Showing results by narrator "Matt Godfrey" in All Categories

Meet Erik Sheepflattener. Each member of his modern-day Viking-heritage family has a motto to live by. His parents have Family and Pride. His sisters have Conquer and Win. His grandfather has Turnip. But Erik is developing a motto he can truly believe in: Avoid Stuff. Mostly, Erik’s fierce family ignores or discounts him, especially when he tries to say no. But while spending the summer with his rough-and-tumble cousins and older sister Brunhilde in Minnesota, axe-wielding Bru gets the idea to name and Conquer all of Erik’s fears.

Is there anything more random than middle school? Sixth graders Oliver and Frankie don't think so. Their first few weeks have been full of weirdness-lunchtime thievery, free beef jerky, and Matilda, the mysterious new girl who knows everything about them, but has a lot to learn about making friends. But what if none of it is random at all? What if a reclusive genius is keeping an eye on them and making sure the tiny pieces of his puzzle fall into place, one by one, until strange, seemingly unconnected incidents snowball totally out of control?

Meet Mars! The red planet. Planet Marvelous. Favorite sibling of Earth (or so he claims). Sometimes they're close (just 34.5 million miles apart). Sometimes they need space (250 million miles apart)! Earth and Mars have a lot in common - clouds, mountains, polar icecaps. And while Earth has Earthlings, Mars makes a persuasive case for why people should make the journey to spend time with him. His day is seven minutes longer! He is home to the largest volcano in the whole solar system. He's, well, marvelous.

By 1979, we knew nearly everything we understand today about climate change—including how to stop it. Over the next decade, a handful of scientists, politicians, and strategists, led by two unlikely heroes, risked their careers in a desperate, escalating campaign to convince the world to act before it was too late. Losing Earth is their story, and ours.

The Accidental Ecosystem tells the story of how cities across the United States went from having little wildlife to filling, dramatically and unexpectedly, with wild creatures. Today, many of these cities have more wild animals living in them than at any time in at least the past 150 years. Why have so many cities—the most artificial and human-dominated of all Earth's ecosystems—grown rich with wildlife, even as wildlife has declined in most of the rest of the world? And what does this paradox mean for people, wildlife, and nature on our increasingly urban planet?

Jackson Stone is hot-like burn-down-buildings kind of hot. He's also my brother's best friend, and the memory of one kiss with him years ago still might get to me. Maybe. But, I am not looking for a second chance. When I return to the small town of Stolen Hearts Valley, my life is a hot mess. I'm a few bucks shy of broke with nowhere else to go. My heart's battered and bruised, and when it comes to romance, the door is nailed shut. But Jackson's the kind of man women ruin panties over. Oh, and he's my roommate. Talk about too close for comfort.

The Deadfall Hotel is where our nightmares go, it’s where the dead pause to rest between worlds, and it’s where Richard Carter and his daughter Serena go to rediscover life - if the things at the hotel don’t kill them first. Think of it as the vacation resort of the collective unconscious. With the powerful prose that has earned him awards and accolades, Steve Rasnic Tem explores the roots of fear and society’s fascination with things horrific, using the many-layered metaphor of the Deadfall Hotel.

Duluthians is a collection of short fiction that illustrates the folks who call Northern Minnesota their home. Here you will find stories of transplants who have found themselves reluctantly placed in the wild northland (Heiland Daze), and those where Duluth has always been their home and they would live in no other place. Follow a young boy who discovers the love of his half-wolf half-dog. Or the ski jumper who is destined for the Olympics if he can only overcome his fear of heights, and, more importantly, his thoughts of letting go and flying away.

What's the reward for a job well done? For the Roman general Belisarius, it was a trial and conviction. Thomas Quinn, sorcerer, after having just saved the world this side of the veil, is hoping for a gentler fate from the tribunal called to pass judgment on him. But after centuries of putting his life on the line for humanity, he just doesn't have a lot of patience with protocol.

Hunter Blake wasn’t planning to get married in Vegas. Then again, he doesn't plan much, living life by the seat of his pants as he tries to outrun the towering shadow of his MLB Hall of Famer father's reputation. But when he wakes up next to Marlowe Story—his friend with benefits and the woman of his dreams—with a ring on his finger, for once he doesn't want to run. Hunter feels like a different man when he's with Marlowe. A better man. Somehow, she's able to pull him out of his own head and help him tame his self-destructive tendencies.

Myles is an average thirteen-year-old boy until one day, Sally Munson shows up with purple pants on that look like a Halloween costume. As classmates tease and make fun of her, Myles starts to see these negative words as fireballs of energy being thrown at Sally. He finds himself in the middle of a war zone invisible to everyone but him! In a suspenseful, supernatural tale of self-discovery and friendship with constant, unexpected twists and turns, Myles tries to understand his newfound superpower. He not only learns about the energy exchange between humans but the energy of all things.

Based on true events, a little green jacket travels through the lives of different children, who live in very different places, and ends up on the other side of the world after a natural disaster. Historical fiction.

Come Away From Her is a boldly written mystery-suspense novel set in the rural town of Black Walnut. The story revolves around the arrival of Tess, a deaf woman running from her past, who unwittingly sets into motion a chain of disturbing events as she is forced to share her secrets with the strangers around her. Her presence upsets the status quo for the townspeople, none more so than for Cap, the pastor of the local church whose life has been marred by substance abuse and tragedy. The morning that Cap discovers a dead body outside the church, life as the town knows it is forever changed.

Grandma Ginny and Timmy take a trip to visit the site of the family farm, where the old house and some rickety buildings still stand. Timmy had visited with Grandpa before and learned all about his tractor, but Grandma has her own stories to tell of planting the fields, harvesting the crops, and feeding the animals. Guided by Grandma’s farm diary and her fond memories, Timmy and Grandma tour the land and talk about what life was like back then.

Grandpa Joe takes his grandson Timmy back to the site of his family’s farm, where the old house and a ramshackle barn still stand. The visit stirs up memories for Grandpa Joe—in particular, the majesty of his own father's shiny red tractor, now rusting in the forgotten fields.

A recovering addict and former child star, Jimmy Cooper gets a second shot at fame as a “famous” private detective in Los Angeles.

Every town needs a hero, and Detective Cal Farrell fits the bill. He stopped an active shooter six months earlier, and now he’s become the darling of the Alexandria press. The problem is that Cal remembers nothing from that day. He’s working with a psychiatrist to recover his memories, but hasn’t had much luck. Then, on one of his morning runs, he is once again the first on scene for a grisly discovery—a body hanging impossibly high on a tree. Soon there’s another victim, killed by a blade and dumped in a ravine.

Once America’s capitalist dream town, Detroit is our country’s greatest urban failure, having fallen the longest and the farthest. But the city’s worst crisis yet (and that’s saying something) has managed to do the unthinkable: turn the end of days into a laboratory for the future. Urban planners, land speculators, neopastoral agriculturalists, and utopian environmentalists―all have been drawn to Detroit’s baroquely decaying frontier. With an eye for both the darkly absurd and the radically new Detroit-area native Mark Binelli has chronicled this convergence.

Charlotte Anne Mattas longs to turn back the clock. Before her husband, Sam, went to serve his country in the war, he was the man everyone could rely on—responsible, intelligent, and loving. But the person who's come back to their family farm is very different from the protector Annie remembers. Sam's experience in the Pacific theater has left him broken in ways no one can understand—but that everyone is learning to fear.

When McGarvey’s best friend, Otto, is charged with treason, Mac and his wife, Petey, set out on a desperate odyssey to clear Otto’s name. Crossing oceans and continents, their journey will take them from Japan to the US to Pakistan to Russia. Caught in a Kremlin crossfire between two warring intel agencies, Mac and Petey must fight for their lives every step of the way.