teen in California - about where identity truly lies, and how we find it. Laguna Beach, California, 2010. Reza Courdee, a 14-year-old straight-A student and chemistry whiz, takes his first hit of pot. In as long as it takes to inhale and exhale, he is transformed from the high-achieving son of Iranian immigrants into a happy-go-lucky stoner.

An idyllic childhood takes a sinister turn. Rumors of a serial killer haunt the neighborhood, families pack up and leave town without a word of warning, and the country begins to unravel. Policemen stand by as protesters overtake the streets, knowing that the once awe-inspiring symbols of power they wear on their helmets have become devoid of meaning.

Nathan is a young artist traveling across Europe in search of the emotional fire that has been missing from his work. He's been deemed by his mentors and critics to be technically skillful but uninspired - criticisms he fears to be true. On a Paris street, he witnesses the volatile breakup of a young French woman and her beau. Nathan pursues a meeting with the woman, and it very quickly becomes evident that her provocative charisma and scathing beauty just may conjure the electricity he has been seeking.

Velveteen Vargas is an 11-year-old from Brooklyn who is granted a summer vacation in the country, courtesy of the nonprofit Fresh Air Fund. Her host family is a couple in upstate New York: Ginger, a failed artist on the fringe of Alcoholics Anonymous; and Paul, an academic who wonders what it will mean to "make a difference" in such a contrived situation.

Aristotle "Aris" Thibodeau is 12 and a half years old and destined for greatness. Ever since her father's death, however, she's been stuck in the small town of Kanuga, Georgia, where she has to manage her mother Diane's floundering love life and dubious commitment to her job as an English professor, not to mention coparenting a little brother who hogs all the therapy money. Luckily Aris has a plan. Following the advice laid out in Write a Novel in Thirty Days!, she sets out to pen a best seller using her charmingly dysfunctional family as material.

Morning rush hour on the Golden Gate Bridge. Amid the river of metal and glass, a shocking event occurs, leaving those who witnessed it desperately looking for answers, most notably one man and his son, Jake, who captured the event and uploaded it to the Internet for all the world to experience. As the media swarms over the story, Jake will face the ramifications of his actions, as he learns the perils of our modern disconnect between the real world and the world we create online.

Wintric Ellis joins the army as soon as he graduates from high school, saying goodbye to his girlfriend and to the backwoods California town whose borders have always been the limits of his horizon. Deployed for two years in Afghanistan in a directionless war, he struggles to find his bearings. Two career soldiers, Dax and Torres, take Wintric under their wings. The aftershocks echo long after each returns home to a transfigured world, where his own children may fear to touch him and his nightmares still hold sway.

Property Of is the book that launched a major literary career. In it, New York Times best-selling author Alice Hoffman introduces a lonely outsider who wants desperately to belong. She deeply envies the tough, sultry girls who wear mascara and black leather and hang with the local gang known as the Orphans. As the unnamed narrator determinedly tries to become the property of the gang's brooding leader, McKay, she will discover what can and cannot be possessed.

When Teresa was a little girl, she dreamed of dark-eyed, fearless heroes on white horses who would sweep her away. But now, as the grown-up Teresa negotiates life and love, she begins to understand that fairytales don't always come true.

Greenwich Village, 1970s: Rainey Royal - 14 years old, talented, and troubled - lives in a once-elegant, now decaying brownstone with her father, a jazz musician with a cultish personality. Her mother has abandoned the family, and Rainey fends off advances from her father's best friend while trying desperately to nurture her own creative drives and build substitute family.

Life hasn't been easy for Eugene "Huge" Smalls. Sure, his IQ is off the charts, but that doesn't help much when you're growing up in the 1980s in a dreary New Jersey town where your bad reputation precedes you, the public school system's written you off as a lost cause, and even your own family seems out to get you. But it's not all bad.

It's 1959. Sixteen-year-old Alex Housman has just stolen his 14th car and frankly doesn't know why. His divorced, working-class father grinds out the night shift at the local Chevy plant in Detroit and looks forward to the flask in his glove compartment and the open bottles of booze in his Flint, Michigan, home. Broke and fighting to survive, Alex and his father face the realities of estrangement, incarceration, and even violence as their lives unfold toward the climactic episode that a New York Times reviewer called "one of the most profoundly powerful in American fiction."

Fourteen-year-old Jeremy Barker is obsessed with zombie movies. He attends an all-boys Catholic High School where roving gangs in plaid make his days a living hell. His mother is an absentee pillhead, his older brother a self-diagnosed sex-addict, and his father an ex-Marine realtor who disappears night after night without explanation. Jeremy navigates it all with a code cobbled together from Night of the Living Dead, 28 Days Later, Planet Terror, Zombieland, and Shaun of the Dead.

Ida grew up with Jackson and James - where there was “I” there was a “J.” She can’t recall a time when she didn’t have them around, whether in their early days camping out in the boys’ room decorated with circus scenes, or later as teenagers when they were drinking on rooftops. While the world outside saw them as neighbors and friends, to each other the three formed a family unit - two brothers and a sister - not drawn from blood but from a deep need to fill a void in their single-parent households.

Benjamin arrives with his parents for a tour of Roaring Orchards, a therapeutic boarding school tucked away in upstate New York. Suddenly, his parents are gone and Benjamin learns that he is there to stay. Sixteen-years-old, a two-time failed suicide, Benjamin must navigate his way through a new world of “popped privileges”, “candor meetings”, “morning meds”, and “cartoon brunches” - all run by adults who themselves have yet to really come of age.

Fifteen-year-old Lynn Marie Sugrue is doing her best to make it through a difficult summer. Her mother works long hours as a nurse, and Lynn suspects that her mother's pill-popping boyfriend has enlisted her in his petty criminal enterprises. Lynn finds refuge in online flirtations, eventually meeting up with a troubled young soldier, Logan Loy, and inviting him home. When he's forced to stay over in a storage space accessible through her closet, and the Army subsequently lists him as AWOL, she realizes that he's the one thing in her life that she can control.

Mary Bet, the youngest of nine children, was born the same year the first railroad arrived in their county. As she comes of age during the South’s reconstruction and industrialization, she must learn to overcome her family’s curse: the deaths of her mother and siblings, a deaf and damaged older brother, and her father’s growing insanity and rejection of God.

Youth in Revolt brings us the journals of Nick Twisp, California's most precocious diarist, whose ongoing struggles to make sense out of high school, deal with his divorced parents, and lose his virginity result in his transformation from an unassuming 14-year-old to a modern youth in open revolt. As his family splinters, worlds collide, and the police block all routes out of town, Nick must cope with economic deprivation, homelessness, and the gulag of the public schools.

As his family splinters, worlds collide, and the police block all routes out of town, Nick Twisp must cope with economic deprivation, homelessness, the gulag of the public schools, a competitive Type-A father, murderous canines (in triplicate), and an inconvenient hair trigger on his erectile response, all while vying ardently for the affections of the beauteous Sheeni Saunders, teenage goddess and ultimate intellectual goad. He's smart, he's horny, he's resourceful, and he's on the loose.