Dear Jo

Maxine and her best friend Leah enjoyed chatting with boys online, and so what if they lied about their ages--it was just Internet stuff. But when Leah disappeared, Max realized they weren't the only ones lying online. And what has happened to Leah?

Maxine's best friend, Leah, has been missing for six months, and Maxine helps the police investigate the possibility that her disappearance is connected to their online friend, 2funE, who claims to be a sixteen-year-old boy.

Simple text and illustrations of diverse families show how children affect their loved ones for the better.

When Wally Prichard receives a diary for his ninth birthday, he has no idea what a valued confidante and adviser his diary will become, as it chronicles his increasingly bizarre journey through life. Wally's mind runs rampant with non-stop imagination, perverse wit and escalating madness, taking the reader to oft-times unbelievable reality. Born in the small town of Lark, Iowa in the mid forties, Wally has it made. Orphaned in his teens he inherits more money than he will ever need, with all the time in the world to follow his heart's desire: doing nothing. Watching the tube, journalizing and giving in to every instant gratification he can lay his hands on, Wally leads a meaningless existence, filled with endless excess and fantasy. The town's perception of Wally as a lazy good ole boy with money is only partially correct. Lazy? Absolutely! Money? You Bet. But Good? You'd better check with Gil Joy, Iris Skiddaul, Otto Pertz, Raymond Burr and the others about that.

2016 VOYA Top Shelf Fiction Selection Anna has always been so level-headed, so easy-going, so talented and funny. How could anyone have guessed she wanted to die? Anna is not like other people. She’s always felt like she didn’t belong: not with other kids, not with her family, not in her body. It isn’t until her grandparents are killed in a tragic accident, however, that Anna starts to feel untethered. She begins to wonder what it would be like if she didn’t exist, and the thought of escaping the aimless drifting is the only thing that brings her comfort. When Anna overdoses on prescription painkillers, doctors realize she has been suffering from depression and start looking for a way to help her out of the desperate black hole she never thought she would escape. It’s then that rock bottom comes into sight and the journey back to normal begins.

Introducing an extraordinary and original writer whose first novel explores the intersections of grief and rage, personal strength and healing--and what we owe one another. Fern seeks refuge from her mother's pill-popping and boyfriends via Soul Train; Gwin finds salvation in the music of Prince much to her congregation's dismay and Jesenia, miles ahead of her classmates at her gifted and talented high school, is a brainy and precocious enigma. None of this matters to Boss Man, the monster who abducts them and holds them captive in a dilapidated house in Queens. On the night they are finally rescued, throngs line the block gawking and claiming ignorance. Among them is lifetime resident Miss Metropolitan, advice columnist for the local weekly, but how could anyone who fancies herself a "newspaperwoman" have missed a horror story unfolding right across the street? And why is it that only two of the three girls--now women--were found? The mystery haunts the two remaining "victim girls" who are subjected to the further trauma of becoming symbols as they continuously adapt to their present and their unrelenting past. Like Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys, Ferrell's Dear Miss Metropolitan gives voice to characters surviving unimaginable tragedy. The story is inventively revealed before, during, and after the ordeal in this singular and urgent novel.

She left home at nineteen to prove to her father, and other men, that she could do anything a man could do, and better. And she did. For three years, Skye-Blue Johnston has bounty hunted alongside her friend Clyde Daniels. She has brought in more outlaws than to be expected of a woman, and has made a living off it. Clyde and Blue (as she liked to be called) rode together until his death by an outlaw she and Clyde had been after. Blue had been devastated after his death, and took off on her own to the town of Silver City, Missouri. He was the famed outlaw, the Robin Hood of Liberty, Missouri. And he had the most feared gang of the west. For many years, Jesse James and his gang has terrorized banks, stagecoaches, and trains in the surrounding states of Missouri as a lifestyle. He has known loss, and has become a hard man for it. Having met the bounty hunter of Silver City in the Calico Saloon, his (along with his brother, Frank's and his cousin, Cole's) life is about to change. When these two forces meet, sparks fly and an electrifying bond is born. Throughout their obstacles, and meeting Billy the Kid and Johnny Ringo, they become inseparable. The outlaw and bounty hunter beat the odds that are against them and find out in the end that Love is the Ultimate Outlaw.

In this dystopian science fiction classic set in a world where women have no rights, the patriarchy sends a covert female agent to take down the resistance. In the second entry of the Native Tongue trilogy, the time has come for Láadan—the secret language created to resist an oppressive patriarchy—to empower womankind worldwide. To expand the language’s reach, female linguists translate the Bible into Láadan, and a group of Roman Catholic nuns are tasked to spread the language. But when outraged priests detect their sabotage, they send a double agent to infiltrate and destroy the movement from the inside… Originally published in the 1980s, the Native Tongue trilogy is a classic dystopian tale: a testament to the power of language and women's collective action. “This angry feminist text is also an exemplary experiment in speculative fiction, deftly and implacably pursuing both a scientific hypothesis and an ideological hypothesis through all their social, moral, and emotional implications.”—Ursula K. Le Guin “Less well known than The Handmaid's Tale but just as apocalyptic in their vision…Native Tongue along with its sequel The Judas Rose . . . record female tribulations in a world where…women have no public rights at all. Elgin's heroines do, however, have one set of weapons—words of their own.”—Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, New York Times Book Review “A pioneering feminist experiment.”—Literary Hub “A welcome reminder of the feminist legacies of science fiction…Explores the power of speech, agency, and subversion in a work that is as gripping, troubling, and meaningful today as it has ever been.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

This volume reflects the scholarly interests and achievements of Professor Hiroyuki Ito in whose honour it was conceived. It is a collection of papers on the stylistics of English and American literature written by scholars in Japan. A wide range of approaches, from traditional philological analysis to innovative new directions such as corpus stylistics and narratology are found in this book, addressing literary works as varied as the writings of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Defoe, Austen, Dickens, and Mark Twain with Irish folktales and English-language Haiku. This volume also offers an overview of the state of the art in stylistic studies of English literature in Japan. The papers have been divided into four parts according to manner of approach: Philological Approaches, Corpus Stylistics, Narratology and Literary Stylistics.