Showing results by narrator "Janet Metzger" in All Categories

Present Day: Julia Baxter’s wedding veil, bequeathed to her great-grandmother by a mysterious woman on a train in the 1930s, has passed through generations of her family as a symbol of a happy marriage. But on the morning of her wedding day, something tells her that even the veil’s good luck isn’t enough to make her marriage last forever. Overwhelmed, she escapes to the Virgin Islands to clear her head.

Hatred is often considered the opposite of love, but in many ways it is much more complicated. It also may be considered one of the dominant emotions of our time, as individuals, groups, and even nations express or enact hatred to varying degrees. What is hatred? Where does it come from, and what does it reveal about the hater? And is hatred always a bad thing? Brogaard makes a deep dive into the moral psychology of one of our most complex and vivid emotions.

Tiny McAllister never thought she’d get married. Not because she didn’t want to, but because she didn’t think girls from Connecticut married other girls. Yet here she is with Caroline, the love of her life, at their destination wedding on the Bermuda coast. In attendance - their respective families and a few choice friends. The conflict-phobic Tiny hopes for a beautiful weekend with her bride-to-be. But as the weekend unfolds, it starts to feel like there’s a skeleton in every closet of the resort. 

Walking home wearily from an evening spent poring over the books of the Parchly Heights Methodist Ladies' Aid searching for a fifty-eight-cent error, Miss Jennifer Murdock becomes witness to a terrible scene: A man, stumbling drunk, arrives home–and just as he fumbles with his keys, gunfire erupts and kills him on the spot.

Twelve-year-old Mary Frances “Frankie” Jackson has been sent to California for the summer to live on a houseboat with her Aunt Roxy. There’s one catch—she can’t get in trouble, or it’s back to New Jersey and juvenile detention camp. Too bad that days after arriving at the houseboat community, Frankie is accused of animal cruelty (killing a cat) and has two weeks to prove her innocence. In the process, she gets to know all the eccentrics on the dock.

In the watershed year of 1919, world leaders met in Paris, promising to build a new international order rooted in democracy and social justice. Female activists demanded that statesmen live up to their word. Excluded from the negotiating table, women met separately, crafted their own agendas, and captured global headlines with a message that was both straightforward and revolutionary: Enduring peace depended on recognition of the fundamental humanity and equality of all people.

What happens when freedom of expression comes under threat? In frank and wide-ranging interviews, historian and critic Leonard S. Marcus probes the experience of thirteen leading authors of books for young people. 

Sloane’s world crumbles after receiving the news that her military husband is missing in action. She can barely climb out of bed, much less summon the strength to be the parent her children deserve. Her mother, Ansley, provides a much-needed respite as she puts her personal life on hold to help Sloane and her grandchildren wade through their new grief-stricken lives. But between caring for her own aging mother, her daughters, and her grandchildren, Ansley's private worry is that secrets from her past will come to light.

Great medical practices create an experience so positive that patients can't stop talking about it. Patients talk to friends, relatives, and acquaintances about the care they received. They can't help posting nice things about this great practice on social media. And they can't imagine recommending anyone else. Patient Care The Sandler Way shows how to create this experience. It offers timeless, proven principles for effective patient care, based on the communication skills and success principles of the Sandler Selling System.

Hannah Brencher, TED Talk speaker and founder of The World Needs More Love Letters, thought Atlanta was her destination. Yet even after she arrived, she found herself in the same old chase for the next best thing…somewhere else. And it left her in a state of anxiety and deep depression. Our hyper-connected era has led us to believe life should be a highlight reel - where what matters most is perfect beauty, instant success, and ready applause. Yet, as Hannah learned, nothing about faith, relationships, or character is instant. So she took up a new mantra: be where your feet are. 

Antebellum New Orleans sat at the heart of America's slave and cotton kingdoms. It was also where yellow fever epidemics killed as many as 150,000 people during the nineteenth century. With little understanding of mosquito-borne viruses, a person's only protection against the scourge was to "get acclimated" by surviving the disease. Repeated epidemics bolstered New Orleans's strict racial hierarchy by introducing another hierarchy, what Kathryn Olivarius terms "immunocapital." Whereas immunity conferred privilege on whites, it relegated enslaved people to the most grueling labor.

In the endless days of the pandemic, a woman spends her time sorting fact from fiction in the life and work of Herman Melville. As she delves into Melville's impulsive purchase of a Massachusetts farmhouse, his fevered revision of Moby-Dick there, his intense friendship with neighbor Nathaniel Hawthorne, and his troubled and troubling marriage to Elizabeth Shaw, she becomes increasingly obsessed by what his devotion to his art reveals about cost, worth, and debt.

Law Beaumont and Kristen Hemmings have watched each other from a distance for years. But Law, a bartender with a bad-boy past, and Kristen, an assistant principal devoted to helping her community, couldn’t seem more different. When they unite to mentor a young foster child and to help Law’s troubled daughter through the aftermath of her parents’ ugly divorce, their attraction deepens. They face the undeniable connection between them, and a whirlwind of challenges they can only conquer together.

A childhood on the streets taught Mallory Phillips to never trust love again. Years later, she longs for a peaceful existence and a community to call home, only she can’t quite settle into the picturesque, cozy world around her. When Polly Lombard sneaks into Mallory’s house to look at her Christmas tree, Mallory connects with Polly and Polly’s grieving father in wondrous ways, helping them heal. But when Mallory’s past returns to haunt her, will she trust her new family to be there for her?

When eldest daughter Caroline and her husband announce they are divorcing - and 15-year-old daughter Vivi acts out in response - Caroline, at her wits end, can’t think of anything to do besides leave her with her mother Ansley in Peachtree Bluff for the holidays. As the “storm of the century” heads toward Peachtree Bluff, Ansley and her husband, Jack, with Vivi in tow, are grateful they’re planning to leave for the trip of a lifetime. But Vivi’s recklessness forces the trio to shelter in place during the worst hurricane Peachtree has ever seen.

Once, Sam Perry had it all. Then the unthinkable happened.... Watching his once-carefree wife withdraw into herself was almost more than Brian Perry could handle. Moving her out of New York to Chandlerville, a small, quiet suburb of Atlanta, felt right. Anything to get her away from the memories of the buildings, and her world, crashing around her. Now, two sons and many years later, Sam cherishes the new life on Mimosa Lane that Brian built for them. Until lightning strikes twice.

Sheriff Guy Trident doesn't have much to do with off-worlders; he has his hands full keeping his own planet safe. But he'll do anything, go anywhere to save Jewel Quinn. She broke his heart years ago when she left to marry a Terraloft aristocrat. Now she's run away from her husband, only to fall into the clutches of slavers.

Lisa Landon makes her living with her voice — a voice fueled by a heartbreak she vows never to experience again. But despite her renown, Lisa’s real ambition is to escape the memories that follow her from one sold-out engagement to the next. Perhaps that’s what brings her to the exotic desert nation of Sedikhan and the nightclub where she meets Clancy Donahue.

Just after midnight on October 9, 2017, as one of the nation's deadliest firestorms swept over California's Wine Country, hundreds of elderly residents from two posh senior living facilities were caught in its path. The frailest were blind, in wheelchairs, or diagnosed with dementia, and their community quickly transformed from a palatial complex that pledged to care for them to one that threatened to entomb them. The rescue of the final 105 seniors left behind on an inflamed hillside depended not on employees, but strangers whose lives intersected in a riveting tale of terror and heroism.

Thaisa Frank works with what the New York Times has called "a tantalizing sense of indirection," in this short work of surrealistic fiction, as she writes about a couple who begin to spin the most mundane topics into fantastical bedtime stories for one another. Their narratives reveal what neither will say to each other directly and end in a surprising admission of truth.