I Should Have Just Stayed Home

Yes, the co-pilot on this morning's flight moonlights as a barber. There was a little explosion outside the lobby of your hotel. One wall of your hotel room just disappeared. The maitre d' was just arrested under the Patriot Act. And there's a gumball flasher showing up in your rear view mirror. Chill, baby. Just sit back, relax and be glad you weren't with...

ONE FLIGHT CAN CHANGE EVERYTHING. Airplane pilot Isobel LaFleur escaped small-town life a long time ago. Living in Dallas now, she enjoyed the city life and had no desire to spend time in a small town. Not for any reason. When baseball player Matthew Rodgers tore his calf muscle, life as he knew it came to a screeching halt. But he kept his promises to family. Even if it meant going home. Surely he could endure one weekend in the country. Neither Isobel nor Matthew could have predicted what happened that weekend. Would they welcome the unexpected events or would both go back to their familiar lives? Will Isobel and Matthew change their lives in the name of true love? This is a sweet/clean contemporary romance with a happily ever after in the spirit of your favorite Hallmark movie.

Michael Hiebert's remarkable debut novel tells the riveting story of a small southern town haunted by tragedy, one brave woman's struggle to put a troubling mystery to rest--and its impact on the sensitive boy who comes of age in the midst of it all. . . Abe Teal wasn't even born when Ruby Mae Vickers went missing twelve years ago. Few people in Alvin, Alabama, talk about the months spent looking for her, or about how Ruby Mae's lifeless body was finally found beneath a willow tree. Even Abe's mom, Leah, Alvin's only detective, has avoided the subject. But now, another girl is missing. Fourteen-year-old Mary Ann Dailey took the bus home from school as usual, then simply vanished. Townsfolk comb the dense forests and swampy creeks to no avail. Days later, Tiffany Michelle Yates disappears. Abe saw her only hours before, holding an ice cream cone and wearing a pink dress. Observant and smart, Abe watches his mother battle small-town bureaucracy and old resentments, desperate to find both girls and quietly frantic for her own children's safety. As the search takes on a terrifying urgency, Abe traverses the shifting ground between innocence and hard-won understanding, eager to know and yet fearing what will be revealed. Dream with Little Angels is by turns lyrical, heartbreaking, and shocking--a brilliantly plotted novel of literary suspense and of the dark shadows, painful secrets, and uncompromising courage in one small town. "One of the best books I've read in a long, long while." --Lisa Jackson, New York Times bestselling author

Mary Cheever called Kathleen O’Connor’s fiction “funny, sad, and utterly convincing.” These fifteen stories possess all those qualities. They also remind us of the importance of the connections between family, friends, and neighbors. The title story, Water’s Edge, details how an alienated young woman forges a bond with her grieving grandmother. In Through the Woods an elderly man reconnects with a troubled foster child. And the young boy in With Harry’s Help survives through his bond with a fictional character. The constant in all of O’Connor’s stories is the hope that comes from our need and love for each other.

Absurdity, social realism, and the indepth examination of the human condition are but a few of the themes that comprise the contents of the seventythree short stories breathing menacingly between the covers of this book. Humor attacks surrealism on a landscape sun-saturated with saintly thought and intense clarity creations first simple act of pure effervescence getting drowned.

Robert Louis Stevenson's classic adventure tale tells of the kidnapping of David Balfour. After the death of David's parents, he is sent to an uncle he's never heard of to find his fortune. Uncle Ebenezer doesn't want to part with his money, but he will pay to have his nephew kidnapped and put into slavery! Discover the betrayal, adventure, and friendship David finds on his struggle home in the Calico Illustrated Classics adaptation of Stevenson's Kidnapped. Calico Chapter Books is an imprint of Magic Wagon, a division of ABDO Group. Grades 3-8.

Noted scholar Lois Weis first visited the town of "Freeway" in her 1990 book, Working Class Without Work. In that book we met the students and teachers of Freeway's high school to understand how these working-class folks made sense of their lives. Now, fifteen years later, Weis has gone back to Freeway for Class Reunion. This time her focus is on the now grown-up students who are, for the most part, still working class and now struggling to survive the challenges of the global economy. Class Reunion is a rare and valuable longitudinal ethnographic study that provides powerful, provocative insight into how the lives of these men and women have changed over the last two decades--and what their prospects might be for the future.

REA’s English the American Way: A Fun ESL Guide to Language and Culture in the U.S. with Embedded Audio & Mp3 Download Helps English Language Learners Improve Their Skills A fun guide to everything American for the English language learner! Authored by seasoned ESL instructors, this handy guidebook is perfect for people who already have a good grasp of English, but want to improve how they speak the language as it is spoken in the United States. Written in a lighthearted and easy-to-follow style, this book is a great resource for people of all ages and all nationalities. Each unit introduces commonly used phrases, vocabulary, and verbs, and offers sample dialogs to illustrate everyday American life. Sentence completions, quizzes, tips, and illustrations make learning fun. Individual units cover topics essential to the mosaic of American life: making friends, basic skills, driving, dining out, dealing with money, home life, emergency situations, doctor visits, handling a job interview, and more. To improve your pronunciation, listen to the embedded audio that accompanies this e-book or download the Mp3. The audio contains all the dialogues and pronunciation pointers found in the book so you can listen along and practice your speaking skills as you read. The dialogues are read by native speakers and are a great way to work on accent reduction. If you’re looking for a fun and easy way to improve your English language skills, this is the book for you!