For eleven years, Renee brought the casserole, learned her mother-in-law's preferences like scripture, and folded the towel the way no one ever noticed she liked it. Then her husband's mother told her to "bring nothing" to the family dinner — and Renee understood, too late, that she was the thing being removed.The catered table. The playpen in the guest room. The framed photograph, turned face-down before she arrived: her husband's son, fourteen months old,...

Katie's Cupcake Club friends all have other activities besides making cupcakes. Mia and Alexis are on the soccer team and Emma plays the flute. Katie sets out to find her extracurricular niche and soon she's dribbling, passing, and catching in an effort to find the right sport for her. Sure Katie can whip up a great cupcake but can she cook on the field too? When Katie tries out and makes the softball team it's batter up . . . but instead of swinging away she gets nervous during games. Wha...

The Cupcake Club gets its start in this first book of a sweet treat of a series!Katie Brown is miserable when her best friend is invited to join the Popular Girls Club and Katie is left out. Is there an Unpopular Girls Club she can join? Fortunately, Katie finds her way with a great new group of friends—Mia, Emma, and Alexis—and together they form the Cupcake Club. Sometimes starting from scratch turns out to be the icing on the cupcake!

Emma needs a break from big-sister duty in this addition to Spotlight's treat of a tween series.Emma is not thrilled with always having to rearrange her schedule so she can babysit her younger brother, Jake. Now Emma's parents have broken some news that really threatens to push Emma over the edge—since Emma and Jake are going to the same day camp this summer, she's expected to sit with Jake on the bus. Not only does this mean Emma can't hang out with her friends, b...

He didn't have an affair. That was the thing Renee couldn't explain to anyone — that her husband never touched the other woman, and it was somehow worse.Because Renee found out the way no wife should: standing at a swim meet she wasn't supposed to attend, watching a little boy she'd never seen surface from the water and shout "Daddy, did you see?" — and watching her husband's hand go up before he could stop it. A practiced motion. A father's reflex. For a c...

For twenty-two years, Carolyn learned every silence her husband owned. Now she's done waiting for the one word he never learned to say.Vincent Pritchard rules the club table with a stillness grown men lean in to hear. At home, that same silence has starved his marriage down to a locked door and a wife standing outside it, ear pressed to the wood, listening for a sound that never comes. Carolyn has loved him since he proposed in a Sonic parking lot with a speech wri...

He never raised his voice. That was the genius of it. A man who snaps at you leaves fingerprints — gives you something to point to. Roland left nothing.For twenty-four years, Carolyn ran a surgical schedule of forty operations a day and never once dropped one. So she could not explain, even to herself, how she'd become a woman who stood in her own kitchen and went searching through her own memory for the error her husband had gently suggested was there. He'...

This is the first multidisciplinary book that addresses the ethics of fur. Whatever might have been true of the past, the production of fur is now morally problematic in terms of both necessity and suffering. There is no necessity in killing animals for nonessential purposes, such as adornment, fashion, or vanity. The argument for utility simply doesn’t hold up. Alternative clothing is now readily available, enduring, and less costly. Worse still, since we know that the animals exploited a...

The death of Bon Scott is The Da Vinci Code of rock. In the early hours of 19 February 1980, Bon Scott, lead singer of the rock band AC/DC, left The Music Machine in Camden, London, with a man called Alistair Kinnear, whereupon he lost consciousness and was left to sleep in Alistair’s Renault 5, parked outside Alistair’s East Dulwich apartment. That evening, Bon’s lifeless body was found, still in the car. He was pronounced dead on arrival at King’s College Hospital. Less than two months l...

Mia finds that one more in the mix is always better in this treat of a tween series!Mia is getting used to her new family now that her mom is remarried to Eddie and she's gained a new stepbrother, Dan. She's in the groove of going to her dad's house on the weekends, and everything is going pretty well at home and at school. Well, except for Spanish class. Mia's parents and stepfather speak it and she does too—but speaking it and writing it are two different things,...

The Cupcake Club questions its loyalties when Mia makes friends with a mean girl in disguise.There's a new girl in town, and Mia tries to take her under her wing. But Olivia Allen is not so nice; as a matter of fact, she might be even meaner than Sydney Whitman! Mia's been saving for weeks to buy a new pair of shoes, but when Olivia asks to borrow money, Mia gives it to her—only to find out Olivia spends the cash on the exact same shoes Mia has been saving up for! ...

Katie finds the courage to face off with a former friend in this addition to Spotlight's sweet treat of a tween series.Katie and Callie used to be best friends—until Callie ditched Katie so she could join the Popular Girls Club. And even though Katie is now very happy with her Cupcake Club friends, Callie's mean move still bothers her. Finally, Katie finds a way to confront Callie . . . but it's going to take lots of sweet-talking to repair the friendship.