Showing results by narrator "Catherine Taber" in All Categories

Four sisters face new beginnings in this heartfelt modern take on Little Women. Amy March is more like her older sister Jo than she'd like to admit. An up-and-coming designer in New York's competitive fashion industry, ambitious Amy is determined to get out of her sisters' shadow and keep her distance from their North Carolina hometown. But when Jo's wedding forces her home, she must face what she really wants...and confront the One Big Mistake that could upend her life and forever change her relationship with Jo.

You are not alone. Whether you’re a free spirit, an office exec, a writer, musician, college student, or tired parent - your soul, like mine, knows life is meant to go beyond rat races and rare applause. This book speaks to that belief. And if you’re not careful, you may find tears warming your eyes as you read because finally someone is naming your weariness, your striving, your questions of why you just can’t quite make it, or the emptiness that hit because maybe you did.

Eleven-year-old Maybelle Lane collects sounds. She records the Louisiana crickets chirping, Momma strumming her guitar, their broken trailer door squeaking. But the crown jewel of her collection is a sound she didn't collect herself: an old recording of her daddy's warm-sunshine laugh, saved on an old phone's voicemail. It's the only thing she has of his, and the only thing she knows about him. Until the day she hears that laugh - his laugh - pouring out of the car radio. Going against Momma's wishes, Maybelle starts listening to her radio DJ daddy's new show....

Some locales seem to come with their own soundtrack. Don Ho and his tiny bubbles provide the background music for Hawaii, Edith Piaf for Paris. The reggae of Bob Marley evokes Jamaica. The soundtrack for Alabama is without question provided by our troubled troubadour Hank Williams. The 2016 biography Hank by Mark Ribowsky paints a dark picture of the musician's short, alcoholic, drug-filled life: a life of loneliness and pain. He goes so far as to call Hank's life story "noir-ish"....

Evelyn Peters is desperate. Desperate for a way out of McNair Falls, the dying Southern town that's held her captive since the day she was born. Desperate to protect her little sister from her mother's terrifying and abusive boyfriend. And desperate to connect with anyone, even fallen golden boy Ashton Harper, longtime boyfriend of the girl Evelyn can never stop thinking about - beautiful, volatile, tragically dead Reid Brewer. Until a single night sends Evelyn and Ashton on a collision course that starts something neither of them can stop.

Eleven-year-old Brittany knows there has to be a better world out there. Lately, though, it sure doesn't feel like it. She and her best friend, Marisol, stick together at school, but at home Brittany's granny is sick, her cat is missing, there's never any money, and there's her little brother, Tommy, to worry about. Brittany has a hard time picturing her future as anything but a plain white sky. If her life is going to ever change, she needs a plan.

Alice is angry at having to move to Rainbow, Georgia - a too small, too hot, dried-up place she's sure will never feel like home. Then she gets put in charge of walking her elderly neighbor's dog. But Clarence won't budge without Miss Millie, so Alice and Miss Millie walk him together. Strolling with Clarence and Miss Millie quickly becomes the highlight of Alice's day and opens her eyes to all sorts of new things to marvel over.

Long before they became famous writers, Truman Capote (In Cold Blood) and Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird) were childhood friends in Monroeville, Alabama. This fictionalized account of their time together opens at the beginning of the Great Depression, when Tru is seven and Nelle is six. They love playing pirates, but they like playing Sherlock and Watson-style detectives even more. It’s their pursuit of a case of drugstore theft that lands the daring duo in real trouble. Humor and heartache intermingle in this lively look at two budding writers in the 1930s South.

On the day a black truck rattles past her house and a Klan flyer lands in her front yard, 10-year-old Beth disappears from her Simmonsville, Georgia home. Armed with skills sharpened while caring for an alcoholic mother, she must battle to survive the days and months ahead. Seven years later, Imogene Coulter is burying her father - a Klan leader she has spent her life distancing herself from. But while clearing out her father's apparent hideout, she finds a child. Young and alive, in an abandoned basement, and behind a door that only locks from the outside.

Beatrice Corwell has a crooked haircut, eight well-trained cats, and a plan: she’s turning herself into a Tin Man. Once her heart is made of metal, she’ll no longer miss her beloved dead grandma, her absent dad, or her recently moved-away best friend. While Beatrice awaits her transformation, she keeps vigil with a special doll and a handful of wishes she’s determined to make come true. With her encyclopedic knowledge, there must be a way to grant her heart’s deepest desires.