Showing results by narrator "Michael Crouch" in All Categories

Cole Weston - former friend, former boyfriend - has become dangerous, erratic. Something needs to be done. Getting rid of Cole is practically a public service. So high school seniors Holly Morse, Grayson Hobbs, Logan Bailey, and Meeka Miller devise a plan. Kill Cole. Bury him in the woods behind Meeka's house. Bury him deep, deep in the ground along with four old cell phones, wiped except for their video confession as insurance that no one will ever betray the group.

Fifth-grader Abe Mitchell is fed up with sharing. All he wants is something to call his own. And he just might get it when he finds a loophole in the fine print of a doughnut shop coupon. Abe thinks it entitles him to a fresh-baked mountain of crullers, dunkers, and chocolate-frosteds. But cashing in means war with Marlene Paczki, the daughter of the doughnut shop owner and Abe’s new crush.

At first we were almost strangers. But ever since I moved to New York, Amos was the one person I could count on. And together we were there for Poppy. (I mean, what kind of parents leave their kid to be raised by a nanny?) I just didn't expect to fall for him - and I never expected him to leave us.

When Adeline, a wealthy art student, chances upon a young man from the Midwest known only as Baby in a shady East Village squat, the two begin a fiery friendship that propels them through a decade of New York life. In the apartments and bars of downtown Manhattan to the infamous nightclub The Limelight, Adeline is Baby's guardian angel, introducing him to a city not yet overrun by gentrification. They live through an era of New York punctuated by the deaths of Warhol, Basquiat, Wojnarowicz, and Tompkins Square Park.

Mike is about to graduate from college and inherit a world much different from the one he was promised. The World Trade Center towers have just fallen, the Beltway Sniper terrorizes the nation's capital, and a polarizing president pushes forward a dubious war. Told in 18 vignettes, Mike's misadventures begin in Washington, DC, and span Brooklyn, Portland, and Austin as he takes up arms with the overeducated, underemployed millennials who surround him.

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.

A joyful collection of the most popular, provocative and unforgettable essays from the New York Times 'Modern Love' column. A young woman goes through the five stages of ghosting grief. A man's promising fourth date ends in the emergency room. A female lawyer with bipolar disorder experiences the highs and lows of dating. A widower hesitates about introducing his children to his new girlfriend. A divorcée in her 70s looks back at the beauty and rubble of past relationships.

Ten years ago, a tragic accident tore through a community. Ever since, the nine survivors - just teenagers at the time - have met on the anniversary to remember those they lost. They made a promise to keep each other safe from harm. For Cassidy, always the outsider at school, this group has felt almost like friendship. But this year, their reunion is overshadowed by death and the disappearance of one of their own. As the week unravels, Cassidy begins to fear something darker than survivors' guilt has bound them together. Was their pact to protect one another a promise, or a threat?

Cutthroat political consultant Thom Morgan is thriving, working on the governor of California’s presidential campaign. If only he didn’t have to deal with Clay Parker, the infuriatingly smug data analyst who gets under Thom’s skin like it’s his job. In the midst of one of their heated and very public arguments, a journalist snaps a photo, but the image makes it look like they’re kissing. As if that weren’t already worst-nightmare territory, the photo goes viral — and in a bid to secure the liberal vote, the governor asks them to lean into it. Hard.

Thomas and Viv Adler have a picture-perfect family. Affluent and attractive, with two well-mannered kids almost out of the nest, they live in a beautiful house in a well-to-do neighborhood. Their jobs are secure; their children are thriving; the world is their oyster. Until one morning, when they wake up to find that their house and car have been pelted with eggs. Thomas dismisses it as the work of a few out-of-control kids, but when a smoke bomb is tossed on their front lawn, and the tires on their BMW are punctured, he begins to worry.

It is April 1995. Kosovo is a country on the cusp of a dreadful war. Arsim is 22, newly married, cautious - an Albanian trying to keep his head down and finish his studies in an atmosphere of creeping threat. Until he encounters Milos, a Serb, and begins a life in secret. Bolla is the story of what happens when passion and history collide - when a relationship, already forbidden and laced with danger, is ripped apart by war and migration, separated by nations and fate.

After thwarting the man behind the gruesome ironborn murders—and breaking several fae laws to do so—all Arlo wants is a quiet summer. As the deity of luck's Hollow Star, capable of bringing about endless possibilities, this shouldn't be too much to ask, right? But someone is still trying to summon the mythical Seven Deadly Sins. All signs point to immortal meddling, and if this is the gods' attempt at returning to the Mortal Realm, it's Arlo they're going to use to do it.

Rumor Mora fears two things: hellhounds too strong for him to kill and failure. Jude Welton has two dreams: for humans to stop killing monsters and for his strange abilities to vanish. But in no reality should a boy raised to love monsters fall for a boy raised to kill them. Nyx Llorca keeps two secrets: the moon speaks to her, and she's in love with her best friend. Braeden Tennant wants two things: to get out from his mother's shadow and to unlearn his colony's darkest secret. To save everyone they love, they'll both have to commit treason.

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".

An ancient religion grotesquely modernized, The Purpose, deifies children for their deformities - a beautiful girl with three arms, a brave boy with one eye...the exceptional list goes on. Painted and costumed, they are worshiped on stage. Shy and exposed, they are ridiculed in the streets, often by the same faces. Glorious or repulsive? Gods or freaks? How deep will the identity divide be dredged, and to which side will the truth finally tip?

THE TERRIBLES HAVE BEEN CHALLENGED to a game of CREEPOBALL, a sport that is played by all monsters on Creep's Cove Island (just don't ask them how to play it—nobody knows ALL the rules!). Their rivals? A horde of relentless, fierce, low-down GNOMES. Can THE TERRIBLES defeat these Gnomes without anyone DISAPPEARING into an ALTERNATE DIMENSION? Why are you asking me?

A brand-new, heart-wrenching story from the best-selling author of If I Stay and I Was Here, Gayle Forman. Around the time that Freya loses her voice while recording her debut album, Harun is making plans to run away from home to find the boy that he loves, and Nathaniel is arriving in New York City after a family tragedy leaves him isolated on the outskirts of Washington state. After the three of them collide in Central Park, they slowly reveal the parts of their past that they haven't been able to confront, and together they find their way back to who they're supposed to be.

San Francisco, 1968: Jeannie and Kip are lost and half-orphaned, their mother dead under mysterious circumstances, and their father - a decorated WWII veteran - consumed by guilt and losing sight of his teenage children. Kip, a dreamer and swaggerer prone to small-time trouble, enlists to fight in Vietnam; Jeannie finds a seemingly safe haven in early marriage and motherhood. But when Kip is accused of a terrible military crime, Jeannie is seduced into joining an ambiguous anti-war organization.

In the wake of his parents’ tragic deaths in a house fire, fourteen-year-old Richard has been sent to live with his aunt and uncle in the remote, insular town of Ballantyne, where he quickly earns a reputation as an outcast. When a classmate named Tom goes missing, everyone suspects that the angry new boy is responsible for his disappearance. And no one believes Richard when he says the telephone booth out by the edge of the woods sucked Tom into the receiver like something out of a horror movie.

Things have quietened down for lovable troublemaker Rafe Khatchadorian, and after all the mishaps and adventures he's been through, he's feeling a little restless. So when he's invited to attend an all-expenses paid art field trip in California, Rafe jumps at the opportunity. But things go sideways, as they always do for Rafe, when he arrives and realises his trip isn't the Hollywood vacation he thought it would be. Instead, he'll be participating in a 'Cultural Campout' in the desert.