Showing results by narrator "Emily Caudwell" in All Categories

The grid is an accident of history and of culture, in no way intrinsic to how we produce, deliver and consume electrical power. Yet this is the system the United States ended up with, a jerry-built structure now so rickety and near collapse that a strong wind or a hot day can bring it to a grinding halt. The grid is now under threat from a new source: renewable and variable energy, which puts stress on its logics as much as its components.

Taryn McKenna believes she's easy to forget. Abandoned by her parents and left behind when her high school sweetheart joined the army, she vows to never love again and throws herself into her love for the outdoors and the pursuit of a college degree - something no one else in her family has ever accomplished. Her goal, as a young teacher in the hills of North Carolina, is to leave a legacy in the lives of the middle schoolers she teaches.

A brittle young woman juggles her overbearing mother, her pregnant sister, her adoring father, and the intrigue of a handsome stranger she keeps running into. Angie's passive role in her own life, while acting as her sister's support and her mother's adversary, is upended in both the unlikeliest and likeliest of ways.

What happens when danger and love collide under a Navajo moon? The search for a woman who disappeared in 1906 has lead cultural anthropologist Erin Dawson to Cedar Canyon, where the iconic terrain of red rock walls and mesas keep Navajo traditions - and maybe criminal evidence - well hidden. When Erin's search leads her to cross paths with tribal policeman Adam Silverhorn, it's hardly love at first sight. But everywhere she turns, Adam is already there.

Joss Whedon has much to teach his fans, as he unfurls epics of sacrifice and heroism for superheroes and ordinary people. Whedon offers lessons to improve the world and our roles within it. This book compares themes, motifs, and archetypes across all his works, teasing out the common threads and the messages within

Chuntao is still reeling from being tossed aside by her white boyfriend - and his enchantingly cozy family - when her coworker sets her up with a Burmese-American man named Gabe Dove. Out with a fellow Asian for the first time, Chuntao finds their commonality both attractive and repellant, intimate and embarrassing, familiar, and dangerously distancing. As their relationship deepens, Chuntao is both alert and blind to her own motives, as she starts treating Gabe Dove in ways even she doesn't understand.

After the end of World War II, Clara Kirkpatrick returns from the Women's Army Corp to deliver a dying soldier's last wishes: convey his love to his young widow, Mattie, with apologies for the missed life they had planned to share. Struggling with her own post-war trauma, Clara thinks she's not prepared to handle the grief of this broken family. Yet upon meeting Mattie, and receiving a baby quilt that will never cuddle the soldier's baby, Clara vows to honor the sacrifices that family made.

Sara Jane Morgan is trying to balance teaching with caring for her ailing, stubborn grandmother. When school lets out for the summer, the plans are for Grandma to teach Sara Jane to quilt as they finish up the Appalachian Ballad quilt Grandma started as a teenager. But things don't always go as planned.

Fed up with her boyfriend and her job, a woman spends the night driving around. Exhausted and drunk, she goes into what she thinks is an abandoned house and finds herself in a surreal world hosted by two old women who insist she stay as their guest and attend a birthday party.

Helping her girlfriend dig through a hoarder's garage, an unnamed narrator with an inimitable voice ushers us into a world that is somehow both shadowy and vivid, tragically dark and life-affirmingly funny - a psychological funhouse full of tricks and sleights of hands. As she peels back the layers of three lives lived in fear, she's forced to decide how much to let her past determine her future.

This story of love and loss begins with a childhood romance between a city girl and a farm boy up in the mountains for a summer vacation and ends on a battlefield in Iraq.

When a northern California dilettante retreats to a convent for a week of introspection, writing, and a Thomas Merton study group, she is forced to confront her core beliefs. Is less truly more? Can generosity be learned? Forgiveness practiced? In this humorous send-up, short story writer Audrey Ferber channels one woman's empty nest grief and unsatisfiable desires.

A young California woman visits upstate New York to meet her boyfriend's teenage children for the first time, reminding her of her own post-divorce childhood, and shifting her perception of her current relationship.

As Marnie disappears into dementia, her daughter finds solace in an unexpected place. A rawly moving look at loss, identity, and the strength we draw from being allowed to care for another person.

An intimate portrait of the inner workings of one woman's life as a wife, mother, daughter, and friend. Theresa ponders the ways her morning-chipper husband both soothes and infuriates her, the challenges of parenting a toddler while pregnant, and the benefit of having family to rely on in hard times.

Ann's baby sister, Lynne, was the beautiful one, the lucky one, the one who grabbed at whatever better life she thought she could get. But when Ann is awakened one night by the unexpected arrival of her young niece, Deena, she's faced with the fact that she may be the one to live out the consequences of her sister's choices.

This wickedly observed family story starts funny and turns harrowing as everyone’s secrets come up from the basement, where Emmaline lives, and sit down together for Thanksgiving dinner. The ghost in this story lives inside a vodka bottle and haunts us all.

Desperate to keep her family going after her husband's paycheck dried up in the Great Recession, Cecily signed up to be a surrogate. She's carried multiple babies for wealthy women, hoping that things will get better. But now her out-of-work husband wants her to have a baby of their own.

Henry turns to watch a pretty woman pass, and in that instant his young daughter, Mary, is struck and killed by a bus. Tender; gorgeously told in bold, vibrant strokes; and utterly shocking in both its imagery and its rawness, Blue Flamingo Looks at Red Water lays bare the different pathways of grief as Henry and his wife, Isabel, deal with the unimaginable loss of their child.

Being a nurse gives Vanessa Meyer a true purpose in life. It grounds her in a way that nothing else can. Since she's watched her mother slide into the clutches of a painful condition, she's worked hard to better the lives of her patients, giving as much as she can to those who seek help. Garrett Ryan is an attorney in Manhattan. He centers his life on himself. When he's brought to the hospital after a horrible crash, Vanessa tends to his wounds. Their first meeting is explosive.