LANA GRANGER LIVES A LIFE OF LIES. She has told so many lies about where she comes from and who she is that the truth is like a cloudy nightmare she cant quite recall. About to graduate from college and with her trust fund almost tapped out, she takes a job babysitting a troubled boy named Luke. Expelled from schools all over the country, the manipulative young Luke is accustomed to controlling the people in his life. But, in Lana, he may have met his match. Or has Lana met hers?
While freaks have captivated our imagination since well before the nineteenth century, the Victorians flocked to shows featuring dancing dwarves, bearded ladies, missing links, and six-legged sheep. Indeed, this period has been described by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson as the epoch of consolidation for freakery: an era of social change, enormously popular freak shows, and taxonomic frenzy. Victorian Freaks: The Social Context of Freakery in Britain, edited by Marlene Tromp, turns to that rich nexus, examining the struggle over definitions of freakery and the unstable and sometimes conflicting ways in which freakery was understood and deployed. As the first study centralizing British culture, this collection discusses figures as varied as Joseph Merrick, The Elephant Man; Daniel Lambert, King of the Fat Men; Julia Pastrana, The Bear Woman; and Laloo The Marvellous Indian Boy and his embedded, parasitic twin. The Victorian Freaks contributors examine Victorian culture through the lens of freakery, reading the production of the freak against the landscape of capitalist consumption, the medical community, and the politics of empire, sexuality, and art. Collectively, these essays ask how freakery engaged with notions of normalcy and with its Victorian cultural context.
Modern-day America. Fifteen Boy Scouts and their seven adult leaders are found to have committed suicide in the forest of a scout reservation. One of the dead boys is a friend of Sparky Wallace, whose father Jack runs a Polish restaurant in Chicago. Drawn into investigating the suicides, Jack discovers a connection with his own grandfather, who killed himself in the Kampinos Forest in Poland when he was fighting the Nazis in World War II.
When Colton King’s marriage to Penny ended after just twenty-four hours he didn’t expect a year later to discover two little secrets: a baby boy and a baby girl. Now, after claiming his twins and reclaiming Penny again, he must ask himself: was their whirlwind marriage meant to last a lifetime?
The second sizzling segment in the erotic serial His to Possess, an intoxicating tale of a woman torn between a dominant billionaire and a tattooed, bad boy rock musician.
When Hanley Helton discovers a boy living in her garage, she knows she should kick himout. But Nate is too charming to be dangerous. He just needs a place to get away, which Hanley understands. Her own escape methodsvodka, black hair dye, and pretending thepast didn’t happenare more traditional, but who is she to judge? Nate doesn’t tell her why he’s in her garage, and she doesn’t tell him what she’s running from. Soon, Hanleys trading her late-night escapades for all-night conversations and stolen kisses. But when Nates recognized as the missing teen from the news, Hanley isn’tsure which is worse: that she’s harboring a fugitive, or that she’s in love with one.
Diamond is an odd little boy, a seemingly fragile child – who proves to be anything but. An epic story begins when he steps into the world his parents have so carefully kept him from, a world where gigantic trees each house thousands of humans and another human species, the papio, rule its far edges. Does Diamond hold the promise to remake one species and, perhaps, change all of the Creation?
Can a boy on the edge find his way back? From award-winning Icelandic author Fridrik Erlings comes a novel as cruel as it is tender.
Part two of the literary sci-fi thriller follows a boy and a girl who are caught in a warring town where thoughts can be heard and secrets are never safe.
