The Matryoshka Memoirs

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The Matryoshka Memoirs

Author : Sasha Colby
Publisher : ECW Press
ISBN 13 : 1778522122
Total Pages : 264 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (785 download)

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Book Synopsis The Matryoshka Memoirs by : Sasha Colby

Download or read book The Matryoshka Memoirs written by Sasha Colby and published by ECW Press. This book was released on 2023-09-12 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A granddaughter explores the story of her Ukrainian grandmother’s survival of Hitler’s forced labor camps Irina Nikifortchuk was 19 years old and a Ukrainian schoolteacher when she was abducted to be a forced laborer in the Leica camera factory in Nazi Germany. Eventually pulled from the camp hospital to work as a domestic in the Leica owners’ household, Irina survived the war and eventually found her way to Canada. Decades later Sasha Colby, Irina’s granddaughter, seeks out her grandmother’s story over a series of summer visits and gradually begins to interweave the as-told-to story with historical research. As she delves deeper into the history of the Leica factory and World War II forced labor, she discovers the parallel story of Elsie Kühn-Leitz, Irina’s rescuer and the factory heiress, later imprisoned and interrogated by the Gestapo on charges of “excessive humanity.” This is creative nonfiction at its best as the mystery of Irina’s life unspools skillfully and arrestingly. Despite the horrors that the story must tell, it is full of life, humor, food, and the joy of ordinary safety in Canada. The Matryoshka Memoirs takes us into a forgotten corner of history, weaving a rich and satisfying tapestry of survival and family ties and asking what we owe those who aid us.

The Leica and Other Stories

Author : Harry Rosenberg
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780646221144
Total Pages : 100 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (211 download)

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Book Synopsis The Leica and Other Stories by : Harry Rosenberg

Download or read book The Leica and Other Stories written by Harry Rosenberg and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Happiness: A Memoir

Author : Heather Harpham
Publisher : Henry Holt and Company
ISBN 13 : 125013157X
Total Pages : 318 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (51 download)

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Book Synopsis Happiness: A Memoir by : Heather Harpham

Download or read book Happiness: A Memoir written by Heather Harpham and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2017-08-01 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reese’s Book Club x Hello Sunshine’s April 2018 book pick A shirt-grabbing, page-turning love story that follows a one-of-a-kind family through twists of fate that require nearly unimaginable choices. Happiness begins with a charming courtship between hopelessly attracted opposites: Heather, a world-roaming California girl, and Brian, an intellectual, homebody writer, kind and slyly funny, but loath to leave his Upper West Side studio. Their magical interlude ends, full stop, when Heather becomes pregnant—Brian is sure he loves her, only he doesn't want kids. Heather returns to California to deliver their daughter alone, buoyed by family and friends. Mere hours after Gracie's arrival, Heather's bliss is interrupted when a nurse wakes her, "Get dressed, your baby is in trouble." This is not how Heather had imagined new motherhood – alone, heartsick, an unexpectedly solo caretaker of a baby who smelled "like sliced apples and salted pretzels" but might be perilously ill. Brian reappears as Gracie's condition grows dire; together Heather and Brian have to decide what they are willing to risk to ensure their girl sees adulthood. The grace and humor that ripple through Harpham's writing transform the dross of heartbreak and parental fears into a clear-eyed, warm-hearted view of the world. Profoundly moving and subtly written, Happiness radiates in many directions--new, romantic love; gratitude for a beautiful, inscrutable world; deep, abiding friendship; the passion a parent has for a child; and the many unlikely ways to build a family. Ultimately it's a story about love and happiness, in their many crooked configurations.

Mother Winter

Author : Sophia Shalmiyev
Publisher : Simon & Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1501193090
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (11 download)

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Book Synopsis Mother Winter by : Sophia Shalmiyev

Download or read book Mother Winter written by Sophia Shalmiyev and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2020-02-11 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Lyrical and emotionally gutting." —O, THE OPRAH MAGAZINE “Intellectually satisfying [and] artistically profound.” —KIRKUS REVIEWS (STARRED REVIEW) “Mesmeric.”—THE PARIS REVIEW “Vividly awesome and truly great." —EILEEN MYLES “Gorgeous, gutting, unforgettable." —LENI ZUMAS “Brilliant.” —MICHELLE TEA An arresting memoir equal parts refugee-coming-of-age story, feminist manifesto, and meditation on motherhood, displacement, gender politics, and art that follows award-winning writer Sophia Shalmiyev’s flight from the Soviet Union, where she was forced to abandon her estranged mother, and her subsequent quest to find her. Russian sentences begin backward, Sophia Shalmiyev tells us on the first page of her striking lyrical memoir. To understand the end of her story, we must go back to the beginning. Born to a Russian mother and an Azerbaijani father, Shalmiyev was raised in the stark oppressiveness of 1980s Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), where anti-Semitism and an imbalance of power were omnipresent in her home. At just eleven years old, Shalmiyev’s father stole her away to America, forever abandoning her estranged alcoholic mother, Elena. Motherless on a tumultuous voyage to the states, terrified in a strange new land, Shalmiyev depicts in urgent, poetic vignettes her emotional journeys through an uncharted world as an immigrant, artist, and, eventually, as a mother of two. As an adult, Shalmiyev voyages back to Russia to search endlessly for the mother she never knew—in her pursuit, we witness an arresting, impassioned meditation on art-making, gender politics, displacement, and most potently, motherhood.

Stratified Modernism

Author : Sasha Colby
Publisher : Peter Lang
ISBN 13 : 9783039119325
Total Pages : 226 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (193 download)

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Book Synopsis Stratified Modernism by : Sasha Colby

Download or read book Stratified Modernism written by Sasha Colby and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2009 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book proposes an alternative modernist tradition, a line of writers captured by the archaeological project and the poetic possibilities it created. This tradition spans from Théophile Gautier's mid-nineteenth-century passion for Egyptology to Charles Olson's literal excavations on the Yucatan peninsula in the 1950s. With attention to the historical development of archaeology, the author argues that the archaeological became a rich site of cultural fantasy, a location where modernity's alternatives could be considered, imagined, and transcribed. These models, taking their cue from new archaeological dynamics, include the ushering of primal intensities into the present, the tapping of the subterranean unconscious, and the decipherment of an original poetic language. Ranging from psychic excavations to the reactivation of political templates, the plumbing of the archaeological landscape became a key posture in modernist development, which the author pursues through the work of both twentieth-century modernists and their nineteenth-century substrata. Ambitious in scope, this book provides a compelling argument about the role of archaeology in the modernist literary imagination and the century-long evolution of the poetics of excavation.

Staging Modernist Lives

Author : Sasha Colby
Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN 13 : 0773548963
Total Pages : 331 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (735 download)

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Book Synopsis Staging Modernist Lives by : Sasha Colby

Download or read book Staging Modernist Lives written by Sasha Colby and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2017-02-01 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three modernist women, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle, 1886-1961), Mina Loy (1882-1966), and Nancy Cunard (1896-1965), came to define the interwar avant-garde through their experimental writing and unconventional pursuits. In Staging Modernist Lives, Sasha Colby dramatizes these women’s lives and writing in three new plays that traverse the origins of modernism, Parisian literary circles, two world wars, the Spanish Civil War, and race and gender relations in the first half of the twentieth century. Leveraging each writer’s autobiographical materials, the plays explore the work of H.D., Loy, and Cunard as artists, publishers, and activists, their quests for self-definition amid political and historical upheaval, and their development as modernists among mentors, detractors, lovers, and friends including Bryher Ellerman, Ezra Pound, Sigmund Freud, Gertrude Stein, Arthur Cravan, D.H. Lawrence, and Pablo Neruda. Navigating the emerging field of research-creation, Staging Modernist Lives maps the critical terrain for dramatized literary inquiry. Bridging scholarship and creative practice, extant biographical drama and the possibilities of research-theatre, Staging Modernist Lives demonstrates how performance can deliver literary history to new audiences - and how research in turn reinvigorates itself through performance.

Tales to Keep You Up at Night

Author : Dan Poblocki
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 059338749X
Total Pages : 273 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (933 download)

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Book Synopsis Tales to Keep You Up at Night by : Dan Poblocki

Download or read book Tales to Keep You Up at Night written by Dan Poblocki and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2023-08-15 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the co-author of the #1 New York Times bestselling series The Magic Misfits comes a spectacularly creepy novel that will keep you up way past bedtime. Perfect for fans of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark! Amelia is cleaning out her grandmother's attic when she stumbles across a book: Tales to Keep You Up at Night. But when she goes to the library to return it, she's told that the book never belonged there. Curious, she starts to read the stories: tales of strange incidents in nearby towns, of journal entries chronicling endless, twisting pumpkin vines, birthday parties gone awry, and cursed tarot decks. And at the center of the stories lies a family of witches. And witches, she's told, can look like anyone... As elements from the stories begin to come to life around her, and their eerie connections become clear, Amelia begins to realize that she may be in a spooky story of her own... With hair-raising, spine-chilling prose, Dan Poblocki delivers a collection of interconnected stories that, if you're anything like Amelia, is sure to keep you up late in the night.

In Memory of Memory

Author : Maria Stepanova
Publisher : New Directions Publishing
ISBN 13 : 0811228843
Total Pages : 436 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (112 download)

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Book Synopsis In Memory of Memory by : Maria Stepanova

Download or read book In Memory of Memory written by Maria Stepanova and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2021-02-09 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of life at the margins of history from one of Russia’s most exciting contemporary writers Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize Winner of the MLA Lois Roth Translation Award With the death of her aunt, the narrator is left to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs, old postcards, letters, diaries, and heaps of souvenirs: a withered repository of a century of life in Russia. Carefully reassembled with calm, steady hands, these shards tell the story of how a seemingly ordinary Jewish family somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions and repressions of the last century. In dialogue with writers like Roland Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Susan Sontag, and Osip Mandelstam, In Memory of Memory is imbued with rare intellectual curiosity and a wonderfully soft-spoken, poetic voice. Dipping into various forms—essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue, and historical documents—Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities and offers an entirely new and bold exploration of cultural and personal memory.

Paris Savages

Author : Katherine Johnson
Publisher : Allison & Busby Ltd
ISBN 13 : 0749026073
Total Pages : 395 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (49 download)

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Book Synopsis Paris Savages by : Katherine Johnson

Download or read book Paris Savages written by Katherine Johnson and published by Allison & Busby Ltd. This book was released on 2020-07-23 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fraser Island, 1882. The population of the Badtjala people is in sharp decline following a run of brutal massacres. When German scientist Louis Müller offers to sail three Badtjala people - Bonny, Jurano and Dorondera - to Europe to perform to huge crowds, the proud and headstrong Bonny agrees, hoping to bring his people's plight to the Queen of England.Accompanied by Müller's bright, grieving daughter, Hilda, the group begins their journey to belle-époque Europe to perform in Hamburg, Berlin, Paris and eventually London. While crowds in Europe are enthusiastic to see the unique dances, singing, fights and pole climbing from the oldest culture in the world, the attention is relentless, and the fascination of scientists intrusive. When disaster strikes, Bonny must find a way to return home.

Are You My Mother?

Author : Alison Bechdel
Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN 13 : 0547524366
Total Pages : 303 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (475 download)

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Book Synopsis Are You My Mother? by : Alison Bechdel

Download or read book Are You My Mother? written by Alison Bechdel and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2012-05-01 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times–bestselling graphic memoir about Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home, becoming the artist her mother wanted to be. Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home was a pop culture and literary phenomenon. Now, a second thrilling tale of filial sleuthery, this time about her mother: voracious reader, music lover, passionate amateur actor. Also a woman, unhappily married to a closeted gay man, whose artistic aspirations simmered under the surface of Bechdel's childhood…and who stopped touching or kissing her daughter good night, forever, when she was seven. Poignantly, hilariously, Bechdel embarks on a quest for answers concerning the mother-daughter gulf. It's a richly layered search that leads readers from the fascinating life and work of the iconic twentieth-century psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, to one explosively illuminating Dr. Seuss illustration, to Bechdel’s own (serially monogamous) adult love life. And, finally, back to Mother—to a truce, fragile and real-time, that will move and astonish all adult children of gifted mothers. A New York Times, USA Today, Time, Slate, and Barnes & Noble Best Book of the Year “As complicated, brainy, inventive and satisfying as the finest prose memoirs.”—New York Times Book Review “A work of the most humane kind of genius, bravely going right to the heart of things: why we are who we are. It's also incredibly funny. And visually stunning. And page-turningly addictive. And heartbreaking.”—Jonathan Safran Foer “Many of us are living out the unlived lives of our mothers. Alison Bechdel has written a graphic novel about this; sort of like a comic book by Virginia Woolf. You won't believe it until you read it—and you must!”—Gloria Steinem

No. 5, Vol. 1

Author : Taiyo Matsumoto
Publisher : VIZ Media LLC
ISBN 13 : 1974728889
Total Pages : 317 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (747 download)

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Book Synopsis No. 5, Vol. 1 by : Taiyo Matsumoto

Download or read book No. 5, Vol. 1 written by Taiyo Matsumoto and published by VIZ Media LLC. This book was released on 2021-07-20 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a world where most of the earth has become a harsh desert, the Rainbow Council of the Peace Corps has a growing crisis on its hands. No. 5, one member of a team of superpowered global security guardians and a top marksman, has gone rogue. Now the other guardians have to hunt down No. 5 and his mysterious companion, Matryoshka. But why did No. 5 turn against the council, and what will it mean for the future of the world? -- VIZ Media

Happy Hour

Author : Marlowe Granados
Publisher : Verso Books
ISBN 13 : 1839764031
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (397 download)

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Book Synopsis Happy Hour by : Marlowe Granados

Download or read book Happy Hour written by Marlowe Granados and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the verve and bite of Ottessa Moshfegh and the barbed charm of Nancy Mitford, Marlowe Granados’s stunning debut brilliantly captures a summer of striving in New York City. Isa Epley, all of twenty-one years old, is already wise enough to understand that the purpose of life is the pursuit of pleasure. She arrives in New York with her newly blond best friend looking for adventure. They have little money, but that’s hardly going to stop them. By day, the girls sell clothes on a market stall, pinching pennies for their Bed-Stuy sublet and bodega lunches. By night, they weave between Brooklyn, the Upper East Side, and the Hamptons among a rotating cast of celebrities, artists, Internet entrepreneurs, stuffy intellectuals, and bad-mannered grifters. Resources run ever tighter and the strain tests their friendship as they try to convert social capital into something more lasting than precarious gigs as au pairs, nightclub hostesses, paid audience members, and aspiring foot fetish models. Through it all, Isa’s bold, beguiling voice captures the precise thrill of cultivating a life of glamour and intrigue as she juggles paying her dues with skipping out on the bill. Happy Hour is a novel about getting by and having fun in a system that wants you to do neither.

Sharon and My Mother-in-Law

Author : Suad Amiry
Publisher : Anchor
ISBN 13 : 0307427684
Total Pages : 178 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (74 download)

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Book Synopsis Sharon and My Mother-in-Law by : Suad Amiry

Download or read book Sharon and My Mother-in-Law written by Suad Amiry and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on diaries and email correspondence that she kept from 1981-2004, here Suad Amiry evokes daily life in the West Bank town of Ramallah. "A literary protest done with great wit, skill, and passion. Not only is it really funny but it shows the kind of courage, vision, and humanity needed to bring peace to the Middle East." —Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues Capturing the frustrations, cabin fever, and downright misery of her experiences, Amiry writes with elegance and humor about the enormous difficulty of moving from one place to another, the torture of falling in love with someone from another town, the absurdity of her dog receiving a Jerusalem identity card when thousands of Palestinians could not, and the trials of having her ninety-two-year-old mother-in-law living in her house during a forty-two-day curfew. With a wickedly sharp ear for dialogue and a keen eye for detail, Amiry gives us an original, ironic, and firsthand glimpse into the absurdity—and agony—of life in the Occupied Territories.

I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This

Author : Nadja Spiegelman
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 1101627751
Total Pages : 386 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (16 download)

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Book Synopsis I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This by : Nadja Spiegelman

Download or read book I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This written by Nadja Spiegelman and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-08-02 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Vogue Best Book of the Year "What Ferrante did for female friends—exploring the tumult and complexity their relationships could hold—Spiegelman sets out to do for mothers and daughters. She’s essentially written My Brilliant Mom." —Slate A memoir of mothers and daughters—and mothers as daughters—traced through four generations, from Paris to New York and back again. For a long time, Nadja Spiegelman believed her mother was a fairy. More than her famous father, Maus creator Art Spiegelman, and even more than most mothers, hers—French-born New Yorker art director Françoise Mouly—exerted a force over reality that was both dazzling and daunting. As Nadja’s body changed and “began to whisper to the adults around me in a language I did not understand,” their relationship grew tense. Unwittingly, they were replaying a drama from her mother’s past, a drama Nadja sensed but had never been told. Then, after college, her mother suddenly opened up to her. Françoise recounted her turbulent adolescence caught between a volatile mother and a playboy father, one of the first plastic surgeons in France. The weight of the difficult stories she told her daughter shifted the balance between them. It had taken an ocean to allow Françoise the distance to become her own person. At about the same age, Nadja made the journey in reverse, moving to Paris determined to get to know the woman her mother had fled. Her grandmother’s memories contradicted her mother’s at nearly every turn, but beneath them lay a difficult history of her own. Nadja emerged with a deeper understanding of how each generation reshapes the past in order to forge ahead, their narratives both weapon and defense, eternally in conflict. Every reader will recognize herself and her family in I'm Supposed to Protect You From All This, a gorgeous and heartbreaking memoir that helps us to see why sometimes those who love us best hurt us most.

"The Triple Whammy" and Other Russian Stories

Author : Luis Menashe
Publisher : New Acdemia+ORM
ISBN 13 : 099814777X
Total Pages : 171 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (981 download)

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Book Synopsis "The Triple Whammy" and Other Russian Stories by : Luis Menashe

Download or read book "The Triple Whammy" and Other Russian Stories written by Luis Menashe and published by New Acdemia+ORM. This book was released on 2018-08-22 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An American historian, film specialist, and documentary filmmaker shares candid stories of his life in Russia during and after the Cold War. A captivating lifetime of personal and professional experiences by an American historian, film specialist, and documentary filmmaker in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia. The author’s experiences as a radical in the turbulent 1960s, and his eventual disenchantment offer some precedents and perspectives to all those on the Left, Center, or Right interested in the fluctuations of American politics. The vivid log of hopes and disillusions is related in a candid, non-academic style, and set against a panorama of history and politics in the late twentieth century. “A self-described scholar-activist, Menashe weaves together political, intellectual, and cultural currents of leftist life, and draws a vivid picture of people and places, life-changing adventures, the intellectual and political challenges of graduate school during the Cold War, encounters with key Russian literary and political figures, and much more. Then comes the crash, the Soviet Union’s end. As in all failed love affairs, Menashe retains some sweet memories. The reader will taste them long after reading the memoir.” —Carole Turbin, Professor Emerita, History and Sociology, SUNY/Empire State College

Forbidden City

Author : James Ponti
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 153447921X
Total Pages : 448 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (344 download)

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Book Synopsis Forbidden City by : James Ponti

Download or read book Forbidden City written by James Ponti and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-02 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this third “thrilling” (Kirkus Reviews) installment in the New York Times bestselling series from Edgar Award winner James Ponti, the young group of spies help a fellow agent in another international adventure perfect for fans of Spy School and Mrs. Smith’s Spy School for Girls. After taking down a mole within their organization, the City Spies are ready for their next mission—once again using their unique skills and ability to infiltrate places adults can’t. The sinister Umbra has their sights set on recruiting a North Korean nuclear physicist by any means necessary, and the City Spies plan to keep an eye on his son by sending Paris to the chess prodigy’s tournaments in Moscow and Beijing. Meanwhile, Sydney’s embedded as a junior reporter for a teen lifestyle site as she follows the daughter of a British billionaire on tour with the biggest act on her father’s music label to uncover what links both the band and the billionaire have to a recent threat from an old Soviet missile base. From a daring break-in at one of London’s most exclusive homes to a dangerous undercover mission to a desperate search and rescue operation on the streets of Beijing, the City Spies have their work cut out for them on their most dangerous mission yet.

Fate of Flames

Author : Sarah Raughley
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1481466771
Total Pages : 368 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (814 download)

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Book Synopsis Fate of Flames by : Sarah Raughley

Download or read book Fate of Flames written by Sarah Raughley and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-11-22 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Four girls with the power to control the elements and save the world from a terrible evil must come together in the first epic novel in a brand-new series. When Phantoms--massive beasts made from nightmares and darkness--suddenly appeared and began terrorizing the world, four girls, the Effigies, each gained a unique power to control one of the classical elements: earth, air, fire, and water. Since then, four girls across the world have continually fought against the Phantoms, fulfilling their cosmic duty. And when one Effigy dies, another girl gains her power as a replacement. But now, with technologies in place to protect the world's major cities from Phantom attacks, the Effigies have stopped defending humanity and, instead, have become international celebrities, with their heroic feats ranked, televised, and talked about in online fandoms. Until the day that New York City's protection against the Phantoms fails, a man seems to be able to control them by sheer force of will, and Maia, a high school student, unexpectedly becomes the Fire Effigy. Now Maia has been thrown into battle with three girls who want nothing to do with one another. But with the first human villain that the girls have ever faced, and an army of Phantoms preparing for attack, there isn't much time for the Effigies to learn how to work together. Can the girls take control of their destinies before the world is destroyed forever?