Showing results by narrator "Karen White" in All Categories

Sex trafficking. We hear about it on the nightly news and in special interest stories from around the world, but it occurs daily in communities all around us. Every year, thousands of young women are forced into sexual exploitation. Most are under the age of 18. The damage this causes to their emotions and souls is immeasurable. But they are not without hope.

Dahlia Mallard has finally found her destiny - running an ice cream shop in Bliss, the happiest bridal town in the Midwest. Problem is, her heart is bigger than her bank account, and she needs a serious influx of cash to get through the winter. Her last-ditch effort? Convincing country music superstar Billy Brenton to commit to attending her risqué flavor-tasting event to boost ticket sales.

Nya, a dedicated teacher at an inner-city school, is desperate to give her only son opportunities that her own public high school students will never have. When a controversial incident at his private school threatens to get Omari expelled, Nya must confront her own deepest fears to give her son a future.

Lulu is a fascinating heroine based on the equally fascinating life of her creator. Come take the journey with Lulu as she grows from a precocious child in Charleston, SC, into a coed at a college in the North. A journey that comes with all of the heartbreak of first love, motherly rivalry, brotherly caring, and parental betrayal. With a literary voice in the grand tradition of the great Southern writers, one of America's best-selling nonfiction authors, Nancy Friday, has in Lulu created a fascinating first work of fiction.

She needs a date to some swanky something or other. He's more of a fish-sticks-and-denim guy. But for a woman who's not afraid to get naughty in an elevator at a charity fundraiser, he can stand a couple days of smoked salmon and Armani. With their chemistry, there's no doubt they can pull off a fake relationship. They just need to remember that in the end, they're going in very opposite directions. But what could go wrong? It's just a weekend. It's just this one time. It's just for fun.

It's Valentine's Day in Tinker's Cove, and while the cupcakes Lucy's baking for her children will have pink frosting and candy hearts, her thoughts aren't centered on sugary sentiments. She's barely arrived at her first board meeting of the newly renovated library when Bitsy Howell, the new librarian, is found dead in the basement, shot only minutes before story hour was to start. The agitated board members assume that Bitsy was killed by an outsider until Detective Lt. Horowitz arrives on the scene and announces that the killer is among them.

As a young woman, Jendara left the cold northern isles of the Ironbound Archipelago to find her fortune. Now, many years later, she's forsaken her buccaneer ways and returned home in search of a simpler life, where she can raise her young son, Kran, in peace. When a strange clan of shapeshifting raiders pillages her home, however, there's no choice for Jendara but to take up her axes once again to help the islanders defend all that they hold dear.

Internationally best-selling author and relationship expert Arielle Ford offers the keys to rediscovering love, passion, respect, and renewed commitment years after the simple act of falling in love and getting married. It's one thing to fall in love and get married. It is quite another thing to have a marriage you love. This is the true purpose of Turn Your Mate into Your Soulmate.

An important medical breakthrough has a shameful history. In 1840s Alabama, a slave-owning doctor performs medical experiments on involuntary subjects - enslaved women - in an effort to solve the problem of fistulas, a post-childbirth anomaly. As the experiments proceed, and he gets close to a solution, the women try to survive and even find dignity in the face of inhuman treatment.

Retirement insecurity is an increasingly serious manifestation of the vast inequality that risks destroying the social fabric in America. The nearly inevitable consequence of lifetime wage discrepancies, security in retirement is linked to the kinds of jobs we hold during our work lives. That, in turn, is a product of all the forces leading to historic levels of inequality, forces that have protected the very wealthy, destroyed any hold on stability for the poor, and gradually eroded the security of the vast middle class.

Besides the annual Turkey Trot 5K on Thanksgiving Day, Lucy expects the approaching holiday to be a relatively uneventful one - until she finds beautiful Alison Franklin dead and frozen in Blueberry Pond. No one knows much about Alison, except that she was the daughter of the wealthy investor Ed Franklin and struggled quietly with drug addiction. Police blame her death on an accidental overdose, but Lucy can't understand what terrible forces could have led the privileged woman to her watery ruin.

Kagur is a warrior of the Blacklions, fierce and fearless hunters in the savage Realm of the Mammoth Lords. When her clan is slaughtered by a frost giant she considered her adopted brother, honor demands that she, the last surviving Blacklion, track down her old ally and take the tribe's revenge. Yet this is no normal betrayal, for the murderous giant has followed the whispers of a dark god down into the depths of the earth, into a primeval cavern forgotten by time....

Jendara is a woman of many roles: trader, pirate, islander - and mother. Having left behind her life of piracy, Jendara and her young son, Kran, are back in her native Ironbound Archipelago, looking to make an honest living as seaborne traders. But when Kran goes missing and the threat of a goblin attack looms, Jendara has no choice but to take up her ax once more if she wants to save her new friends - and her son.

Moni, the goat boy, was a very cheerful young man who loved his job and his flock with all his heart. When young Paula first encounter's Moni's jubilant nature and happy song, she is captivated by his joy and becomes his friend. Moni spends each day up in the mountains with the goats and has a particularly special attachment to a kid named Maggerli. One day, Moni runs into a boy from another village who has discovered a beautiful diamond cross and the boy tells Moni that if he keeps his secret about the gross, he will buy Maggerli for Moni to save her from death.

There's big trouble in Quincy's Gap when the "Diva of Dough" arrives to bake the wedding cake for Milla and Jackson's Christmas Eve wedding. The Diva, a celebrity television chef and cookbook author, is Milla's younger sister. And while her cakes are delectably sweet and incredibly beautiful, the Diva makes enemies wherever she goes. When one of the Diva's enemies decides to take her out, and Deputy Lucy Hanover finds the famous chef's body covered in cake batter, the Supper Club members find themselves up to their necks in suspects.

James Henry and the Flab Five are invited to serve as judges at Hog Fest, a celebrated barbecue festival in the Virginia mountains. But when one of the "pit masters" is found dead and a member of the supper club is accused of the murder, James and his friends have to lick the sauce off their fingers and get to work catching a killer. Amid a fairground filled with colorful people and tempting food, The Flab Five are sure to fall off the diet wagon. But James Henry has more to worry about than his expanding waistline.

Two of her four kids may be out of the nest, but Lucy Stone knows only too well that mothering is a lifetime commitment. At least that commitment means she gets to kick back and enjoy a fancy Mother's Day brunch - that is, before the festivities are interrupted by a nasty scene between two moms feuding over the popularity of their teenage daughters. Even after witnessing that scene though, Lucy never expects to see actual blood spilled.

In The Marsh Builders, Sharon Levy delves into the intertwined histories of wetlands loss and water pollution. The book's springboard is the tale of a years-long citizen uprising in Humboldt County, California, which led to the creation of one of the first US wetlands designed to treat city sewage. The book explores the global roots of this local story: the cholera epidemics that plagued 19th-century Europe; the researchers who invented modern sewage treatment after bumbling across the insight that microbes break down pollutants in water; and more.

Descendants of a prominent slaveholding family, Elizabeth, Grace, and Katharine Lumpkin grew up in a culture of white supremacy. But while Elizabeth remained a lifelong believer, her younger sisters chose vastly different lives. Seeking their fortunes in the North, Grace and Katharine reinvented themselves as radical thinkers whose literary works and organizing efforts brought the nation's attention to issues of region, race, and labor. In Sisters and Rebels, National Humanities Award-winning historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall follows the divergent paths of the Lumpkin sisters.

There was a family of three brothers. The older two were very intelligent and much beloved by their parents; the youngest however was considered to be a dunce and a pest and was always getting in his mother's way. One day, the king announced that he was offering his daughter's hand in marriage to whoever could build a flying ship. The older two brothers were immediately sent on their way to try to construct the flying ship, while the youngest was left behind.