Download or read book The Secret of Lillian Velvet written by Jaclyn Moriarty and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2023-10-10 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Good Housekeeping Best Kids’ Book of 2023 Here are only a few of the wonderful, strange, and mysterious elements in this breathtaking visit to the Kingdoms and Empires: A very proper girl named Lillian Velvet, living a very lonely life with a nasty Grandmother. A jar of coins, each with the power to take Lillian on a journey to a different time and place…and also to grant a single wish. A small boy in a barn about to be crushed to death by a load of hay. A family, each member in mortal danger, who are strangers to Lillian (but whom clever readers will recognize). And a web of dangerous magic closing tight around all. Who IS this Lillian Velvet? And what is her secret? Only Jaclyn Moriarty has the ability to make readers laugh even while they grip the sides of their chairs in suspense. In The Secret of Lillian Velvet she is at the height of her storytelling powers, spinning, spinning, spinning seemingly disparate elements until all is revealed as one delicious, tantalizing whole. P R A I S E ★ “Readers will have a hard time closing this book… A must-have for any middle grade collection with fantasy lovers, and those who enjoy the likes of Roald Dahl, Neil Gaiman, and Lemony Snicket.” —School Library Journal (starred) ★ “Enticing… In the nostalgic fantasy novel The Secret of Lillian Velvet, a child gains friendships and fresh insights about herself through extraordinary interdimensional travels.” —Foreword Reviews (starred) “Absorbingly rich and strange.” —Kirkus “Sparkles with energy, warm humor, and outrageous metaphors.” —Horn Book

Download or read book The Stolen Prince of Cloudburst written by Jaclyn Moriarty and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2021-03-16 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Splendidly entertaining."—Kirkus Reviews ★ "A delightfully quirky story with nuance, depth, and a colorful cast of characters, this book begs for multiple readings." —School Library Journal (starred) ★ "Like a middle-grade version of Terry Pratchett's Discworld—fantasy adventure steeped in humor, with a touch of satire, and set in a whimsical secondary world of the highest order." —Booklist (starred) "The tale crescendos to an uplifting close that promotes honesty, bravery, and self-confidence." —Publishers Weekly Twelve-year-old Esther Mettlestone-Staranise loves reading books and writing stories but is troubled by low self-esteem and recurring bad dreams. When she starts the year at boarding school in earnest, she quickly notices something isn't quite right. Her two best friends are mysteriously missing. There are rumors her new teacher is secretly an actual ogre. And the scenic mountains of her quaint little town are teeming with Shadow Mages and danger. As secrets and dangers escalate, Esther must find the answers to several puzzles. Why is her teacher behaving so oddly? Which of Esther's classmates is the Spellbinder, and can they really protect the school from gathering hordes of Shadow Mages? Could the Stolen Prince of Cloudburst be connected? How can Esther – who is not talented like her sisters, nor an adventurer like her cousin, but just Esther – save her family, her school and possibly her entire world?

Download or read book The Impossible Secret of Lillian Velvet written by Jaclyn Moriarty and published by Michael O'Mara Books. This book was released on 2024-02-05 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lillian Velvet is a girl with a secret, one that even she doesn't know but one that will take her on a quest through time and places till the mystery is answered. the latest in Jaclyn Moriarty's magical and enthralling series.

Download or read book The Slightly Alarming Tale of the Whispering Wars written by Jaclyn Moriarty and published by Michael O'Mara Books. This book was released on 2020-10-01 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A story of unexpected magic and friendship, told by two sets of children who are sworn enemies but who must come together to defeat a much more dangerous foe in the dangerous Whispering Wars

Download or read book The Extremely Inconvenient Adventures of Bronte Mettlestone written by Jaclyn Moriarty and published by Michael O'Mara Books. This book was released on 2019-10-03 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A witty and entertaining magical novel telling the story of a ten-year-old girl and her quest to visit all ten aunts in order to discover the fate of her parents - were they really killed by pirates at sea? Encountering dragons, witches and water-sprites among others, Bronte is taken on an adventure she could only have imagined...

Download or read book The Season of Lillian Dawes written by Katherine Mosby and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the acclaimed writer of Private Altars, comes a story of driving lyrical force set in Manhattan in the 1950s. When he is expelled from boarding school, Gabriel Gibbs is sent to live with his older brother Spencer in New York. Rather than a punishment, this becomes an exhilarating invitation to a dazzling world, from smoking cigars at the Plaza Hotel to weekend house parties filled with tennis and cocktails. It is in this heady atmosphere -- from white-gloved Park Avenue to literary Greenwich Village -- that Gabriel first glimpses the elusive Lillian Dawes. Free-spirited and mysterious, Lillian captures the imaginations of those in "all the best circles," including both brothers. As their lives entwine, so begins the powerful and poignant unraveling of innocence.

Download or read book Dirty Little Secrets written by Joy King and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2007-04-01 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A young, hip, sexy novel that takes readers behind the velvet rope of the glamorous and shady entertainment industry Nothing prepares Tyler Blake for the fast-paced living of New York City. A small-town girl from Georgia, she quickly gets caught up in the glamorous entertainment industry. While pursuing her dream of becoming an actress, Tyler continually gets sidetracked by men who promise to help her and finds herself going from one dysfunctional relationship to another. Just when Tyler finally believes she has found her ideal man, in hip-hop producer Brian McCall, everything begins to go horribly wrong. Trapped in a nightmarish relationship, Tyler is determined not to go down without a fight. "Passion, deception, heartbreak, love and a delicious read...what more do you need!" -- B. Lawson Thornton, Essence bestselling author of Misery Loves Company

Download or read book A Wallflower Christmas written by Lisa Kleypas and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2010-11-02 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's Christmastime in London and Rafe Bowman has arrived from America for his arranged meeting with the very proper Natalie Blandford. But when four former Wallflowers try their hands at matchmaking, no one knows what will happen. Martin's Press.

Download or read book Feeling Sorry for Celia written by Jaclyn Moriarty and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2014-06-17 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A #1 Bestseller in Australia and Book Sense 76 Pick Life is pretty complicated for Elizabeth Clarry. Her best friend Celia keeps disappearing, her absent father suddenly reappears, and her communication with her mother consists entirely of wacky notes left on the fridge. On top of everything else, because her English teacher wants to rekindle the "Joy of the Envelope," a Complete and Utter Stranger knows more about Elizabeth than anyone else. But Elizabeth is on the verge of some major changes. She may lose her best friend, find a wonderful new friend, kiss the sexiest guy alive, and run in a marathon. So much can happen in the time it takes to write a letter... A #1 bestseller in Australia, this fabulous debut is a funny, touching, revealing story written entirely in the form of letters, messages, postcards—and bizarre missives from imaginary organizations like The Cold Hard Truth Association. Feeling Sorry for Celia captures, with rare acuity, female friendship and the bonding and parting that occurs as we grow. Jaclyn Moriarty's hilariously candid novel shows that the roller coaster ride of being a teenager is every bit as fun as we remember—and every bit as harrowing.

Download or read book The Astonishing Chronicles of Oscar from Elsewhere written by Jaclyn Moriarty and published by Michael O'Mara Books. This book was released on 2023-03-02 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fourth adventure in the Bronte Mettlestone series, where Oscar, an ordinary boy from our world, finds himself on a magical quest along with Bronte, Esther, Imogen, Alejandro - with nine keys to find they encounter breathtaking adventure, cryptic challenges and a battle to the very end...

Download or read book The Paying Guests written by Sarah Waters and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-09-16 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times bestselling novel that has been called “a tour de force” (Wall Street Journal), “unputdownable” (The Washington Post), “a delicious hothouse of a novel” (USA Today), “effortless” (The Economist), “seductive” (Vanity Fair) and “pitch perfect” (Salon) “Superb, bewitching…Forget about Fifty Shades of Grey; this novel is one of the most sensual you will ever read, and all without sacrificing either good taste or a "G" rating” – NPR “One of the year’s most engrossing and suspenseful novels…a love affair, a shocking murder, and a flawless ending … Will keep you sleepless for three nights straight and leave you grasping for another book that can sustain that high.” — Entertainment Weekly (A rating) “Volcanically sexy, sizzingly smart, plenty bloody and just plain irresistible." —USA Today (4 stars) It is 1922, and London is tense. Ex-servicemen are disillusioned; the out-of-work and the hungry are demanding change. And in South London, in a genteel Camberwell villa—a large, silent house now bereft of brothers, husband, and even servants—life is about to be transformed as impoverished widow Mrs. Wray and her spinster daughter, Frances, are obliged to take in lodgers. With the arrival of Lilian and Leonard Barber, a modern young couple of the “clerk class,” the routines of the house will be shaken up in unexpected ways. Little do the Wrays know just how profoundly their new tenants will alter the course of Frances’s life—or, as passions mount and frustration gathers, how far-reaching, and how devastating, the disturbances will be. Short-listed for the Man Booker Prize three times, Sarah Waters has earned a reputation as one of our greatest writers of historical fiction, and here she has delivered again. A love story, a tension-filled crime story, and a beautifully atmospheric portrait of a fascinating time and place, The Paying Guests is Sarah Waters’s finest achievement yet.

Download or read book Gravity Is the Thing written by Jaclyn Moriarty and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-07-23 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of Real Simple’s Best Books of the Year “I loved this book. . . . Funny, heartbreaking and clever with a mystery at its heart.” —Jojo Moyes “With an eye as keen for human idiosyncrasies as Miranda July’s, and a sense of humor as bright and surprising as Maria Semple’s, this is a novel of pure velocity.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) Twenty years ago, Abigail Sorenson’s brother Robert went missing one day before her sixteenth birthday, never to be seen again. That same year, she began receiving scattered chapters in the mail of a self-help manual, the Guidebook, whose anonymous author promised to make her life soar to heights beyond her wildest dreams. The Guidebook’s missives have remained a constant in Abi’s life—a befuddling yet oddly comforting voice through her family’s grief over her brother’s disappearance, a move across continents, the devastating dissolution of her marriage, and the new beginning as a single mother and café owner in Sydney. Now, two decades after receiving those first pages, Abi is invited to an all-expenses paid weekend retreat to learn “the truth” about the Guidebook. It’s an opportunity too intriguing to refuse. If Everything is Connected, then surely the twin mysteries of the Guidebook and a missing brother must be linked? What follows is completely the opposite of what Abi expected––but it will lead her on a journey of discovery that will change her life––and enchant readers. Gravity Is the Thing is a smart, unusual, wickedly funny novel about the search for happiness that will break your heart into a million pieces and put it back together, bigger and better than before.

Download or read book Tsunami Girl written by Julian Sedgwick and published by Michael O'Mara Books. This book was released on 2021-03-04 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A part-manga, part-prose powerful coming-of-age story about a fifteen-year-old girl caught up in the March 2011 Great Eastern Japan Earthquake and Tsunami.

Download or read book The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street written by Susan Jane Gilman and published by Grand Central Publishing. This book was released on 2014-06-10 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A clever and complex woman builds an ice cream empire after immigrating from Russia in this stunning novel of power, Prohibition, and performance set against the backdrop of early 20th-century America. In 1913, little Malka Treynovsky flees Russia with her family. Bedazzled by tales of gold and movie stardom, she tricks them into buying tickets for America. Yet no sooner do they land on the squalid Lower East Side of Manhattan, than Malka is crippled and abandoned in the street. Taken in by a tough-loving Italian ices peddler, she manages to survive through cunning and inventiveness. As she learns the secrets of his trade, she begins to shape her own destiny. She falls in love with a gorgeous, illiterate radical named Albert, and they set off across America in an ice cream truck. Slowly, she transforms herself into Lillian Dunkle, "The Ice Cream Queen" -- doyenne of an empire of ice cream franchises and a celebrated television personality. Lillian's rise to fame and fortune spans seventy years and is inextricably linked to the course of American history itself, from Prohibition to the disco days of Studio 54. Yet Lillian Dunkle is nothing like the whimsical motherly persona she crafts for herself in the media. Conniving, profane, and irreverent, she is a supremely complex woman who prefers a good stiff drink to an ice cream cone. And when her past begins to catch up with her, everything she has spent her life building is at stake.

Download or read book Velvet Undercover written by Teri Brown and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2015-10-20 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perfect for fans of Jennifer Donnelly and Libba Bray comes this page-turning historical spy thriller from Teri Brown, author of the Born of Illusion series. Samantha Donaldson's family has always done its duty for the British Crown. In the midst of World War I, seventeen-year-old Sam follows in their footsteps, serving her country from the homefront as a messenger for the intelligence organization MI5. After her father disappears on a diplomatic mission, she continues their studies of languages, mathematics, and complex puzzles, hoping to make him proud. When Sam is asked to join the famed women's spy group La Dame Blanche, she's torn—while this could be an unbelievable adventure, how can she abandon her mother, who has already lost a husband? But when her handlers reveal shocking news, Sam realizes she can't refuse the exciting and dangerous opportunity. Her acceptance leads her straight into the heart of enemy territory on a mission to extract the most valuable British spy embedded in Germany, known only as Velvet. Deep undercover in the court of Kaiser Wilhelm II, Sam must navigate the labyrinthine palace and its many glamorous—and secretive—residents to complete her assignment. To make matters worse she must fight a forbidden attraction to the enemy—a dangerously handsome German guard. In a place where personal politics are treacherously entangled in wartime policy, can Sam find Velvet before it's too late . . . for them both? A thrilling story of one girl's journey into a deadly world of spy craft and betrayal—with unforgettable consequences.

Download or read book I Have a Bed Made of Buttermilk Pancakes written by Jaclyn Moriarty and published by House of Anansi. This book was released on 2005-08-17 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Zing family lives in a misguided world of spell books, flying beach umbrellas, and state-of-the-art covert surveillance equipment. There's a slippery Zing, a graceful Zing, and a Zing who runs as fast as a bus. But most significant of all, there's the Zing Family Secret: so immense that it draws the family to the garden shed for meetings every Friday night. I Have a Bed Made of Buttermilk Pancakes is an entirely new universe unto itself. The story passes among five female characters -- Fancy, Marbie, Cassie, Listen, and Cath -- all of whom are closely connected, as they -- and we -- come to discover. The two youngest heroines, Listen and Cassie, shoulder the biggest role in piecing together the mystery that saves everyone in the end.

Download or read book The Patchwork Bike written by Maxine Beneba Clarke and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2016-10-25 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Boston Globe-Horn Book Picture Book Award 2019 Winner of the Children's Book Council of Australia (CBCA) Crichton Award for Debut Illustrator 2017 Selected as a CBCA Honour Picture Book 2017 Shortlisted for PATRICIA WRIGHTSON PRIZE FOR CHILDREN'S LITERATURE 2018 'Beautifully written and incredibly powerful.' Books + Publishing 'this book is just what many of us need right now' - starred Kirkus Review When you live in a village at the edge of the No-Go Desert, you need to make your own fun. That's when you and your brothers get inventive and build a bike from scratch, using everyday items like an old milk pot (maybe mum is still using it, maybe not) and a used flour sack. You can even make a numberplate from bark, if you want. The end result is a spectacular bike, perfect for going bumpity-bump over sandhills, past your fed-up mum and right through your mud-for-walls home. A delightful story from multi-award-winning author Maxine Beneba Clarke, beautifully illustrated by street artist Van T Rudd.