Showing results by narrator "Jeanette Illidge" in All Categories

Striking in their emotional immediacy, the stories in Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self are based in a world where inequality is reality but where the insecurities of adolescence and young adulthood, and the tensions within family and the community, are sometimes the biggest complicating forces in one's sense of identity and the choices one makes.

Philippa Watson, a good-natured yet troubled 17-year-old, has just moved to Washington, DC. She’s lonely until she meets Judy Peabody, a brilliant and tempestuous classmate. The girls become unlikely friends and fashion themselves as intellectuals, drawing the notice of Christine Martins, their dazzling English teacher, who enthralls them with her passion for literature and her love of noirish detective fiction. When Philippa returns a novel Miss Martins has lent her, she interrupts a man grappling with her in the shadows.

Lady Serena Wynter doesn’t mind flirting with a bit of scandal - she’s determined to ignore society’s strictures and live life on her own fiercely independent terms. These days, she chooses to pour her passions into charitable causes with the vibrant group of ladies in her Wednesday Afternoon Social Club. But there is one man who stirs Serena’s deepest emotions, one who’s irresistibly handsome, infuriatingly circumspect, and too honorable for his own good....

Kennedy Mitchell is brilliant, beautiful and tired of being the only Black woman in the room. Two years ago, she was plucked from the reception desk and placed in the boardroom in the name of diversity. Rather than play along, she and her best friend founded Token, a boutique PR agency that helps “diversity-challenged” companies and celebrities. With corporate America diversifying workplaces and famous people getting into reputation-damaging controversies, Token is in high demand. With business booming, Kennedy discovers there’s a lot of on-the-job learning.

Edgar Allan Poe may be 150 years beyond this world, but the themes of his beloved works have much in common with modern young adult fiction. Whether the stories are familiar or discovered for the first time, listeners will revel in both Edgar Allan Poe's classic tales, and in the 13 unique and unforgettable ways that they've been brought to life.

Many of us are facing unprecedented attacks on our democracy, our privacy, and our hard-won civil rights. If you're Black in the US, this is not new. As Colorlines editors Akiba Solomon and Kenrya Rankin show, Black Americans subvert and resist life-threatening forces as a matter of course. In this audiobook, leading organizers, artists, journalists, comedians, and filmmakers offer wisdom on how they fight white supremacy. It's a must-listen for anyone new to resistance work, and for the next generation of leaders building a better future.

The last thing I ever expected was to insult a colleague before I even started a new job. But here I am, already on thin ice after I mistook a fellow doctor for a patient on a bad drug trip. Oops. No matter how handsome or infuriatingly aloof he is, Grant Gao isn’t going to spoil my fresh start. Instead, I’m going to keep myself (maybe too) busy with my roommates, work, and passion: starting a new program to improve pregnancy care in the community.

From nineteenth-century abolitionism to Black Lives Matter today, progressive social movements have been at the forefront of social change. Yet it is seldom recognized that such movements have not only engaged in political action but also posed crucial philosophical questions about the meaning of justice and about how the demands of justice can be met. Michele Moody-Adams argues that anyone who is concerned with the theory or the practice of justice—or both—must ask what can be learned from social movements.

Beach-loving surfer Alberta has been the only black girl in town for years. Alberta's best friend, Laramie, is the closest thing she has to a sister, but there are some things even Laramie can't understand. When the bed and breakfast across the street finds new owners, Alberta is ecstatic to learn the family is black - and they have a 12-year-old daughter just like her.

Still reeling from her recent battle (and grounded until she graduates), Alice must abandon her friends to complete her mission: find The Heart and prevent the Red Lady's rise. But the deeper she ventures into Wonderland, the more topsy-turvy everything becomes. It’s not until she’s at her wits end that she realizes - Wonderland is trying to save her. There’s a new player on the board; a poet capable of using Nightmares to not only influence the living but raise the dead. This Poet looks to claim the Black Queen’s power - and Alice's budding abilities - as their own.

Aster is on a mission for the Lady Ghosts, helping an escaped Good Luck Girl. Although grateful to be contributing to the cause, Aster chafes at the way the Lady Ghosts work, taking as few risks as possible. So Aster is delighted when Clem tells her that there has been support from dustbloods around the country for the welcome house arson, orchestrated by Aster.

Alice and her crew are doing their best to recover from the last boss battle, but some of them keep having these. . . dreams: visions of a dark past—and an even darker future. Sadly, the evil in Wonderland may not be as defeated as they’d hoped. Attacked by Nightmares unlike any they’ve ever seen, Alice will have to step between the coming darkness and the mortal world once more. But this time is different. This time, the monsters aren’t waiting for her on the other side of the Veil.

John F. Kennedy said he needed sex every three days or he got a headache. In the White House, he never had a headache. Kennedy met Mary Pinchot in 1935, when he was eighteen and she was sixteen. Twenty years later, when she was living in Virginia and married to Cord Meyer, a high-ranking CIA official, she was Jack and Jackie Kennedy’s next-door neighbor. In 1962, she was an artist, divorced, living in Washington—and Kennedy’s first serious romance. Mary Pinchot Meyer was more than a bedmate. She was Kennedy’s beacon light: his sole female adviser.

The Vagina Book is an essential guide packed with invaluable information about sexual health that everybody should know, but might be too afraid to ask. With sections on anatomy, periods, hormones, sex, contraception, fertility, hair care, and so much more, this fun-to-hear guide helps listeners make healthy decisions for their bodies. Compelling personal essays from a diverse group of luminary figures - including Margaret Cho, Roxane Gay, and Blair Imani - are sprinkled throughout, enriching the pages with beauty, strength, and honesty.

Triumph. Tragedy. The empyreal. The infernal. Even the mundane, filtered through the fantastical. Superheroes are, appropriately enough, a sort of super-genre, encompassing all other story types. This YA anthology features thirteen short stories that creatively turn superhero tropes on their head, while still paying homage to the genre that has found fans for more than eight decades. And there will be no mistake—superheroes don’t have to just be generic handsome white dudes.

Four teens have dug up the time capsule that their parents buried in 1986 and never bothered to recover. But in addition to the expected ephemera of mixtapes, Walkmans, photographs, letters, toys, and assorted junk, Elayah, Liam, Marcie, and Jorja discover something sinister: a hunting knife stained with blood and wrapped with a note. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to kill anyone."

For years, Columbia freshman Serena has dreamed of visiting Paris - the city where her parents had their idyllic, romantic honeymoon. And since her father unexpectedly died two years ago, Serena has cooked up a plan to travel to Paris with her mother and sister as a way to celebrate and remember her dad. Unfortunately, her mom and sister are less committed to the plan - her mom backs out to attend a conference in London, and her sister makes plans in Madrid after a misunderstanding with Serena.

The village of Kalaro is dying. Since the coming of the Gray, food is scarce, plague is everywhere, and babies enter the world choking and dying. Rot has taken over the village houses that stand dilapidated and abandoned. In a bid to save his people, Odessa Kusa's father, Omari, plans to kill one of the Low Gods—a grave sin thought to be nigh impossible for a mortal man—and Odessa is thrilled to be brought along on the hunt.

Photographer Cassie Harris loves her job - her company Buxom Boudoir makes people look beautiful and feel empowered with her modern twist on classic pinup photography. Cassie’s best friend, Dana, is about to launch her own dangerously dreamy lingerie line and wants Cassie to shoot and direct the career-changing national campaign. But company politics and Dana’s complicated pregnancy interfere, and Cassie finds herself - a proud plus-size Black woman - not behind the camera but in front of it.

Before she kissed one of the Cohen boys, seventeen-year-old Jessi Rumfield knew what it was like to have a family—even if, technically, that family didn’t belong to her. She’d spent her childhood in the house next door, challenging Rowan Cohen to tennis matches while his older brother, Luke, studied in the background and Mel watched over the three like the mother Jessi always wished she had. But then everything changed.