Twelve years after Chester Reynolds’ mysterious disappearance from the Bell Tower at the Enchanted College of Oceania (ECO), his fourteen-year-old identical twin daughters, Harper Leigh and Leigh Harper (named in honor of Harper Lee, the author of To Kill A Mockingbird), embark on a magical quest to determine why he was abducted from their relatively quiet hometown of Oceania, Maryland. Harper and Leigh may be identical, but their personalities could not be more different. Harper excels in sports, and her love of skateboarding is matched only by her feelings for her boyfriend, Jeremy Alexander Fletcher, the good-looking, athletic captain of the Lakeshore Preparatory varsity baseball and football teams. Leigh is light-years ahead of her sophomore class in academics and she prefers to spend Saturday afternoons in ballet class rather than at the skate park with Harper. Harper is a natural dare-devil, but Leigh, the more reserved twin, soon discovers that her chats with a stranger called Poem Man on Teen Village prove to be more sinister and dangerous that she could have ever imagined. Lydia Reynolds, the twins’ mother, owns and operates The Enchanted College of Oceania (ECO), a school for children and young adults with Magical Talents and Special Gifts. ECO is housed in an old mansion with a sordid and murderous history; from ghostly sightings of the mansion’s former owners, J.L and Eloise Winthrop, to strange occurrences in classrooms, students have no shortage of surreal tales to tell. Unlike their hopeful mother, the twins aren’t convinced that their father is still alive. Dr. Xavier Montague, the Headmaster of Lakeshore Preparatory, who has plans of his own for Lydia, often quietly thwarts Lydia’s search for Chester. While visiting ECO one afternoon, Harper discovers a rather ominous magic book that details how to reclaim the dead. The twins soon realize that the book’s spells for resurrection involve “soul-napping”, which proves to be quite difficult as ghosts are hard to capture and control. While the twins attempt to bottle spirits, Lydia becomes the legal guardian of a handsome, sixteen-year-old named Lance Meridian, whose parents recently died in a car accident in Washington D.C. The trauma of the event caused Lance to experience hysterical deafness. Despite his grief and solitude, he establishes a friendship with the four peculiar and rarely seen women of Emerson Pond. In Oceania, no one but Lance is brave enough to even venture into their territory, as few are aware of what occurs in their enchanted cottage. The Reynolds twins must balance the paranormal pursuit to find their father, Chester, (which they title “Project C”) with real world drama at The Academy of the Sacred Names, their all-girls Catholic high school. While executing Project C, the girls must also navigate the precarious corridors of high school marked by rigorous academics, the self-proclaimed “Royals” and their arch-nemesis Meredith Ford. The Reynolds girls certainly never have a dull moment and they manage to find romance, danger and adventure in this world and beyond.
A selection of texts by Elizabeth Gaskell, accompanied by annotations. It brings together Gaskell academics to provide readers with scholarship on her work and seeks to bring the crusading spirit and genius of the writer into the 21st century to take her place as a major Victorian writer.
Maria S. Rye, a woman motivated by both feminist and philanthropic ideals, devoted her life to the migration of women and girls out of England. This biography gives an account of Rye's activities from her early engagement with liberal feminism through her association with the Langham Place group in the 1850s, her work as a journalist and with the Society for Promoting Women's Employment, through to her efforts in women's and children's emigration Between 1861 and 1896, Maria S. Rye sent many hundreds of single women out to Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, and more than four thousand children to Canada, all with the promise of a better life in the British colonies than they could expect at home in England. Like many nineteenth century advocates of emigration, she saw it as a panacea for many social ills, taking people from impoverishment in the old world to the hope of better prospects in the new. Unlike other advocates, she linked this enthusiasm for emigration with the ideals of liberal feminism, arguing that women and girls should share the opportunities for advancement that the colonies offered to men and boys Rye played a central role in developing organizations to facilitate the migration of women and girls, starting with the Female Middle Class Emigration Society in 1861. After 1869 she concentrated on the migration of so-called gutter-children to Canada, where her pioneering efforts were followed by numerous other philanthropic associates, such as Barnardo This biography analyzes how feminism and philanthropy intertwined in her activities, and how her early concerns with the rights of women to economic opportunity came to be over-ridden by an authoritarian streak that led to the tragic excesses of her work in juvenile migration.
In her debut short story collection, Quednau offers unsettling examinations of “what really happened” with rich, complex characters that might equally arouse our suspicions or sympathy: we pay attention. She gives voice to the interludes between actions, what almost occurred, or might yet, the skewed time of “before” and acute reckoning of “afterward.” Seemingly innocent gestures leave their marks in comeuppance: the blurt of an intimate nickname becoming an ad hoc striptease in a public place, a parked car leading to a woman flailing in a dunk tank, a garage sale with no early birds ending in vengeance, the redemptive act of shucking corn with an ex-husband’s new lover transforming into greater loss. These stories attest to Quednau’s belief that the most significant moments in our lives—the things that alter us—lie in the margins, just out of sight of what was once presumed or predicted. In these short fictions timing is everything, the rusted twentieth-century myths of ownership or conquest are set against the incoming reality of pandemic, our separate notions of love or of courage, of painful transformation, yet to be believed.
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