Space-obsessed 12-year-old Paola Santiago and her two best friends, Emma and Dante, know the rule: Stay away from the river. It's all they've heard since a schoolmate of theirs drowned a year ago. Pao is embarrassed to admit that she has been told to stay away for even longer than that, because her mother is constantly warning her about La Llorona, the wailing ghost woman who wanders the banks of the Gila at night, looking for young people to drag into its murky depths.Hating her mother's humiliating superstitions and knowing that she and her friends would never venture into the water, Pao organizes a meet-up to test out her new telescope near the Gila, since it's the best stargazing spot. But when Emma never arrives and Pao sees a shadowy figure in the reeds, it seems like maybe her mom was right. . . .Pao has always relied on hard science to make sense of the world, but to find her friend she will have to enter the world of her nightmares, which includes unnatural mist, mind-bending monsters, and relentless spirits controlled by a terrifying force that defies both logic and legend.

Join Dani Taylor and Detective Jack Bondar battling the clock together to overcome barriers and conflict as they become immersed together in the dark underworld of sex trafficking in Canada. You will gain deep insights into police challenges and psyche, Indigenous perspectives and issues, and what families go through when loved ones go missing. Dani struggles and escapes a path she is on to die young in a gang or wind up in prison. Love drives Dani in the search for her missing kid sister. Detective Jack Bondar grows as he works with Dani and learns about the challenges of Indigenous peoples. The River of Tears is a must-read for anyone wanting insights into missing and murdered women and girls, and policing. It is a captivating story about dignity, hope, and reconciliation. It is about the river of humanity that flows through the impoverished core of every community, the river of tears.

River of Tears is the first ethnography of Brazilian country music, one of the most popular genres in Brazil yet least-known outside it. Beginning in the mid-1980s, commercial musical duos practicing música sertaneja reached beyond their home in Brazil’s central-southern region to become national bestsellers. Rodeo events revolving around country music came to rival soccer matches in attendance. A revival of folkloric rural music called música caipira, heralded as música sertaneja’s ancestor, also took shape. And all the while, large numbers of Brazilians in the central-south were moving to cities, using music to support the claim that their Brazil was first and foremost a rural nation. Since 1998, Alexander Sebastian Dent has analyzed rural music in the state of São Paulo, interviewing and spending time with listeners, musicians, songwriters, journalists, record-company owners, and radio hosts. Dent not only describes the production and reception of this music, he also explains why the genre experienced such tremendous growth as Brazil transitioned from an era of dictatorship to a period of intense neoliberal reform. Dent argues that rural genres reflect a widespread anxiety that change has been too radical and has come too fast. In defining their music as rural, Brazil’s country musicians—whose work circulates largely in cities—are criticizing an increasingly inescapable urban life characterized by suppressed emotions and an inattentiveness to the past. Their performances evoke a river of tears flowing through a landscape of loss—of love, of life in the countryside, and of man’s connections to the natural world.

A young black girl disappears from Cincinnati's West End. No witnesses, no leads. Two days later, a white girl the same age is snatched from Hyde Park Square. Cincinnati's mayor receives a letter brutally stating: "Find the black girl and we'll return the white girl." The fuse lit, two female detectives race to uncover the kidnappers. Hope dwindles as time accumulates, and passes, without resolution. Cincinnati PD and the FBI form an uneasy alliance while battling the city's racial stereotypes and stigmas. In the latest thriller from Rock Neelly, author of ​The Purple Heart Detective Agency ​and ​The Prince of the Border​, readers ride shotgun through the Queen City in police patrol cars, searching recently vacated safe rooms, questioning sorrowful family members, grilling drug lords, looking for anonymous white vans and dark motives. Each detective is tough on her own, combining to make a ferocious duo, but will that be enough...and in time. Weaving together race, law enforcement, family ties, buried history, and life along the banks of the Ohio River, readers will face their own assumptions as they see suspicions reflected on the page. Written with complicated, realistic characters, ​River of Tears​ makes us think about missing girls used as pawns - and what we would do if we had to find them?

A prizewinning historian's epic account of the scramble to control equatorial Africa In just three decades at the end of the nineteenth century, the heart of Africa was utterly transformed. Virtually closed to outsiders for centuries, by the early 1900s the rainforest of the Congo River basin was one of the most brutally exploited places on earth. In Land of Tears, historian Robert Harms reconstructs the chaotic process by which this happened. Beginning in the 1870s, traders, explorers, and empire builders from Arabia, Europe, and America moved rapidly into the region, where they pioneered a deadly trade in ivory and rubber for Western markets and in enslaved labor for the Indian Ocean rim. Imperial conquest followed close behind. Ranging from remote African villages to European diplomatic meetings to Connecticut piano-key factories, Land of Tears reveals how equatorial Africa became fully, fatefully, and tragically enmeshed within our global world.

In his inimitable "two track" style of creating a fictional future and flashing back to actual events in recent history, Peter T. King once again places Congressman Sean Cross at the center of international terrorism, this time coming from radical Islam in cahoots with the Irish Republican Army. The "reality-based" track gives a minute-by-minute account of September 11, 2001 and its effect on the cities of New York and Washington, and continues with month-by-month accounts up until September 11, 2002. A leading congressional Republican, King offers keen insight into President Bush's inner circle in the days immediately following the attacks. In King's fictional future New York once again comes under attack, and it falls upon the resourceful Sean Cross to uncover the odd bedfellows that comprise this latest conspiracy to visit terror on American soil.

Best-selling author Rick Riordan presents the sequel to Tehlor Kay Mejia's critically acclaimed own-voices novel about science-obsessed Paola Santiago. "Paola is a brilliant, furious girl who often trusts her brain but trips over her heart."--Sarah Gailey, Hugo and Locus award-winning author of River of Teeth Six months after Paola Santiago confronted the legendary La Llorona, life is nothing like she'd expected it to be. She is barely speaking to her best friends, Dante and Emma, and what's worse, her mom has a totally annoying boyfriend. Even with her chupacabra puppy, Bruto, around, Pao can't escape the feeling that she's all alone in the world. Pao has no one to tell that she's having nightmares again, this time set in a terrifying forest. Even more troubling? At their center is her estranged father, an enigma of a man she barely remembers. And when Dante's abuela falls mysteriously ill, it seems that the dad Pao never knew just might be the key to healing the eccentric old woman. Pao's search for her father will send her far from home, where she will encounter new monsters and ghosts, a devastating betrayal, and finally, the forest of her nightmares. Will the truths her father has been hiding save the people Pao loves, or destroy them? Once again Tehlor Kay Mejia draws on her Mexican heritage to tell a wild and wondrous story that combines creatures from folklore with modern-day challenges. Complete your middle grade collection with these best-selling fan favorites: Rick Riordan Presents Aru Shah and the End of Time by Roshani Chokshi Rick Riordan Presents Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky by Kwame Mbalia Rick Riordan Presents Sal and Gabi Break the Universe by Carlos Hernandez The Percy Jackson and the Olympians series by Rick Riordan The Trials of Apollo series by Rick Riordan