This Princess Kills Monsters: The Misadventures of a Fairy-Tale Stepsister

Ry Herman

A princess with a mostly useless magical talent takes on horrible monsters, a dozen identical masked heroes, and a talking lion in a quest to save a kingdom—and herself—in this affectionate satire of the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale The Twelve Huntsmen.Someone wants to murder Princess Melilot. This is sadly normal.Melilot is sick of being ordered to go on dangerous quests by her domineering stepmother. Especially since she always winds up needing to be rescued by her more magically talented stepsisters. And now, she's been commanded to marry a king she’s never met.When hideous spider-wolves attack her on the journey to meet her husband-to-be, she is once again rescued—but this time, by twelve eerily similar-looking masked huntsmen. Soon, she has to contend with near-constant attempts on her life, a talking lion that sets bewildering gender tests, and a king who can't recognize his true love when she puts on a pair of trousers. And all the while, she has to fight her growing attraction to not only one of the huntsmen, but also her fiancé’s extremely attractive sister.If Melilot can't unravel the mysteries and rescue herself from peril, kingdoms will fall. Worse, she could end up married to someone she doesn’t love.

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Rose: Love in Violent Times

Inga Muscio

Rose breaks new ground in answering a fundamental question in most feminist and anti-racist writing: how do we identify, witness, and then recover from trauma—as individuals, as families, as communities, and as a country? Muscio's ability to address dire topics with a unique freshness and bravery allows her readers to come face to face with the true brutality of a violent culture, and then react powerfully with righteous rage and hopeful determination.

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It Ends with Us

Colleen Hoover

Sometimes it is the one who loves you who hurts you the most. Lily hasn’t always had it easy, but that’s never stopped her from working hard for the life she wants. She’s come a long way from the small town in Maine where she grew up — she graduated from college, moved to Boston, and started her own business. So when she feels a spark with a gorgeous neurosurgeon named Ryle Kincaid, everything in Lily’s life suddenly seems almost too good to be true. Ryle is assertive, stubborn, maybe even a little arrogant. He’s also sensitive, brilliant, and has a total soft spot for Lily. And the way he looks in scrubs certainly doesn’t hurt. Lily can’t get him out of her head. But Ryle’s complete aversion to relationships is disturbing. Even as Lily finds herself becoming the exception to his “no dating” rule, she can’t help but wonder what made him that way in the first place. As questions about her new relationship overwhelm her, so do thoughts of Atlas Corrigan — her first love and a link to the past she left behind. He was her kindred spirit, her protector. When Atlas suddenly reappears, everything Lily has built with Ryle is threatened.

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Leo: Harness the Power of the Zodiac (astrology, star sign) (Seeing Stars)

Stella Andromeda

ROAR, FLAMING LEO, FULL HEART, STAR POWER, GLOSS SHINE. GO WILD, TAKE YOUR STAGE. Who are you going to fall in love with next? What job should you really be in? When are you finally going to come into that big money? Why does everyone freak out when Mercury is in retrograde? In our increasingly turbulent world, many of us are looking to the sky to find guidance in the ancient art of astrology. In Leo, Stella Andromeda will tell you all you need to know about your astrological life as the lion. Learn how to harness the ancient power of the zodiac and open your mind to what the universe can offer in ways you never would have imagined. With advice that covers everything from self-care to sex, this little book is your key to a very starry future. Contents Get to Know Lucky color; Leo careers; How Leo communicates / The Leo Deep Self-care; The Leo home; Food and cooking; How Leo wants to be loved / Give Me Your birth chart, The Moon effect; Saturn return

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It Ends with Us

Colleen Hoover

Sometimes it is the one who loves you who hurts you the most. Lily hasn’t always had it easy, but that’s never stopped her from working hard for the life she wants. She’s come a long way from the small town in Maine where she grew up — she graduated from college, moved to Boston, and started her own business. So when she feels a spark with a gorgeous neurosurgeon named Ryle Kincaid, everything in Lily’s life suddenly seems almost too good to be true. Ryle is assertive, stubborn, maybe even a little arrogant. He’s also sensitive, brilliant, and has a total soft spot for Lily. And the way he looks in scrubs certainly doesn’t hurt. Lily can’t get him out of her head. But Ryle’s complete aversion to relationships is disturbing. Even as Lily finds herself becoming the exception to his “no dating” rule, she can’t help but wonder what made him that way in the first place. As questions about her new relationship overwhelm her, so do thoughts of Atlas Corrigan — her first love and a link to the past she left behind. He was her kindred spirit, her protector. When Atlas suddenly reappears, everything Lily has built with Ryle is threatened.

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An Ocean Apart

Jill Tew

An electrifying dystopian novel packed with a tantalizing love triangle, gripping political intrigue, and a Bachelor-style competition from the critically acclaimed author of The Dividing Sky, Jill Tew. Eden Lowell has plenty to be frustrated about. In the flooded Marshes of former Miami, each day is about survival. Even her feelings for her best friend Henry are more complicated than they should be. Luckily, Eden knows exactly who to blame: the Cruisers, corporate elite who sail the world on massive ships instead of facing the environmental crimes they’ve committed on land. When Eden learns that a Cruiser family is hosting a dating competition for their heir, Theo Desjardins, she seizes an opportunity. Aided by a political agitator known as the Ringmaster, she’ll infiltrate the competition, break Theo’s heart, and then steal his money for the Marshes. A perfect plan… Until she gets to know Theo, who’s not only handsome but surprisingly kind… As Eden drifts deeper down into the Cruisers’ world, the line separating truth and lies becomes murky. Torn between two identities, two loves, and two futures, will she choose the mission, or her heart?

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Dan in Green Gables: A Modern Reimagining of Anne of Green Gables

Rey Terciero

In this modern reimagining of Anne of Green Gables, effervescent extrovert Dan Stewart-Álvarez is surprised to find home and community in rural Tennessee. Despite a life on the road with his free-spirited mother, fifteen-year-old Dan Stewart-Álvarez has always wanted to settle down. He just didn’t think it’d be like this: with his mother abandoning him in rural Tennessee with two strangers—his gentle grandmother and conservative, rough-around-the-edges grandfather. Here, he is forced to adjust to working the farm, entering high school, and hardest yet—reckoning with his queerness in a severe Southern Baptist community. But even as Dan grows closer to his mawmaw, befriends fellow outsiders at school, and tries to make a new life for himself in Green Gables, he has to discover whether he can contend with intolerance and adapt to change without losing himself in the process. From award-winning author Rey Terciero and Eisner Award nominee and illustrator Claudia Aguirre comes a new retelling of Anne of Green Gables about unconventional families, queer identity, and finding the meaning of home in the most unlikely of places.

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Dan in Green Gables: A Modern Reimagining of Anne of Green Gables

Rey Terciero

In this modern reimagining of Anne of Green Gables, effervescent extrovert Dan Stewart-Álvarez is surprised to find home and community in rural Tennessee. Despite a life on the road with his free-spirited mother, fifteen-year-old Dan Stewart-Álvarez has always wanted to settle down. He just didn’t think it’d be like this: with his mother abandoning him in rural Tennessee with two strangers—his gentle grandmother and conservative, rough-around-the-edges grandfather. Here, he is forced to adjust to working the farm, entering high school, and hardest yet—reckoning with his queerness in a severe Southern Baptist community. But even as Dan grows closer to his mawmaw, befriends fellow outsiders at school, and tries to make a new life for himself in Green Gables, he has to discover whether he can contend with intolerance and adapt to change without losing himself in the process. From award-winning author Rey Terciero and Eisner Award nominee and illustrator Claudia Aguirre comes a new retelling of Anne of Green Gables about unconventional families, queer identity, and finding the meaning of home in the most unlikely of places.

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A Monstrous Need (Bonkers Season 4: The Bluebeard Chronicles)

Elizabeth Stephens

Her strength and her vulnerability have tangled themselves together like barbed wire and formed a cage around my heart. And I don’t want it back. It’s hers to do with what she likes. - the monstrous Count Laval Arianne, a witch born without magic, is searching for something precious to her and is willing to take great risks to find it – including breaking into the beastly Count Laval’s castle. Mistaking her for an assassin, Count Laval has every intention of confining her there, then killing her. But as he begins to learn more about Arianne and the sorcerers who are after her, he begins to develop a need for her…and it’s a need most monstrous. Read A Monstrous Need, part of Bonkers Season 4: The Bluebeard Chronicles, now on Backerkit

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Leo: Harness the Power of the Zodiac (astrology, star sign) (Seeing Stars)

Stella Andromeda

ROAR, FLAMING LEO, FULL HEART, STAR POWER, GLOSS SHINE. GO WILD, TAKE YOUR STAGE. Who are you going to fall in love with next? What job should you really be in? When are you finally going to come into that big money? Why does everyone freak out when Mercury is in retrograde? In our increasingly turbulent world, many of us are looking to the sky to find guidance in the ancient art of astrology. In Leo, Stella Andromeda will tell you all you need to know about your astrological life as the lion. Learn how to harness the ancient power of the zodiac and open your mind to what the universe can offer in ways you never would have imagined. With advice that covers everything from self-care to sex, this little book is your key to a very starry future. Contents Get to Know Lucky color; Leo careers; How Leo communicates / The Leo Deep Self-care; The Leo home; Food and cooking; How Leo wants to be loved / Give Me Your birth chart, The Moon effect; Saturn return

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All About Love: New Visions

bell hooks

All About Love offers radical new ways to think about love by showing its interconnectedness in our private and public lives. In eleven concise chapters, hooks explains how our everyday notions of what it means to give and receive love often fail us, and how these ideals are established in early childhood. She offers a rethinking of self-love (without narcissism) that will bring peace and compassion to our personal and professional lives, and asserts the place of love to end struggles between individuals, in communities, and among societies. Moving from the cultural to the intimate, hooks notes the ties between love and loss and challenges the prevailing notion that romantic love is the most important love of all. Visionary and original, hooks shows how love heals the wounds we bear as individuals and as a nation, for it is the cornerstone of compassion and forgiveness and holds the power to overcome shame. For readers who have found ongoing delight and wisdom in bell hooks's life and work, and for those who are just now discovering her, All About Love is essential reading and a brilliant book that will change how we think about love, our culture-and one another.

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The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex

Melissa Febos

From the national best-selling author of Girlhood, an examination of the solitude, freedoms, and feminist heroes Melissa Febos discovered during a year of celibacy. A wise and transformative look at relationships and self-knowledge.In the wake of a catastrophic two-year relationship, Melissa Febos decided to take a break—for three months she would abstain from dating, from relationships, and sex. Her friends were amused. Did she really think three months was a long time? But to Febos, it was. Ever since her teens, she had been in one relationship after another. As she puts it, she could trace a “daisy chain of romances” from her adolescence to her mid-thirties. Finally, she would carve out time to focus on herself and examine the patterns that had produced her midlife disaster. Over those first few months, she gleaned insights into her past and awoke to the joys of being single. She decided to extend her celibacy not knowing it would become the most fulfilling and sensual year of her life. No longer defined by her romantic pursuits, she learned to relish the delights of solitude, the thrill of living on her own terms, the sensual pleasures unmediated by lovers, and the freedom to pursue her ideals without distraction or guilt. Bringing her own experiences into conversation with those of women throughout history—from Hildegard von Bingen, Virginia Woolf, and Octavia Butler to the Shakers and Sappho—Febos situates her story within a newfound lineage of role models who unapologetically pursued their ambitions and ideals.By abstaining from all forms of romantic entanglement, Febos began to see her life and her self-worth in a radical new way. Her year of divestment transformed her relationships with friends and peers, her spirituality, her creative practice, and most of all her relationship to herself. Blending intimate personal narrative and incisive cultural criticism, The Dry Season tells a story that's as much about celibacy as its pleasure, desire, fulfillment. Infused with fearless honesty and keen intellect, it's the memoir of a woman learning to live at the center of her own story, and a much-needed catalyst for a new conversation around sex and love.

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This Princess Kills Monsters: The Misadventures of a Fairy-Tale Stepsister

Ry Herman

A princess with a mostly useless magical talent takes on horrible monsters, a dozen identical masked heroes, and a talking lion in a quest to save a kingdom—and herself—in this affectionate satire of the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale The Twelve Huntsmen.Someone wants to murder Princess Melilot. This is sadly normal.Melilot is sick of being ordered to go on dangerous quests by her domineering stepmother. Especially since she always winds up needing to be rescued by her more magically talented stepsisters. And now, she's been commanded to marry a king she’s never met.When hideous spider-wolves attack her on the journey to meet her husband-to-be, she is once again rescued—but this time, by twelve eerily similar-looking masked huntsmen. Soon, she has to contend with near-constant attempts on her life, a talking lion that sets bewildering gender tests, and a king who can't recognize his true love when she puts on a pair of trousers. And all the while, she has to fight her growing attraction to not only one of the huntsmen, but also her fiancé’s extremely attractive sister.If Melilot can't unravel the mysteries and rescue herself from peril, kingdoms will fall. Worse, she could end up married to someone she doesn’t love.

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A Monstrous Need (Bonkers Season 4: The Bluebeard Chronicles)

Elizabeth Stephens

Her strength and her vulnerability have tangled themselves together like barbed wire and formed a cage around my heart. And I don’t want it back. It’s hers to do with what she likes. - the monstrous Count Laval Arianne, a witch born without magic, is searching for something precious to her and is willing to take great risks to find it – including breaking into the beastly Count Laval’s castle. Mistaking her for an assassin, Count Laval has every intention of confining her there, then killing her. But as he begins to learn more about Arianne and the sorcerers who are after her, he begins to develop a need for her…and it’s a need most monstrous. Read A Monstrous Need, part of Bonkers Season 4: The Bluebeard Chronicles, now on Backerkit

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The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change

Rebecca Solnit

Rebecca Solnit offers a thrilling survey of the sheer breadth and scale of social, political, scientific, and cultural change over the past three quarters of a century.In this sequel to her enduring bestseller Hope in the Dark, Solnit surveys a world that has changed dramatically since the year 1960. She argues that, despite the forces seeking to turn back the clock on history, change is not a possibility, it is an inevitability, and the nature of that change is determined by who participates and how.The changes amount to nothing less than dismantling an old civilization and building a new one, whose newness is often the return of the old ways and wisdoms. In this rising worldview, interconnection is a core idea and value. But because the transformation has happened in so many disparate arenas, and within a longer arc of history, the scale of that change is seldom recognized.While the backlash of white nationalist authoritarianism, Manosphere misogyny, and justifications for callousness, selfishness, economic inequality, and environmental destruction collectively drive individualism and isolation, the elements of this new world are related in their vision of more inclusion, equality, interconnection. This new vision embraces antiracism, feminism, a more expansive understanding of gender, environmental thinking, and indigenous and non-Western ideas, particularly Buddhism, as well as breakthroughs in the life sciences and neuroscience, pointing toward a more interconnected, relational world.

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Bottom of the Breath: A Novel

Jayne Mills

For fans of Liane Moriarty and Maria Semple, this contemporary debut novel weaves together romance, mystery, and adventure as a woman travels to the Grand Canyon seeking answers after uncovering an old family secret.After crashing into a devastating revelation, Cyd’s tranquil life on the Florida panhandle is further upended when she receives a letter announcing an inheritance from an estranged aunt. The inheritance contains mysterious “items of a personal nature” which Cyd must collect in person halfway across the country. In a last attempt to salvage her deteriorating marriage, Cyd agrees to travel with her husband on what he promises—and she questions—will be the trip of a lifetime. As they set out, a hurricane threatens their hometown. Soon, fueled by the growing threat of the storm and the tension brewing between them, the couple’s long-suppressed problems erupt. Cyd digs deep for the courage to continue the journey on her own, unsure if either her home or her marriage will survive. Once in Phoenix, Cyd learns the strange details of the inheritance and a decades-old family secret. But what was the whole truth? Clues and instinct lead Cyd to Sedona and then to the Grand Canyon. She descends into the vast chasm alone searching for answers to newly raised questions and age-old mysteries. She steps off the beaten path, literally, knowing she must make peace with her pain-filled past and her uncertain future.

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The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change

Rebecca Solnit

Rebecca Solnit offers a thrilling survey of the sheer breadth and scale of social, political, scientific, and cultural change over the past three quarters of a century.In this sequel to her enduring bestseller Hope in the Dark, Solnit surveys a world that has changed dramatically since the year 1960. She argues that, despite the forces seeking to turn back the clock on history, change is not a possibility, it is an inevitability, and the nature of that change is determined by who participates and how.The changes amount to nothing less than dismantling an old civilization and building a new one, whose newness is often the return of the old ways and wisdoms. In this rising worldview, interconnection is a core idea and value. But because the transformation has happened in so many disparate arenas, and within a longer arc of history, the scale of that change is seldom recognized.While the backlash of white nationalist authoritarianism, Manosphere misogyny, and justifications for callousness, selfishness, economic inequality, and environmental destruction collectively drive individualism and isolation, the elements of this new world are related in their vision of more inclusion, equality, interconnection. This new vision embraces antiracism, feminism, a more expansive understanding of gender, environmental thinking, and indigenous and non-Western ideas, particularly Buddhism, as well as breakthroughs in the life sciences and neuroscience, pointing toward a more interconnected, relational world.

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Bottom of the Breath: A Novel

Jayne Mills

For fans of Liane Moriarty and Maria Semple, this contemporary debut novel weaves together romance, mystery, and adventure as a woman travels to the Grand Canyon seeking answers after uncovering an old family secret.After crashing into a devastating revelation, Cyd’s tranquil life on the Florida panhandle is further upended when she receives a letter announcing an inheritance from an estranged aunt. The inheritance contains mysterious “items of a personal nature” which Cyd must collect in person halfway across the country. In a last attempt to salvage her deteriorating marriage, Cyd agrees to travel with her husband on what he promises—and she questions—will be the trip of a lifetime. As they set out, a hurricane threatens their hometown. Soon, fueled by the growing threat of the storm and the tension brewing between them, the couple’s long-suppressed problems erupt. Cyd digs deep for the courage to continue the journey on her own, unsure if either her home or her marriage will survive. Once in Phoenix, Cyd learns the strange details of the inheritance and a decades-old family secret. But what was the whole truth? Clues and instinct lead Cyd to Sedona and then to the Grand Canyon. She descends into the vast chasm alone searching for answers to newly raised questions and age-old mysteries. She steps off the beaten path, literally, knowing she must make peace with her pain-filled past and her uncertain future.

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Shattered Gods (Dark Olympus, #10)

Katee Robert

Hermes, [Redacted], and [Redacted]'s book.

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Seconds

Bryan Lee O'Malley

Katie’s got it pretty good. She’s a talented young chef, she runs a successful restaurant, and she has big plans to open an even better one. Then, all at once, progress on the new location bogs down, her charming ex-boyfriend pops up, her fling with another chef goes sour, and her best waitress gets badly hurt. And just like that, Katie’s life goes from pretty good to not so much. What she needs is a second chance. Everybody deserves one, after all—but they don’t come easy. Luckily for Katie, a mysterious girl appears in the middle of the night with simple instructions for a do-it-yourself do-over:   1. Write your mistake 2. Ingest one mushroom 3. Go to sleep 4. Wake anew   And just like that, all the bad stuff never happened, and Katie is given another chance to get things right. She’s also got a dresser drawer full of magical mushrooms—and an irresistible urge to make her life not just good, but perfect. Too bad it’s against the rules. But Katie doesn’t care about the rules—and she’s about to discover the unintended consequences of the best intentions.   From the mind and pen behind the acclaimed Scott Pilgrim series comes a madcap new tale of existential angst, everyday obstacles, young love, and ancient spirits that’s sharp-witted and tenderhearted, whimsical and wise.

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