Showing results by narrator "Victoria Villarreal" in All Categories

For decades, bestselling author J. R. Alastor, king of the murder mystery, has hidden in the shadows. His novels adorn countless bookshelves across the world, but no one knows his real name. One day, event coordinator Mila del Angél gets a message: Alastor wants her help to host a murder mystery retreat on his private island. It’s the perfect cover for Mila to finally carry out her long-held plans for revenge on one of the authors, a ghost from her past. But when a different guest turns up dead, she finds herself in a lethal game she didn’t plan for.

For all of Kat’s life, it’s just been her and her mother, Jamie—except for the forty-eight hours twelve years ago when Jamie was married and Kat had a stepbrother, Liam. That all ended in an epic divorce, and Kat and Liam haven’t spoken since. Now Jamie is a jewel thief trying to go straight, but she has one last job - at billionaire Ross Sutherland’s 80th birthday party - and Kat has figured out a way to tag along with her mother. .

Grieving mother Magos cuts out a piece of her deceased eleven-year-old son Santiago's lung. Acting on fierce maternal instinct and the dubious logic of an old folktale, she nurtures the lung until it gains sentience, growing into the carnivorous little Monstrilio she keeps hidden within the walls of her family's decaying Mexico City estate. Eventually, Monstrilio begins to resemble the Santiago he once was, but his innate impulses—though curbed by his biological and chosen family's communal care—threaten to destroy this fragile second chance at life.

When a professor named Cristina Rivera Garza stumbles upon the corpse of a man in a dark alley, she finds a stark warning on the brick wall beside the body, scrawled in coral nail polish: ‘Beware of me, my love / beware of the silent woman in the desert.’ After reporting the crime to the police, the professor becomes the lead informant of the case, led by a detective with a newfound obsession with poetry and a long list of failures on her back. But what has the professor really seen?

There are no shortcuts to surviving your first day at a new school—you can’t fix it with duct tape like you would your Chuck Taylors. On Day One, twelve-year-old Malú (María Luisa, if you want to annoy her) inadvertently upsets Posada Middle School’s queen bee, violates the school’s dress code with her punk rock look, and disappoints her college-professor mom in the process. Her dad, who now lives a thousand miles away, says things will get better as long as she remembers the first rule of punk: be yourself.

On the dawn of 16 July 1990, Liliana Rivera Garza, Cristina Rivera Garza’s sister, was murdered by her ex-boyfriend and subsumed into Mexico's dark and relentless history of femicide. She was a twenty-year-old architecture student who had been trying for years to end her relationship with a high school boyfriend who insisted on not letting her go. A few weeks before the tragedy, Liliana made a definitive decision: at the height of her winter she had discovered that, as Albert Camus had said, there was an invincible summer in her.

Rumination—obsessive thinking about an idea, situation, or choice that can interfere with normal life—is a common and destructive issue that can negatively impact romantic relationships. You may feel anxious, worried, hopeless, and frustrated, but even if you know your overthinking is a problem, it can be seriously hard to stop. In Stop Overthinking Your Relationship, certified couples therapist Alicia Muñoz draws from cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and mindfulness to offer an effective, four-step approach to reduce rumination and change negative thinking patterns.

Barcelona, 1964. Exiled from Cuba after the revolution, Isabel Perez has learned to guard her heart and protect her family at all costs. After Isabel’s sister, Beatriz, disappears in Barcelona, Isabel goes to Spain in search of her. Joining forces with an unlikely ally thrusts Isabel into her sister’s dangerous world of espionage, but it’s an unearthed piece of family history that transforms Isabel’s life.

Gabriela Menchaca and Edwin Saucedo are hardworking, undocumented employees at the Detmer Foods chicken plant in Springdale, Arkansas, just a stone’s throw from the trailer park where they’ve lived together for seven years. While dealing with personal tragedies of their own, the young couple endures the brutal, dehumanizing conditions at the plant in exchange for barebones pay.

Golden Age Hollywood - a city overflowing with gossip, scandal, and intrigue. Every actress wants to play Salome, the star-making role in a big-budget movie about the legendary temptress. So when the film's mercurial director casts Vera Larios, an unknown Mexican ingenue, in the lead role, she quickly becomes the talk of the town. Vera also becomes an object of envy for Nancy Hartley, a bit player whose career has stalled and who will do anything to win the fame she believes she richly deserves.

Hacienda San Isidro was meant to be Beatriz's haven, her salvation from an oppressive life with her uncle and his vicious wife. When Don Rodolfo Solórzano proposed, Beatriz dreamed only of the security his estate in the countryside would provide, ignoring the rumors surrounding his first wife's demise and his sinister allegiances. She will have her own home again, no matter the price. But the house has ideas of its own. Visions and voices claw at Beatriz, stealing her sleep, and the weight of invisible eyes follows her every move.

When Fernanda, Annelise, and their friends from the Delta Bilingual Academy convene after school, Annelise leads them in thrilling but increasingly dangerous rituals to a rhinestoned, Dior-scented, drag-queen god of her own invention. Even more perilous is the secret Annelise and Fernanda share, rooted in a dare in which violence meets love. Meanwhile, their literature teacher Miss Clara, who is obsessed with imitating her dead mother, struggles to preserve her deteriorating sanity. Each day she edges nearer to a total break with reality.

The year is 2038, and the formerly bustling town of Three Rivers, Texas, is a surreal wasteland. Under the authoritarian thumb of its tech industrialist mayor, Pablo Henry Crick, the town has outlawed reading and forced most of the town’s mothers to work as indentured laborers at the Big Tex Fish Cannery, which poisons the atmosphere and lines Crick’s pockets. Scraping by in this godforsaken landscape are best friends Prosperina and Neftalí—the latter of whom, one of the town’s last literate citizens, hides and reads the books of the mysterious renegade author Jazzmin Monelle Rivas.

Anna Lucia Bell believes in luck: bad luck. Bad luck made her best friend stop talking to her. Bad luck caused her parents' divorce. Bad luck is forcing her mother, Miriam, to sell the family's beloved bookstore. And it is definitely bad luck that Anna seems to be the only person in the world Miriam is unable to recommend a life-changing book. When Anna finds out that she and her mom are spending two months in a New England seaside town called Rockport, she expects a summer plagued with bad luck too. But Rockport has surprises in store for Anna.

Chanterelle Cottage is Charlie Sparrow’s whole world. The cozy spellshop where she and her moms practice their witchcraft, selling goods and services to the people of small-town Owl’s Hollow, has been in her family for generations. Okay, business has been a little slow and a recent burglary hit their inventory pretty hard. And the bank may not agree to restructure their loan. But Charlie is talented and savvy, and she’ll keep things afloat once her parents finally let her buy into the business as a co-owner.

Some kids have one job: to be a kid! Cecilia has two. When she isn't on the soccer field scoring goals, she's accompanying her parents to all kinds of grown-up places, like the DMV, the accountant's office, and the auto shop. She helps them translate from Spanish to English and from English to Spanish. It’s an important job, and it can even be fun. It’s also hard work. Sometimes Cecilia's second job is so much responsibility, it feels like she'll split in two! Is it time for Cecilia to blow her whistle and call for a time-out?

Natalie is living her dream: topping the charts and setting records as a Brazilian pop star...until she's dumped spectacularly on live television. Not only is it humiliating - it could end her career. Her PR team's desperate plan? A gorgeous yet oh-so-fake boyfriend. Nati reluctantly agrees, but William is not what she expected. She was hoping for a fierce bad boy - not a soft-hearted British indie film star.

Two teenagers discover the power of friendship, feminism, and standing up for what you believe in, no matter where you come from. A collaboration between two gifted authors writing from alternating perspectives, this compelling novel shines with authenticity, courage, and humor.

Summer ends, the season changes, and Coro, an artist frightened off by what her own paintings may represent, gets in her car and drives for hours in the middle of the night until she chances upon Betania, an isolated house existing in a world of its own. It's an unfamiliar place inhabited exclusively by women who, strangely, all seem to know her. Like adherents of an ancient cult, the women of Betania all dress the same, carry out strange rites and celebrations, and live alongside goats and innumerable dogs against a landscape dominated by a mountain that seems to block out the sunlight.

A new generation of Americans has declared that another world is possible. And yet, the stubborn problems of inequality, climate change, and declining health seem as intractable as ever. Where might different answers lie? Intrepid journalist Natasha Hakimi Zapata has traveled around the world, from Costa Rica to Uganda, and Estonia to Singapore, uncovering how different countries solve the problems that plague the United States.