Valentina is urged by her family to participate in an unusual selection process, all to help her brother Luigi pay off a high debt and avoid being killed. As a very beautiful and virgin young woman, she is chosen by the mafioso Salvatore, a cold and powerful man whom she had imagined as a grumpy old man who was extremely ugly.After the contract is signed and all the clauses are defined, Valentina does not expect that upon meeting Salvatore, he is not the old mafioso she imagined, b...

According to the National Center for Health Statistics, there has been a dramatic increase in obesity in Americans since the 1990s.Almost 9 mil ion (15%) children between the ages of 6 and 19 are overweight, and this number is still growing, according to information gathered between 1999 and 2000 (triple the number since 1980). The information has also shown that another 15% of children between the ages of 6 and 19 are at risk of becoming overweight.Obesity is defined as having an excessiv...

From international tuition hikes and discriminatory immigration policies to racially motivated violence and geopolitical tensions, international students encounter numerous political issues while studying abroad. Yet it is often assumed that international students are politically passive and disengaged rather than actively contributing to the political life of higher education institutions and the host country more generally. The present book challenges this assumption by bringing together...

The thirteen chapters in this collection analyze David Fincher’s development as a filmmaker, from television commercials and music videos to serving as front runner on the series Mindhunter. The contributors explore a variety of characteristics, including Fincher’s attitudes toward his audiences, his attention to detail, his Gothic sense of evil, his modernization of film noir, and his reinvention of the serial killer. The diversity of approaches highlights the paradoxes of Finche...

Governance, security, and development are three critical components of a dialectical nexus that is both dominant and determinant for any objective and fruitful quest for the understanding of the trajectory of a country, a region or, in the case of Africa, a continent from a colonial past to a neocolonial and meta-colonial present, and toward a future of strategic optimal independence and self-reliance. That colonial past and the ensuing neocolonial and meta-colonial present have made these...

Award: 2023 Reader's Favorite Golden Medal Winner for Children 4th-6th genre"Powerful middle-grade fiction that speaks from the heart and invites readers to share in a better future." — Kirkus Reviews"Cintia Alfonso's well-rounded approach to bullying is crucial for our youth." — The Chrysalis BREW Project, AustraliaPatina meets Amari and the Night Brothers in a middle-grade debut, the star...

Cintia Santana’s virtuoso debut collection, The Disordered Alphabet, reckons with the emotional anarchy of our lives, baring the difficulty of wrestling experience into language. She surveys a cosmic crossroads, “the sluices of heaven wording as we [stand] in that great rushing wind within, yet without name, turning.” These poems pay homage to inherited forms while fashioning their own shapes — Santana writes in alliterative verse, in footnotes, in epistles to consonants and vowel...

LOVE ON HOLDThere is a better way to find love.There is a desperate cry among single women who feel ready to get married. They start relationships that end in heartbreak; they become wounded and grow tired. "Will I ever find a husband?" they wonder. "Why is this so hard?"Love was not meant to be this way!In her book Love on Hold, author Cintia Stirling challenges single women to take a leap of faith and embark on a one-of-a-kind journey with...

This is the uppercase edition of These are...Colors. Specially written in uppercase for young learners in Argentina.Cute characters introduce colors with a rhyming quote, encouraging toddlers to make associations to learn while still having fun interacting with the reader. This book is ideal for native speakers of English as well as for children growing in bilingual homes.

This book fills a gap in early developmental psychology by providing a critical reconsideration of the status of artifact objects as protagonists of children's actions and communication. The main thesis explored in the book is that objects are part of the material culture; they have public functions and social meanings that are transmitted by the members of the community. Their meanings are not "naturally" given, and children are not born knowing what to do with objects. All chapters analy...

I see, I see… is a series of books written with simple words and colorful pictures where the narrator describes what he sees. The book is written in rhyme and it is great for the beginning reader. Patterns of words and phrases encourage the child to read the book with the help of cute illustrations. Each page introduces a new animal, including an elephant, a panda bear, a fox, a penguin, a cat, a turtle, a butterfly and a bee. In the final page, the author invites children to mention what ...

Forth and Back broadens the scope of Hispanic trans-Atlantic studies by shifting its focus to Spain’s trans-literary exchange with the United States at the end of the twentieth century. Santana analyzes the translation “boom” of U.S. literature that marked literary production in Spain after Franco’s death, and the central position that U.S. writing came to occupy within the Spanish literary system. Santana examines the economic and literary motives that underlay the phenomenon, as well as ...