Showing results by narrator "Joy Osmanski" in All Categories

M. J. Stark's life is picture-perfect - she has a dream job as a magazine editor, a sexy doctor boyfriend, and a glamorous life in Manhattan. But behind her success, she can't shake a deep sense of loneliness. So when her boyfriend offers her a completely new life in California after a promotion does not go her way, she decides to give it a try. Once there, M. J. is left to fend for herself in a small California beach town, with only the company of her elderly neighbor, Gloria.

Don’t read the comments. It’s advice that feels as old as the internet, yet more relevant than ever. The tools we once hailed for their power to connect people and spark creativity can also be hotbeds of hate and harassment. Gupta interviews people who have built and sustained fascinating online communities in our unpredictable digital climate, and dives deep with activists, organizers, journalists, and executives to find out what strategies work best for them. Is there really such a thing as a recipe for success?

Laterre is on the brink of war. The Third Estate are rioting against the injustices of a corrupt system. The Patriarche, reeling from the murder of his only heir, makes brutal attempts to quash the unrest, while a new militant faction launches a series of deadly attacks. And three outlaws find themselves pulled into the fray. Marcellus is now a traitor to his planet, willing to do anything to stop his grandfather from seizing control of Laterre. Chatine is a prisoner on Bastille. Alouette is a fugitive who has been lied to her entire life. These three renegades must risk everything.

The Storm Dragons are here! Three new girls share an incredible secret—they can transform into powerful Storm Dragons when they travel to the Magic Forest! They must work together to banish an all-new villain, the Chaos Queen.

Cate, Renee, and Abby have come to New York for very different reasons, and in a bustling city of millions, they are linked together through circumstance and chance. Cate has just been named the features editor of Gloss, a high-end lifestyle magazine. It's a professional coup, but her new job comes with more complications than Cate ever anticipated.

Lauren, mother of twins, wakes up one morning to her Wife Alarm Bells sounding. She sleuths on her husband’s phone and stumbles on a dirty secret that explodes her marriage. Madeline has it all—a penthouse apartment, a perfect daughter, and no-strings-attached romps with handsome men. But when she learns she might lose her child to her ex in England, it stirs up a decades-old personal tragedy. Sophie, with too much FOMO and never enough money, obsesses over her ex-husband’s Family 2.0—all while keeping her true desires hidden, even from herself.

When celebrated and respected agent Fritz Hudson passes away, he leaves a trail of Hollywood glory in his wake - and two separate families who never knew the other existed. Allie and Des Hudson are products of Fritz's first marriage to Honora, a beautiful but troubled starlet whose life ended in a tragic overdose. Meanwhile, Fritz was falling in love on the Delaware Bay with New Age hippie Susa Pratt - they had a daughter together, Cara, and while Fritz loved Susa with everything he had, he never quite managed to tell her or Cara about his West Coast family.

Allie, Des, and Cara, each having her own reasons for wanting a share of their father's estate, meet in the grand Victorian home in which he grew up, only to be greeted by another secret he purposely hid from them: his sister Bonnie. The women reluctantly band together to take on Fritz's challenge, working with a local contractor to begin the renovations financed by an account Fritz had set up for the task. While the restoration appears to go smoothly at first, it soon becomes apparent that the work will be more extensive than originally thought.

At thirty-nine, Nicole Mueller’s life is on the rocks in “this brilliant, tangled web of lies, cover ups and deception” (Mary Kubica, New York Times bestselling author). Her once brilliant law career is falling apart. She and her husband, Dan, are about to be forced out of the apartment they love. After a warning from her firm’s senior partners, she receives an invitation from an exclusive women’s networking group, Panthera Leo. Membership is anonymous, but every member is a successful professional.

From the beloved nanny to stars like Jessica Biel and Justin Timberlake, Emily Blunt and John Krasinski, and Cash Warren and Jessica Alba comes a loving yet no-nonsense guide to the first four months of parenthood so you can raise a happy baby - and be happy parents.

Always believing she was an ugly duckling, Chrissy Jenkins thought she had finally turned into a swan when her real-life Prince Charming swept her off her feet. But as his true character began to crack his perfect facade, Chrissy realized that she was better off without him. Returning to her ancestral home on Cannonball Island, she reboots her life, successfully reinventing herself as a chef at Blossoms, an up-and-coming restaurant. But despite her newfound self-confidence, she still doesn’t trust her taste in men. So when she meets Jared Chandler, a handsome ship salvager, Chrissy’s certain she can keep him as a friend....

The Storm Dragons will harness the incredible powers of thunder, lightning, and snow to help defeat a brand-new villain the Magic Forest: The Chaos Queen. Hana the Thunder Dragon doesn't like bullies. So she's determined to stop the Chaos Queen from causing trouble all over the Magic Forest. All she needs is a little help from her friends—and a lot of dragon magic!

California girl Allie Hudson Monroe can’t wait for the day when the renovations on the Sugarhouse Theater are complete so she can finally collect the inheritance from her father and move on with her life. After all, her life and her 14-year-old daughter are in Los Angeles. But Allie’s divorce left her tottering on the edge of bankruptcy, so to keep up on payments for her house and her daughter’s private-school tuition, Allie packed up and flew out east. But fate has a curveball or two to toss in Allie’s direction.

Everyone knows that opening a restaurant is a risky business, a venture with an astounding rate of failure. Patric Kuh’s Becoming a Restaurateur takes listeners behind the scenes of one of America’s trendiest new restaurants, revealing how Lien Ta and chef Jonathan Whitener of LA’s Here’s Looking at You managed to beat the odds. With valuable information about what daily life for a professional is like, this is an entertaining, practical guide to what makes a master restaurateur, from writing the business plan to opening night and beyond.

Bestselling author Lily Lee is on a short deadline to deliver her new career guide How to Land the Perfect Job, and she’s been interviewing at all the top companies around town. But when she’s offered a coveted position at her dream company, the employer’s background check reveals she never actually finished her college degree. Unbelievably, her worst nightmare has come true.

This powerful essay collection is a natural extension of the #MeToo movement, revealing the interior experience of women after they’ve inevitably been underestimated or hurt—the epiphany that the world is different than they thought it to be—and how they’ve used this knowledge to make change.

In a perfect world, we would all be able to fit a year’s worth of waste in a mason jar. But for most of us​,​ doing so can be immensely intimidating or simply not feasible. But even if you can’t be perfectly zero waste, you can still have a profound impact on our environment, climate, and health by making some simple changes to your lifestyle and habits.

A middle-class white woman in rural America and war-affected children in Africa find common ground in their journeys from brokenness to redemption. Author and psychologist Bethany Haley shares how her own emotional healing led her into treacherous war zones, where she provides care to former child soldiers and young girls used as sex slaves.

Summer knows that kouun means good luck in Japanese, and this year her family has none of it. Just when she thinks nothing else can possibly go wrong, an emergency whisks her parents away to Japan - right before harvest season. Summer and her little brother, Jaz, are left in the care of their grandparents, who come out of retirement in order to harvest wheat and help pay the bills.

When Marty returns to Pennsylvania after living in California for 10 years, he’s happily welcomed by his father and younger brother, Jody. The joyful reunion is short-lived. Two days later, Jody enters the house to find his father and Marty shot dead as their masked killer flees out the back door. Without any answers from the local police, Jody heads to Los Angeles looking for who murdered his family and why. Soon, he finds a trove of strange videos recorded by his brother that leads him into the city’s most dangerous corners.