Essays by adult women writers explore their secret lives as teenagers: secret confessions about parental unhappiness and infidelity, mental illness in the family, alcoholism and threats to self-esteem.
From the beloved author of Because of Mr. Terupt comes the sequel to The Perfect Score, about a lovable group of students at Lake View Middle School and the rewards and challenges of seventh grade. These students are in for a year of secrets, discoveries, and kid power! GAVIN finally joins the football team--a dream come true!--but Coach Holmes refuses to play him for reasons that also threaten to tear Gavin's family apart. When RANDI attends an elite gymnastics camp, she uncovers a startling family connection. SCOTT starts researching an article for the school newspaper and stumbles right into a hornet's nest of lies. With his loser older brother, Brian, out of the house, TREVOR's life is loads better--until he realizes that only he can save Brian from getting into deep trouble. NATALIE's top goals: (1) find out why Mrs. Woods and Mrs. Magenta no longer speak to each other--a mission shared by all the kids--and (2) teach a certain someone an important life skill without anyone knowing. It's tough keeping secrets. And tougher still to deal with the fallout when secrets spill out.
From the beloved author of Because of Mr. Terupt and its sequels comes The Perfect Score, a new middle-grade school story with a very special cast of unforgettable characters who discover that getting the perfect score—both on the test and in life—is perhaps not so perfect after all. No one likes or wants to take the statewide assessment tests. Not the students in Mrs. Woods’s sixth-grade class. Not even Mrs. Woods. It’s not as if the kids don’t already have things to worry about. . . . Under pressure to be the top gymnast her mother expects her to be, RANDI starts to wonder what her destiny truly holds. Football-crazy GAVIN has always struggled with reading and feels as dumb as his high school–dropout father. TREVOR acts tough and mean, but as much as he hates school, he hates being home even more. SCOTT’s got a big brain and an even bigger heart, especially when it comes to his grandfather, but his good intentions always backfire in spectacular ways. NATALIE, know-it-all and aspiring lawyer, loves to follow the rules—only this year, she’s about to break them all. The whole school is in a frenzy with test time approaching—kids, teachers, the administration. Everyone is anxious. When one of the kids has a big idea for acing the tests, they’re all in. But things get ugly before they get better, and in the end, the real meaning of the perfect score surprises them all.
A GRIPPING PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF GONE. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "Immediately grabbed my interest and kept me turning the pages late into the night. This fast-paced thriller is full of twists and turns I didn't see coming." Sheila N. THE PERFECT FIANCÉ OR A MURDERER'S SON? It's him. Tom. I helped put his mom in prison for life. She killed his father. I recognize the sharp nose and flare to the nostrils. His thick eyebrows and defined cheekbones. But mostly it's the eyes. Sea green. THE CONCERNED MOTHER. But my daughter, Joni, keeps calling him Michael. And they're here at the lake house telling us they're getting married. SHE LOVES HIM. BUT I KNOW HE'S LYING. It must be him. But what do I say? Suddenly I'm thrust back fifteen years, looking through photos of a violent and bloody murder scene. I can't be 100% sure. We haven't been the perfect family. But we got through it together. I will do anything to protect us, to protect the life we've fought for. WHO DO YOU BELIEVE? A gripping psychological thriller ready to be devoured by fans of K.L. Slater, Patricia MacDonald, Teresa Driscoll, Lisa Jewell, Natalie Barelli, Shalini Boland, Alex Michaelides and Susanna Beard. READERS LOVE HER PERFECT SECRET: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "Brearton kept me guessing until the end. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and would recommend it to a friend. Great for those who like fast-paced mystery thrillers." S.N. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "I loved this one . . . The characters were well rounded and the narrative felt believable. Gave me chills. Solid five." Morgan S. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "A captivating psychological thriller . . . It kept me guessing with a totally surprising ending. Well worth the read." Carole S. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "There are so many layers to this story . . . loved it." Aileen G. ⭐⭐⭐⭐ "A very good read . . . This book kept me guessing until the end." Barbara ALSO BY T.J. BREARTON THE NORTH COUNTRY SERIES Book 1: DARK WEB Book 2: DARK KILLS Book 3: GONE THE TITAN SERIES Book 1: HABIT Book 2: SURVIVORS Book 3: DAYBREAK Book 4: BLACK SOUL SPECIAL AGENT TOM LANGE Book 1: DEAD GONE Book 2: TRUTH OR DEAD Book 3: DEAD OR ALIVE STANDALONE NOVELS HER PERFECT SECRET HIGH WATER THE HUSBANDS WHEN HE VANISHED
The instant New York Times Bestseller #1 Wall Street Journal Business Bestseller Instant Washington Post Bestseller "Brims with a surprising amount of insight and practical advice." --The Wall Street Journal Daniel H. Pink, the #1 bestselling author of Drive and To Sell Is Human, unlocks the scientific secrets to good timing to help you flourish at work, at school, and at home. Everyone knows that timing is everything. But we don't know much about timing itself. Our lives are a never-ending stream of "when" decisions: when to start a business, schedule a class, get serious about a person. Yet we make those decisions based on intuition and guesswork. Timing, it's often assumed, is an art. In When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, Pink shows that timing is really a science. Drawing on a rich trove of research from psychology, biology, and economics, Pink reveals how best to live, work, and succeed. How can we use the hidden patterns of the day to build the ideal schedule? Why do certain breaks dramatically improve student test scores? How can we turn a stumbling beginning into a fresh start? Why should we avoid going to the hospital in the afternoon? Why is singing in time with other people as good for you as exercise? And what is the ideal time to quit a job, switch careers, or get married? In When, Pink distills cutting-edge research and data on timing and synthesizes them into a fascinating, readable narrative packed with irresistible stories and practical takeaways that give readers compelling insights into how we can live richer, more engaged lives.
This book covers key concepts of cryptography, from encryption and digital signatures to cryptographic protocols, presenting techniques and protocols for key exchange, user ID, electronic elections and digital cash. Advanced topics include bit security of one-way functions and computationally perfect pseudorandom bit generators. Assuming no special background in mathematics, it includes chapter-ending exercises and the necessary algebra, number theory and probability theory in the appendix. This edition offers new material including a complete description of the AES, a section on cryptographic hash functions, new material on random oracle proofs, and a new section on public-key encryption schemes that are provably secure against adaptively-chosen-ciphertext attacks.
Cryptography plays a key role in ensuring the privacy and integrity of data and the security of computer networks. Introduction to Modern Cryptography provides a rigorous yet accessible treatment of modern cryptography, with a focus on formal definitions, precise assumptions, and rigorous proofs. The authors introduce the core principles of
This accessible introduction for undergraduates explains the cryptographic protocols for privacy and the use of digital signatures for certifying the integrity of messages and programs. It provides a guide to the principles and elementary mathematics underlying modern cryptography, giving readers a look under the hood for security techniques and the reasons they are thought to be secure.
This introduction to cryptography employs a programming-oriented approach to study the most important cryptographic schemes in current use and the main cryptanalytic attacks against them. Discussion of the theoretical aspects, emphasizing precise security definitions based on methodological tools such as complexity and randomness, and of the mathematical aspects, with emphasis on number-theoretic algorithms and their applications to cryptography and cryptanalysis, is integrated with the programming approach, thus providing implementations of the algorithms and schemes as well as examples of realistic size. A distinctive feature of the author's approach is the use of Maple as a programming environment in which not just the cryptographic primitives but also the most important cryptographic schemes are implemented following the recommendations of standards bodies such as NIST, with many of the known cryptanalytic attacks implemented as well. The purpose of the Maple implementations is to let the reader experiment and learn, and for this reason the author includes numerous examples. The book discusses important recent subjects such as homomorphic encryption, identity-based cryptography and elliptic curve cryptography. The algorithms and schemes which are treated in detail and implemented in Maple include AES and modes of operation, CMAC, GCM/GMAC, SHA-256, HMAC, RSA, Rabin, Elgamal, Paillier, Cocks IBE, DSA and ECDSA. In addition, some recently introduced schemes enjoying strong security properties, such as RSA-OAEP, Rabin-SAEP, Cramer--Shoup, and PSS, are also discussed and implemented. On the cryptanalysis side, Maple implementations and examples are used to discuss many important algorithms, including birthday and man-in-the-middle attacks, integer factorization algorithms such as Pollard's rho and the quadratic sieve, and discrete log algorithms such as baby-step giant-step, Pollard's rho, Pohlig--Hellman and the index calculus method. This textbook is suitable for advanced undergraduate and graduate students of computer science, engineering and mathematics, satisfying the requirements of various types of courses: a basic introductory course; a theoretically oriented course whose focus is on the precise definition of security concepts and on cryptographic schemes with reductionist security proofs; a practice-oriented course requiring little mathematical background and with an emphasis on applications; or a mathematically advanced course addressed to students with a stronger mathematical background. The main prerequisite is a basic knowledge of linear algebra and elementary calculus, and while some knowledge of probability and abstract algebra would be helpful, it is not essential because the book includes the necessary background from these subjects and, furthermore, explores the number-theoretic material in detail. The book is also a comprehensive reference and is suitable for self-study by practitioners and programmers.
Return to Lake View Middle School in the third book of the PERFECT SCORE series from the beloved author of Because of Mr. Terupt. Eighth grade promises to be an unforgettable year of tears, laughter, surprises, and star power. GAVIN's days of football glory have arrived, but an accident on the home front upends his family. Ever enterprising, NATALIE anchors a morning news broadcast at school--where she's unafraid to tackle big issues. Being on the outs with his best friend sucks, but the more TREVOR tries to patch things up, the worse things get. Sidelined with a gymnastics injury, RANDI develops a bad attitude and worries that her mom's new boyfriend means changes she won't like. SCOTT discovers hidden talents . . . and becomes a secret weapon on and off the football field. It's the final year of middle school--a time to play hard, smart, and together!