Showing results by narrator "Amanda Ronconi" in All Categories

Facile's manager, Xavier Blackwell, has reputation for being ruthless, smart, and savvy with the ladies. While the first two descriptors are correct, the third portion of his reputation is not exactly accurate. While the posh London accent and prowling persona have garnered him many a lady's attention, for Xavier, there's been only one woman - one woman who seeped into his soul and left her mark on his heart. And she chose tonight, one of the most hectic, disastrous nights in Facile's history, to visit his restaurant.

Facile's chief pastry chef, Lydia Conner, has watched the jerk at table seventeen run her fellow kitchen staffers ragged all night with his special requests and substitutions. But she knows she can sweeten his sour mood with one of her legendary desserts. No man alive can resist her special flourless chocolate cake...except for the jerk at table seventeen.

Tessa thought her day had hit rock bottom when she came home to find her best friend riding her boyfriend like a bronco in the skank rodeo. And then she arrived for her shift at Facile to find that she would be waiting tables in the same section as gorgeous, conceited Colt. Colt, who considered himself God's gift to the sighted. Colt, who honestly seemed to think that diners came to Facile for him and not the delicious food.

On a lake in northernmost Minnesota, you might find Naledi Lodge - only two cabins still standing, its pathways now trodden mostly by memories. And there you might meet Meg, or the ghost of the girl she was, growing up under her grandfather’s care in a world apart and a lifetime ago. Now an artist, Meg paints images "reflected across the mirrors of memory and water", much as the linked stories of Vacationland cast shimmering spells across distance and time.

Emily Glass knows she’s neurotic. But she’s got it under control. Sort of. She dons compression socks when she flies (because, you know, deep vein thrombosis) and responds to people routinely overestimating her age with more Lifespin classes and less gluten. Thankfully, she also has David, the wonderful man she’ll soon call husband - assuming they can survive wedding week with her wildly dysfunctional family. Emily’s therapist mother, Marla, who’s been diagnosing her children since they were in diapers, sees their homecoming as the perfect opportunity for long-overdue family therapy sessions. Less enthused are Emily and her two siblings.

In a southern Virginia coal-mining town in December 1942, Bone Phillips is learning to control her Gift: seeing the history of a significant object when she touches it. But one object is off limits: Uncle Ash's World War I dog tags, which hold memories of terror. When a body identified as Uncle Ash turns up inside the mines, Bone will need every ounce of courage she can summon to not only find her beloved uncle through the dog tags but prove that he isn't the thief the mine supervisor claims he is.

In a southern Virginia coal-mining town in October 1942, Bone Phillips is learning to control her Gift: Bone can see the history of a significant object when she touches it. When her best friend, Will Kincaid, asks Bone to "read" the history of his daddy's jelly jar—the jelly jar that was buried alongside his father during the mine cave-in that killed him—Bone is afraid. Even before Bone touches it, she can feel that the jar has its own strange power. With her mother dead, her father gone to war, and Aunt Mattie's assault looming over Bone, she can't bear the idea of losing Will too.

In southern Virginia coal-mining town in 1942, Bone Phillips has just reached the age when most members of her family discover their Gift. Bone has a Gift that disturbs her; she can sense stories when she touches an object that was important to someone. She sees both sad and happy—the death of a deer in an arrowhead, the pain of a beating in a baseball cap, and the sense of joy in a fiddle. There are also stories woven into her dead mama's butter-yellow sweater—stories Bone yearns for and fears.