Betrayal At Salty Springs

Grey has improved a ton with the help of his friends, and he’s closing in on the top tier of players. But then his closest friend announces that he’s been asked to join a new squad on the top tier and leaves them in hopes of making the top five with his new squad. Grey is devastated, and their play struggles. He falls back several ranks and begins to wonder if it’s even possible to escape the game this season. Some players have been there for many seasons…some aren’t even trying to leave because they like it so much. Maybe he should just accept it as his life. A former rival tells him to snap out of it—he’s too good to slide back so far. They end up in a squad and do well enough to scale the ranks again. Grey has a chance to screw over his old Ally/Friend by taking his place on the Top Tier team, but will he?

Twelve-year-old Grey has been sucked into a hacked, virtual reality version of Fortnite Battle Royale along with one hundred other players. To get home, he must become one of the top five players before the season ends, or he’s stuck in Fortnite for another two months. Grey and his friend have gone up in ranks and are learning how to build structures to improve their tactics. While they’re not at the top by any means, they are solidly in the middle of the pack. They aspire to be like the Top Player, who has been unbeatable for fifteen games in a row. No one knows how the Top Player does it, but everyone is chasing him. Before Grey can aspire to beat the Top Player, though, he has to get through the Rival players that are just above him. These players are threatened by him and his friend and hunt them down in every battle. Grey wants to beat them, but he can’t figure out how. How can Grey survive long enough to beat the Top Player? And will he ever escape the Fortnite world?

Twelve-year-old Grey gets sucked into a hacked, virtual reality version of Fortnite Battle Royale along with one hundred other players. To get home, he must become one of the top five players before the season ends, or he’s stuck in Fortnite for another two months. Grey logs into Battle Royale as usual, but unlike before he passes out and wakes up in the lobby and everything is as real as can be. Four others stand there with him as an admin tells them they are the “new meat” and their game has been hacked. Their consciousness will be trapped in this version of Fortnite until they can become the top five players for a season. New to the fighting arena but ambitious, Grey sets out for glory with one hundred other players on a flying bus. As they jump and land on the island to battle, he struggles to figure out the tools as people come to kill him. He dies quickly, much to his disappointment. Maybe this won’t be as easy as he thought. While waiting for the next game in the lobby, someone gives him some tips to help him out and he fares a bit better. They form a duo in hopes of both escaping the game together. Will Grey be able to escape, now that he has an ally?

As the executive culinary assistant to celebrity Chicago chef Patrick Conlon, Alana Ostermann works behind the scenes—and that’s just the way she likes it. But with developing recipes for Patrick’s cookbooks, training his sous chefs, picking out the perfect birthday gifts for his ex-mother-in-law, and dealing with the fallout from his romantic escapades, she barely has a personal life, much less time to spend with her combo platter of a mutt, Dumpling. Then a fluke online connection brings her RJ, a transplant from Tennessee, who adds some Southern spice to her life. Suddenly Alana’s priorities shift, and Patrick—and Dumpling—find themselves facing a rival for her time and affection. With RJ in the mix, and some serious decisions to make about her personal and professional future, Alana must discover the perfect balance of work and play, money and meaning, to bring it all to the table—one delicious dish at a time… INCLUDES RECIPES

Time is running out for Grey and his squad. While they consistently rank in the top twenty players stuck in Fortnite Battle Royale, they need to be the top five to escape virtual reality and go home. Grey’s team begins to fray apart, and he fears he won’t be able to keep them together long enough to get the rank they need. With the season ending in a couple weeks, people are either giving up or fighting harder than ever. When Grey losses another squad member, he’s on the verge of throwing in the towel himself. But to his surprise, the top player, Tae Min, approaches him with a deal that may give them just the chance they need.

With Tae Min’s help, Grey’s squad reaches the top ten, but every game changes who will stay trapped in Fortnite Battle Royale and who will go home. There are only three days of battles left, and Grey isn’t sure it’s enough to secure top five for his whole squad. His rank is higher than his friends, and it starts to look like he’ll get home like he wanted. But someone he cares about will have to stay, and Grey has to make a choice: give up his spot or leave his friends. Either choice will mean losing something, but Grey must decide if what’s gained is worth more.

"With hundreds of millions of players around the world, Fortnite is the video game sensation that has taken the world by storm. In this book, readers will discover how to level up and unlock new items in the Battle Pass by completing different kinds of quests. Includes table of contents, author biography, sidebars, glossary, index, and informative backmatter"--

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER THE WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK OF 2021 A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK WINNER of the Isabel Allende Most Inspirational Fiction Award, She Reads Best of 2021 Awards • FINALIST for the 2022 Southern Book Prize • LONGLISTED for Crook’s Corner Book Prize • NOMINEE for 2021 GoodReads Choice Award in Debut Novel and Historical Fiction A sweeping, masterful debut about a daughter's fateful choice, a mother motivated by her own past, and a family legacy that begins in Cuba before either of them were born In present-day Miami, Jeanette is battling addiction. Daughter of Carmen, a Cuban immigrant, she is determined to learn more about her family history from her reticent mother and makes the snap decision to take in the daughter of a neighbor detained by ICE. Carmen, still wrestling with the trauma of displacement, must process her difficult relationship with her own mother while trying to raise a wayward Jeanette. Steadfast in her quest for understanding, Jeanette travels to Cuba to see her grandmother and reckon with secrets from the past destined to erupt. From 19th-century cigar factories to present-day detention centers, from Cuba to Mexico, Gabriela Garcia's Of Women and Salt is a kaleidoscopic portrait of betrayals—personal and political, self-inflicted and those done by others—that have shaped the lives of these extraordinary women. A haunting meditation on the choices of mothers, the legacy of the memories they carry, and the tenacity of women who choose to tell their stories despite those who wish to silence them, this is more than a diaspora story; it is a story of America’s most tangled, honest, human roots.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a deliciously unsettling novel about a perverse, isolated, and possibly murderous family and the struggle that ensues when a cousin arrives at their estate.

This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins. While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even while preserving ethnic identities at the same time. In this sense, nearly all Americans are "Albion's Seed," no matter what their ethnicity may be. The concluding section of this remarkable book explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still help to shape attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.