Showing results by narrator "Michael Crouch" in All Categories

Jeanne Ann is smart, stubborn, living in an orange van, and determined to find a permanent address before the start of seventh grade. Cal is awkward, sensitive, living in a humongous house across the street, and determined to save her. Jeanne Ann is roughly as enthusiastic about his help as she is about living in a van. As the two form a tentative friendship that grows deeper over alternating chapters, they're buoyed by a cast of complex, oddball characters who let them down, lift them up, and leave you cheering.

Twelve-year-old Mikey Pruitt - president, founder, and CEO of Anything, Inc. - has always been an entrepreneur at heart. Inspired by his grandfather Pap Pruitt, who successfully ran all sorts of businesses from a car wash to a roadside peanut stand, Mikey is still looking for his million-dollar idea. It isn't until kid drag queen Coco Caliente, Mistress of Madness and Mayhem (aka eighth grader Julian Vasquez) walks into his office (aka his family's storage/laundry room) looking for an agent that Mikey thinks he's finally found his million-dollar idea!

Sixteen-year-old Dale Cardigan is a loner who’s managed to make himself completely invisible at his all-boys high school. He doesn’t fit with his classmates (whom he gives nicknames in his head), his stepbrother (whom nobody at school knows he’s related to), or even his mother (who never quite sees how gifted a musician Dale might be)—but they don’t fit with him, either. And he’s fine with that. To him, high school and home are stages to endure until his real life can finally begin.

On the outskirts of a town too tired for its own happenings, the boys were found dead inside a tent. Three years later, their fathers have disappeared too. Ruth Fenn's son was the boy they blamed. For three years, Ruth has accepted her lot as pariah, focusing on her ailing mother and the children left in her care by the struggling single parents of North Falls, Vermont. But now the additional loss of her husband is too much to bear. As she edges closer to the truth, she begins to uncover some secrets that are better left buried.

Pesha and Fen have shouldered the grief, pain, and fear for the people they love for as long as they can remember. Fen as his sister’s protector and handler, and Pesha as his brother’s trusted right hand. Neither has given thought to their own happiness, because a life of crisis only allows for chaos. Contentment is an affliction neither can afford. When Pesha embarks on a desperate, risky journey to a homeland he’s never been to, in a final attempt to save his dying sister, Fen doesn’t hesitate to come along to help the man he’s been slowly falling in love with.

Every year, the town of Happy Hills holds its haunted house contest. In a spooky old manor, teams of kids come up with new ways to frighten people. The scariest team wins. But this year, all the teams are going to lose. Because this year the house itself has awakened...and it won’t be happy until it’s devoured all the people inside. What started out as a game has turned into something much more deadly. Is there any way out?

Dexter Foreman is twelve going on eighty. He has lived at The Pines retirement village with his grandmother since he was six years old, and as a result he gets along better with senior citizens than kids his own age. He's homeschooled by the residents up until the day the county’s truancy officer shows up and announces that Dex has to go to a “real” school, to the local middle school.

Spring 1938. The Vienna Writers Circle meets at Café Mozart to share hopeful stories during a hopeless time. Mathias and Johannes - fellow writers, cousins, and close as brothers - thrive within this creative group of friends. But when the Nazis take over Austria, everything changes. With their families' lives now under threat, the men hide in plain sight using false identities. The safety of their loved ones and their writing is their only salvation.

On a run through the woods outside her north Georgia hometown, defense attorney Ama Chaplin encounters a mysterious hiker and recognizes him, too late, as a sociopath she successfully defended when he was a teenager. In the intervening seventeen years, Ama changed her name and moved to Atlanta, anxious to put her past behind her. Michael Walton, her young client, grew into a ruthless and inventive murderer. And now that he’s caught her, he can put a twisted, years-in-the-making plot into motion.

Joel Walker wakes up to a world suddenly and frighteningly changed. In the wake of a massive power outage, an otherworldly siren begins to blare, changing all that listen to it for too long in frightening ways. Desperate to find his mother and little sister, Joel will have to survive in a world that is coming apart at its seams.

The secrets of Bellwound’s lineage and lifelong love have led him away from a once quiet life and into the Dark Beyond, the realm where Lucifer and his Fallen Stars were imprisoned. The once sacred land has turned into a luscious prison, riddled with mystery, guarded by the judged goddess Romiria. The arrival of Lucifer’s son disrupts an ancient order, stirring chaos in this doomed paradise. While the Dark Beyond is shaken by Bellwound’s presence, Lucifer and his servants plot against mortals and the Creator with an army of Shadows.

When sixth grader Silas Wade does a school presentation on former Major Leaguer Glenn Burke, it’s more than just a report about the irrepressible inventor of the high five. Burke was a gay baseball player in the 1970s―and for Silas, the presentation is his own first baby step toward revealing a truth about himself he’s tired of hiding. Soon he tells his best friend, Zoey, but the longer he keeps his secret from his baseball teammates, the more he suspects they know something’s up―especially when he stages one big cover-up with terrible consequences.

It’s been a rough year for Alex Collins. In the past twelve months, he’s lost his best friend, become the target of the two biggest bullies at school, and been sentenced to community service. But on June 25, 2013, he gets a call for help from Cassie Ramirez, the prettiest girl in school. At last, he feels like his luck might be changing. Cassie is at the Texas State Capitol to protest Wendy Davis’s historic filibuster of the abortion bill HB2, and she’s rallying everyone she knows to join her.

Declan Taylor is furious at the world. After winning state as a freshman starting pitcher, he accidentally messes up his throwing arm. Despite painful surgery and brutal physical therapy, he might never pitch again. And instead of spending the summer with his friends, Declan is forced to get a job to help his family out. On top of that, it seems like his best friend, Jake Lehrer, is flirting with Declan’s crush and always ditching him to hang out with the team or his friends from synagogue. So Declan ends up playing a lot of Imperialist Empires online and making new friends.

Frumkin’s latest book is a deliciously entertaining collection of five genre-defying stories that range from downright hilarious to brilliantly unhinged. Taken together, they celebrate a wide variety of human experiences. In the title story, a queer young adult with bipolar disorder drops out of college in a fog of depression, aimlessly drifting between maintaining their job at a fast food restaurant and dodging their mom’s texts. But when they fall in with a group of sex workers starring in BDSM films, they find radical freedom, love, and community.

Salem, Massachusetts, 1692. Thomas is marked as an outcast the moment he steps off the ship from England. As a Quaker, he’s outnumbered and distrusted by Salem’s Puritans. And as an orphan without any useful skills, he has nowhere to live and no way to earn his keep. In a stroke of luck—perhaps good, perhaps not—he’s taken in by the aged widow Prudence Blevins, who’s rumored to be a witch.

From the critically acclaimed author of The Adventures of a South Pole Pig comes a heartwarming middle grade animal adventure story about Frank, the odd one out in a family of ducks, who discovers both his courage and unique identity as he braves the unknown to save his family from an invading fox.

A meteorite carrying an alien virus of unknown origin falls to Earth off the US coast. Three boys find fragments washed ashore and sell them online, unknowingly spreading the contagion around the US. One of the fragments comes to the town of Stark’s Hill, Colorado. When exposed to this virus, human beings turn into flesh-eating zombies, or as Ben Michaels and his small group of allies come to call them "the Changed".

Radiant Basket of Rainbow Shells, scholar of curses and magical history, has spent several years on a research expedition abroad in Quruscan, one of the four kingdoms of the Tetrarchia. When Tetrarchia and Radiant’s home country of Loasht suddenly revoke their tenuous peace, Quruscan is no longer the safe haven for Radiant that it once was. He needs someone to help him escape: a bodyguard, perhaps, or someone with the sheer cunning to escort him to safety. The perfect candidate is Kalyna Aljosanova: a crafty, mysterious mercenary with an uncanny reputation.

A gripping new novel in verse by the author of the Printz Honor-winning Starfish, featuring a poverty-stricken boy who bravely rides out all the storms life keeps throwing at him.