Showing results by narrator "January Lavoy" in All Categories

At the height of the Civil Rights movement, Lydia Abarca was a Black prima ballerina with a major international dance company—the Dance Theatre of Harlem, a troupe of women and men who became each other’s chosen family. She performed in some of ballet’s most iconic works with other trailblazing ballerinas, including the young women who became her closest friends—founding Dance Theatre of Harlem members Gayle McKinney-Griffith and Sheila Rohan, as well as first-generation dancers Karlya Shelton and Marcia Sells. The Swans of Harlem is a riveting account of these five accomplished women.

When TV producer Laurie Moran investigates an unsolved murder, she becomes entangled in a web of long-buried secrets and begins to wonder if her own life is in grave danger as a mysterious stalker plots revenge.

Nikki Griffin isn't your typical private investigator. In her office above her bookstore’s shelves and stacks, where she luxuriates in books and the comfort they provide, she also tracks certain men. Dangerous men. Men who have hurt the women they claim to love. When a regular PI job tailing Karen, a tech company's disgruntled employee who might be selling secrets, turns ugly and Karen's life is threatened, Nikki has to break cover and intervene.

Since its final episode aired in 2008, HBO's acclaimed crime drama The Wire has only become more popular and influential. The issues it tackled, from the failures of the drug war and criminal justice system to systemic bias in law enforcement and other social institutions, have become more urgent and central to the national conversation. But while there has been a great deal of critical analysis of the show and its themes, until now there has never been a definitive, behind-the-scenes take on how it came to be made.

It's not safe for anyone alone in the woods. There are predators that come out at night: critters and coyotes, snakes and wolves. But the woman in the red jacket has no choice. Not since the Crisis came, decimated the population, and sent those who survived fleeing into quarantine camps that serve as breeding grounds for death, destruction, and disease. She is just a woman trying not to get killed in a world that doesn't look anything like the one she grew up in, the one that was perfectly sane and normal and boring until three months ago.

A wealthy businessman is dead, and fifteen-year-old Ruby Monroe is in a Dallas jail awaiting trial for his murder. Ruby has no one she can count on—no one, except her state-appointed caseworker, a woman named Cadence Ware. In Ruby’s experience, that’s not anyone she can trust. Cadence is familiar with the cold reality of Ruby’s situation, even before Ruby was arrested. Angry and alone, homeless and hungry, breaking the law just to survive, she is the kind of girl no one wants to listen to, especially not the prosecutor who wants to put her away for life.

It's one of the galaxy's most dangerous secrets: a mysterious transmitter with unknown power and a reward for its discovery that most could only dream of claiming. But those who fly the Millennium Falcon throughout its infamous history aren't your average scoundrels. Not once, but twice, the crew of the Falcon tries to claim the elusive prize - first, Lando Calrissian and the droid L3-37 at the dawn of an ambitious career, and later, a young and hungry Han Solo with the help of his copilot, Chewbacca.

From National Book Award finalist and New York Times best-selling author Jason Reynolds comes a genre-defying new novel that serves as an homage to sharing the stories we all hold within ourselves.

Molly Allen lives alone in Portland, but her heart is back in Franklin, Tennessee, where five years ago she walked away from a man she cannot forget, a rare sort of love she hasn’t found since. Ryan Kelly lives in Franklin and spends plenty of time at The Bridge - the oldest bookstore in historic downtown Franklin - remembering the long hours he and Kelly once spent there. Now, Ryan and Molly’s favorite bookstore is in trouble....

When her flailing department lands on the university's chopping block, Professor Naya Turner’s friends convince her to shed her frumpy cardigan for an evening on the town. For one night her focus will stray from her demanding job and she’ll tackle a new kind of to-do list. When she meets a charming stranger in town on business, he presents the perfect opportunity to check off the items on her list. Jake makes her laugh and challenges Naya to rebuild her confidence, which was left toppled by her abusive ex-boyfriend.

San Francisco Detective Lindsay Boxer is loving her life as a new mother. With an attentive husband, a job she loves, plus best friends who can talk about anything from sex to murder, things couldn't be better. Then the FBI sends Lindsay a photo of a killer from her past, and her happy world is shattered. The picture captures a beautiful woman at a stoplight. But all Lindsay sees is the psychopath behind those seductive eyes: Mackie Morales, the most deranged and dangerous mind the Women's Murder Club has ever encountered.

Redwood, an African American woman, and Aidan, a Seminole Irish man, journey from Georgia to Chicago, from haunted swampland to a "city of the future". They are gifted performers and hoodoo conjurors, struggling to call up the wondrous world they imagine, not just on stage and screen but on city streets, in front parlors, in wounded hearts. The power of hoodoo is the power of the community that believes in its capacities to heal and determine the course of today and tomorrow.

Three thrilling stories of the law from the master of the legal thriller: Homecoming takes us back to Ford County, the fictional setting of many of John Grisham's unforgettable stories. Jake Brigance is back, but he's not in the courtroom. He's called upon to help an old friend, Mack Stafford, a former lawyer in Clanton who three years earlier became a local legend when he stole some money from his clients, divorced his wife, filed for bankruptcy, and left his family in the middle of the night, never to be heard from again. Until now.

At the Little Academy, mothers fret over their preschoolers, who have developed an unsettling syndrome. The children’s odd craving for blood is considered relatively benign (to everyone except their beleaguered moms) until a young teacher is found dead and the only potential witnesses are ten adorable four-year-olds. It becomes clear that the police are looking at the children as not just witnesses, but also suspects…and they’re watching the mothers as well. Cutting Teeth is a witty story that asks if there is anything a mother is not asked to sacrifice for her children.

Since her grandmother became her caretaker when she was four years old, Bisou Martel has lived a quiet life in a little house in Seattle. She’s kept mostly to herself. She’s been good. But then comes the night of homecoming, when she finds herself running for her life over roots and between trees, a fury of claws and teeth behind her. A wolf attacks. Bisou fights back. A new moon rises. And with it, questions. About the blood in Bisou’s past, and on her hands as she stumbles home. About broken boys and vicious wolves. About girls lost in the woods - frightened, but not alone.

They first met as college roommates and soon became inseparable, despite their many differences. Kate was beautiful, wild, wealthy, and damaged. Aubrey came from the wrong side of the tracks, and wanted more than anything to distance herself from her past. Jenny was brilliant, ambitious, and determined to win big at all costs. As an unlikely alliance formed, Kate, Aubrey, and Jenny swore they would always be friends. Twenty years later, the three women - all married, and deemed successful by any measure - are together again. But one of them is standing at the edge of a bridge.

In his first work for the theater, James Baldwin brought all the fervor and majestic rhetoric of the storefront churches of his childhood along with an unwavering awareness of the price those churches exacted from their worshipers. For years Sister Margaret Alexander has moved her Harlem congregation with a mixture of personal charisma and ferocious piety. But when Margaret's estranged husband, a scapegrace jazz musician, comes home to die, she is in danger of losing both her standing in the church and the son she has tried to keep on the godly path.

For Dell Fletcher, life isn’t complicated. He is the Roadrunner, a major-league baseball star who seems to have it all. He’s married to his college sweetheart, Leah, and they have two children and a dream home in Los Angeles. But an injury has sidelined his hot career and prescription medication and depression are pulling him into a downward spiral of self-pity and loneliness, leaving Leah feeling emotionally distanced and sad. Her growing frustration ends in an ultimatum: “Get help, or get out.”

Outside the last city on Earth, the planet is a wasteland. Without the Archive, where the genes of the dead are stored, humanity will end. Antigone’s parents–Oedipus and Jocasta–are dead. Passing into the Archive should be cause for celebration, but with her militant uncle Kreon rising to claim her father's vacant throne, all Antigone feels is rage. When he welcomes her and her siblings into his mansion, Antigone sees it for what it really is: a gilded cage, where she is a captive as well as a guest. But her uncle will soon learn that no cage is unbreakable. And neither is he.

On July 4, 1826, as Americans lit firecrackers to celebrate the country’s 50th birthday, both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were on their deathbeds. The young nation had outlived the men who made it, but could it survive intensifying divisions over the very meaning of the land of the free? American Radicals is a dynamic, timely history of 19th-century activists - free-lovers and socialists, abolitionists and vigilantes - and the social revolution they sparked in the turbulent Civil War era.