Maya Shine’s Actionable Life Skills for Young Adults is a comprehensive advice and self-help book for teenagers and young adults. Shine relays pertinent information for self-reflection, self-care, and the importance of high school and secondary academics. Several chapters cover the flexibility of options to earn money, how to present oneself during interviews, the necessity of budgeting, and the breakdown of taxes and loans. The ins and outs of buying a car and renting an apartment are carefully discussed.
Take a journey throughout an evening of a family’s Christmas celebration in their home. Karen Stacy’s Seeing Christmas searches for the true meaning of Christmas. Each page of this picture book is a zoomed-in element of Christmas decorations and traditions. The text is a poem that guides the reader through descriptions and the significance of lights, trees, gifts, decorative village, stockings, toys, food and family.
Terry A. Repak’s Circling Home: What I Learned by Living Elsewhere engages the reader through her unique memoir as a mother of two young children who travels with Stefan, her husband and CDC epidemiologist, to Abidjan, Ivory Coast in West Africa. After living in Africa until the age of six with his refugee Polish parents, Stefan fulfills his dream of helping people during the AIDS crisis in the early nineties. Terry decides to put her writing career on hold to care for her newly adopted young daughter and accompany Stefan as he works for the CDC.
Bryan Mooney’s Christmas Actually opens with the bustling office of Baltimore Star Media Group in Inner Harbor, Baltimore, MD. Colleagues Holly, Frankie, Diego, Jakob, and Josh discuss their upcoming Christmas plans. Holly, enjoying her last meeting with the Baltimore Star, shares that she will be taking in a full, traditional Christmas at home with family in Vermont. Holly further plans to surprise her parents by accepting the CEO position at Jamison Enterprises, her mother’s children’s book company.
Author and main character, Teja Harper, recounts her family’s adventure at the Aquarium. Teja enters the vivid illustration of the St. Louis Aquarium. Scenes of wonder and discovery abound as Teja visits interesting fish such as Red Garra, nibbling shrimp, and clown fish. Conversations with Teja’s brother, mother, and father slowly add atmosphere to the picture book as Teja views splashing otters, various turtles, and jellyfish.
Bryan Mooney’s Under the Christmas Moon intertwines family, hard work, service, duty, community, charity, veteran life, Christmas cheer, and love in his novel searching for the destinies of Garrett and Megan. Marine Sergeant Garrett Jackson finds himself stranded in the small Vermont town of River Junction on route to Montana, a place he used to call home. Out of concern for the impending across-country winter storm, Megan Maguire and her father search the bus for any unfortunately, stranded strangers.
