In this emotionally powerful, funny debut, Cricket Cherpin needs to figure out what to do with his life before he turns 18. But life sucksNso why not just give up?

Four friends . . . four lives . . . one decision Four college students, who couldn’t be more different from each other, move into a flat in Mumbai. Varun is sloppy yet lovable, Ahana is gutsy and reckless, Malvika is the group’s selfie queen and Garima is the reserved one. Yet, all four get along like a house on fire. Although each of them is battling personal demons, their commitment to the friendship they build over time binds them. However, things take a turbulent turn when one of the four is caught in a mess. Will they stick together or fall apart? You’re Trending in My Dreams is a true story that will rearm your faith in the magic of love and friendship.

Teaching Diversity in Rural Schools: Attaining Understanding, Tolerance, and Respect Through Young Adult Literature aims to assist secondary English Language Arts rural educatorsand students regarding diversity education through the use of rural, small town-themed young adult literature. While appropriate for any rural educator, the Upper Midwestern states (IA, MN, MT, NE, ND, SD, and WY) are focused on because they are unique in their predominantly White residents, with few to no racial and cultural minorities in all locations, large or small. Teaching rural students about minorities and facilitating in developing understanding, tolerance, and respect toward those different from oneself is difficult when absent from communities and schools. However, this book helps in reaching these goals through the use of titles that consider specific topics of cultural and racial minorities, such as those who are LGBTQ+, undocumented, homeless, having exceptionalities, managing grief/loss, and more. Also addressed are rural communities and schools, the purpose and importance of young adult literature, and locating quality rural, small town-themed novels. Suggestions for using this literature, activities, discussion topics, and recommended titles are also provided.

In Dear Life, palliative care specialist Dr. Rachel Clarke recounts her professional and personal journey to understand not the end of life, but life at its end. Death was conspicuously absent during Rachel's medical training. Instead, her education focused entirely on learning to save lives, and was left wanting when it came to helping patients and their families face death. She came to specialize in palliative medicine because it is the one specialty in which the quality, not quantity of life truly matters. In the same year she started to work in a hospice, Rachel was forced to face tragedy in her own life when her father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He'd inspired her to become a doctor, and the stories he had told her as a child proved formative when it came to deciding what sort of medicine she would practice. But for all her professional exposure to dying, she remained a grieving daughter. Dear Life follows how Rachel came to understand—as a child, as a doctor, as a human being—how best to help patients in the final stages of life, and what that might mean in practice.

With his stunning debut novel, She's Come Undone, Wally Lamb won the adulation of critics and readers with his mesmerizing tale of one woman's painful yet triumphant journey of self-discovery. Now, this brilliantly talented writer returns with I Know This Much Is True, a heartbreaking and poignant multigenerational saga of the reproductive bonds of destruction and the powerful force of forgiveness. A masterpiece that breathtakingly tells a story of alienation and connection, power and abuse, devastation and renewal--this novel is a contemporary retelling of an ancient Hindu myth. A proud king must confront his demons to achieve salvation. Change yourself, the myth instructs, and you will inhabit a renovated world. When you're the same brother of a schizophrenic identical twin, the tricky thing about saving yourself is the blood it leaves on your bands--the little inconvenience of the look-alike corpse at your feet. And if you're into both survival of the fittest and being your brother's keeper--if you've promised your dying mother--then say so long to sleep and hello to the middle of the night. Grab a book or a beer. Get used to Letterman's gap-toothed smile of the absurd, or the view of the bedroom ceiling, or the influence of random selection. Take it from a godless insomniac. Take it from the uncrazy twin--the guy who beat the biochemical rap. Dominick Birdsey's entire life has been compromised and constricted by anger and fear, by the paranoid schizophrenic twin brother he both deeply loves and resents, and by the past they shared with their adoptive father, Ray, a spit-and-polish ex-Navy man (the five-foot-six-inch sleeping giant who snoozed upstairs weekdays in the spare room and built submarines at night), and their long-suffering mother, Concettina, a timid woman with a harelip that made her shy and self-conscious: She holds a loose fist to her face to cover her defective mouth--her perpetual apology to the world for a birth defect over which she'd had no control. Born in the waning moments of 1949 and the opening minutes of 1950, the twins are physical mirror images who grow into separate yet connected entities: the seemingly strong and protective yet fearful Dominick, his mother's watchful "monkey"; and the seemingly weak and sweet yet noble Thomas, his mother's gentle "bunny." From childhood, Dominick fights for both separation and wholeness--and ultimately self-protection--in a house of fear dominated by Ray, a bully who abuses his power over these stepsons whose biological father is a mystery. I was still afraid of his anger but saw how he punished weakness--pounced on it. Out of self-preservation I hid my fear, Dominick confesses. As for Thomas, he just never knew how to play defense. He just didn't get it. But Dominick's talent for survival comes at an enormous cost, including the breakup of his marriage to the warm, beautiful Dessa, whom he still loves. And it will be put to the ultimate test when Thomas, a Bible-spouting zealot, commits an unthinkable act that threatens the tenuous balance of both his and Dominick's lives. To save himself, Dominick must confront not only the pain of his past but the dark secrets he has locked deep within himself, and the sins of his ancestors--a quest that will lead him beyond the confines of his blue-collar New England town to the volcanic foothills of Sicily 's Mount Etna, where his ambitious and vengefully proud grandfather and a namesake Domenico Tempesta, the sostegno del famiglia, was born. Each of the stories Ma told us about Papa reinforced the message that he was the boss, that he ruled the roost, that what he said went. Searching for answers, Dominick turns to the whispers of the dead, to the pages of his grandfather's handwritten memoir, The History of Domenico Onofrio Tempesta, a Great Man from Humble Beginnings. Rendered with touches of magic realism, Domenico's fablelike tale--in which monkeys enchant and religious statues weep--becomes the old man's confession--an unwitting legacy of contrition that reveals the truth's of Domenico's life, Dominick learns that power, wrongly used, defeats the oppressor as well as the oppressed, and now, picking through the humble shards of his deconstructed life, he will search for the courage and love to forgive, to expiate his and his ancestors' transgressions, and finally to rebuild himself beyond the haunted shadow of his twin. Set against the vivid panoply of twentieth-century America and filled with richly drawn, memorable characters, this deeply moving and thoroughly satisfying novel brings to light humanity's deepest needs and fears, our aloneness, our desire for love and acceptance, our struggle to survive at all costs. Joyous, mystical, and exquisitely written, I Know This Much Is True is an extraordinary reading experience that will leave no reader untouched.

SHE’S GETTING A FAKE BOYFRIEND--ME. WHETHER SHE LIKES IT OR NOT. The leggy car thief is trouble with a capital T. My brother went down because of her I need to find him before the cops do. Which means I’m not letting her out of my sight. Anywhere the human goes, I go. I’ll play her fake boyfriend. Sleep in her bedroom. Go to her prep school classes. Take her to the homecoming dance. I will learn all her secrets, find out all her games. By the time I’m done with her, she’ll be sorry. Sorry she ever set foot in our shop. Sorry we ever met. Sorry she made me fall for her.

Explains how readers who feel lost in life, especially those affected by the recent economic downturn, can reclaim their lives by turning values into clear intentions and intentions into committed action.

Aprilynne Pike, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Wings series, shines in this stand-alone novel that offers a humorous twist on ghosts and is perfect for fans of Ally Carter, Rachel Hawkins, and Kiersten White. Kimberlee Schaffer may be drop-dead gorgeous . . . but she also dropped dead last year. Now she needs Jeff's help with her unfinished business, and she's not taking no for an answer. When she was alive, Kimberlee wasn't just a mean girl; she was also a complete kleptomaniac. So if Jeff wants to avoid being haunted until graduation, he'll have to help her return all of the stolen items. But Jeff soon discovers that it's much easier to steal something than it is to bring it back. Paying for your mistakes takes on a whole new meaning in this hauntingly clever twist on The Scarlet Pimpernel.

Who killed Dr. Laurel Hent? Algernon Hent wants to know, and he's been asking the only survivor and witness of the brutal murder to spill the beans for the last thirty-two years. Just one little problem: that witness is Algernon Hent, and he isn't talking. The doctors call it 'hysterical amnesia'. Real Problem: Algernon is about to get his answer. With Congress threatening to cut NASA's funding for their Manned Mars Mission, the Into Known Space Group kicks into high gear and buys a salvage yard single stage to orbit shuttle all their own. Now all they need is a hundred sixty million dollars to refit it. Enter Algernon Hent. A fervid pro-space advocate and professional Science Fiction writer who has been roving the continent in his thirty foot RV, Wally the Wonder Wagon, for the last eighteen years, Algernon arrives at the 77th annual World Science Fiction Convention, currently in progress at the Orange County Convention Center in Anaheim, Ca. to host an auction of items to benefit the Into Known Space Group, with the aim of getting their shuttle off the ground. The two flies in this ointment labelled 'blissful weekend spent among friends and fans' are 1)Trish Mulhouse, a reporter who blows the lid off Algernon's decades-long disavowal of bloodties to Dr. Hadleigh Hent, renowned genetic research scientist and founder and former head of Hent Laboratories, one of the foremost gene therapy clinics in the world, and 2)Alger's middle sister, Honoria, current head and chief researcher at Hent Labs, who has had it in for Alger ever since a youthful indiscretion with his older sister, Lenore, resulted in an unplanned addition to the family tree and Alger's own attempted suicide. After two years in a Rehabilitation clinic, Alger left home, only to have Honoria hire a pack of goons to track him down for the sole purpose of putting a powerful hurt on him, which has landed him in the hospital five times to date. He has tried, for that reason, to keep his whereabouts a secret from his family ever since, but, like a deer caught in Trish's headlights, things go from bad to worse when Honoria spots him on Trish's live broadcast and calls to put in her two cents worth on global TV. Alger has no choice but to bolt and run. But Honoria and her goons aren't the only ones who have been chasing Alger. His High School sweetie, Sydney St. Croix, and her current husband, Avery Norris, owner and chief researcher for Gene-tech, Hent Laboratories's biggest and most vicious competitor, and Laurel Hent's former paramour, are also after him. When they catch him, they send him on a drug-assisted journey back in time to reconstruct his repressed memory, which reveals, at long last, the identity of his mother's murderer plus a whole raft of Hent family secrets. When the skeltons start rattling, Honoria takes lethal steps to throw them back into the closet where they belong. And as the body count rises, Algernon has to think fast to save his life and bring his mother's killer to justice!