Showing results by narrator "Jenna Berk" in All Categories

With this collection of beautifully written, interconnected stories, Nalini Jones establishes herself as a strong, new voice in contemporary fiction. Home to her characters is a Catholic town in India - an India unfamiliar to most American readers - but the tales of their relationships, ambitions, and concerns are altogether universal, capturing the miscommunication, expectations, joys, and losses experienced by families everywhere.

Lina was a precocious toddler - charming, chatty, joyful. At the age of three, in the aftermath of her second MMR vaccine, first came a seizure, and then, to her parents’ horror, the loss of Lina’s ability to play, use language, and control her impulses. Over the next few years they continued to lose Lina. She communicated her acute discomfort by biting, screaming, hitting, laughing maniacally, and throwing violent tantrums.

The race to save Hagwood has begun! Wicked queen Rhiannon, High Lady of the Hollow Hill, is more intent than ever on finding the enchanted casket containing her heart. Made immortal through evil sorcery, she has ruled the land of Hagwood heartlessly for far too long. If someone can discover the lost casket and destroy the beating heart within, her terrible reign will end. The werlings Finnen and Gamaliel - in possession of the golden key that will unlock the High Lady's casket - race to find it first.

Powerful and eye-opening, Seeing Ezra is an inspirational chronicle of a mother's struggle to protect her son from a system that seeks to compartmentalize and "fix" him, and of her journey toward accepting and valuing him for who he is - just as he is.

The werlings of Hagwood live peacefully in the trees of the forest - overlooked and unbothered while they leisurely perfect the art of wergling (shape-changing). But unlike his fellow werlings, the bumbling Gamaliel Tumpin can’t manage to wergle into even the simplest of forms - a mouse - like his peers. He’s tormented by his sister, Kernella, and teased by his classmates. And he envies star student Finnen Lufkin, who can transform into almost any creature.