There are lots of strange things going on at Starling Academy these days: Leona is devastated about her Wish Pendant failure. Ophelia, the newest Star Darling, is completely clueless. Vega's roommate, Piper, is getting on her last nerve. And Scarlet? Who knows? She's nowhere to be found! So when by-the-book Vega gets sent to Wishworld on the next mission, she finds herself very distracted. Why is her Wisher so secretive? Vega needs to solve this puzzle fast. Time is running out and Starland needs every drop of wish energy it can get!
Leona thinks she is the center of the universe, and can be quite bossy. She must recognize that the world does not revolve around her while not losing her powerful self-confidence.
START YOUR STAR DARLINGS ADVENTURE! Welcome to Starling Academy, the prestigious school where students study to become Wish-Granters and help guide Wishlings in making their dreams and wishes come true. Twelve star-charmed girls--the Star Darlings--have been chosen to work as a team to save their beloved Starland from peril. Sage takes a spectacular journey to Wishworld and discovers how challenging life can be in an unfamiliar place. Then Libby must help two fighting best friends, but can she stop herself from trying to grant every wish big and small? On Leona's mission, her challenge is to put her own desires aside and truly understand what her Wisher needs!
Scarlet's mission: Scarlet is going to help a disabled girl who wishes that she could feel independent. Scarlet wants to return quickly with the energy and tries to manipulate the girl into feeling good about herself instead of actually helping her r
There is one star in the sky that shines brighter than the rest. It's where our wishes go when we send them out into the universe... and it's called Starland. This is where the Star Darlings live -- twelve girls who are chosen as an elite, secret circle of Wish-Granters. They collect, nurture and help us make wishes come true. A Wisher's Guide to Starland introduces us to the Starlings and the incredible, sparkling, positive-energy-powered world they live in. Filled with facts on Starland and it's inhabitants, this 128-page book is filled with amazing full-color art and sure to be on every tween's "wish" list!
First published in 1889, this novel has two main plots; one set in the real world at the time the book was published (the Victorian era), the other in the fictional world of Fairyland.
Celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2024, internationally bestselling author and literary icon Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies is "beautiful, heartbreaking and alive ... a lyrical work of historical fiction based on the story of the Mirabal sisters, revolutionary heroes who had opposed and fought against Trujillo." (Concepción de León, New York Times) Alvarez’s new novel, The Cemetery of Untold Stories, is coming April 2, 2024. Pre-order now! It is November 25, 1960, and three beautiful sisters have been found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. The official state newspaper reports their deaths as accidental. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Nor does it explain that the sisters were among the leading opponents of Gen. Rafael Leónidas Trujillo’s dictatorship. It doesn’t have to. Everybody knows of Las Mariposas—the Butterflies. In this extraordinary novel, the voices of all four sisters--Minerva, Patria, María Teresa, and the survivor, Dedé--speak across the decades to tell their own stories, from secret crushes to gunrunning, and to describe the everyday horrors of life under Trujillo’s rule. Through the art and magic of Julia Alvarez’s imagination, the martyred Butterflies live again in this novel of courage and love, and the human costs of political oppression. "Alvarez helped blaze the trail for Latina authors to break into the literary mainstream, with novels like In the Time of the Butterflies and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents winning praise from critics and gracing best-seller lists across the Americas."—Francisco Cantú, The New York Times Book Review "This Julia Alvarez classic is a must-read for anyone of Latinx descent." —Popsugar.com "A gorgeous and sensitive novel . . . A compelling story of courage, patriotism and familial devotion." —People "Shimmering . . . Valuable and necessary." —Los Angeles Times "A magnificent treasure for all cultures and all time.” —St. Petersburg Times "Alvarez does a remarkable job illustrating the ruinous effect the 30-year dictatorship had on the Dominican Republic and the very real human cost it entailed."—Cosmopolitan.com
"Charming Libby is a people pleaser who is slow at making decisions. She has to learn how to say no, stand up for herself, and feel more confident about her choices. All of the Star Darling roommates have received beautiful bouquets of sparkly flowers welcoming them to Star Academy. The band tryouts begin and many different girls show up to audition. Meanwhile, the Star Darlings are dealing with their personal conflicts and issues"-- Provided by publisher.
"Marytanov explains why and how the US armed forces have lost the military supremacy they thought they once had and how Russia, which supposedly had been defeated in the Cold War, succeeded not only in catching up with USA, but actually surpassing it in many key domains such as long range cruise missiles, diesel-electric submarines, air defenses, electronic warfare, air superiority and many others. Andrei Martyanov's book is an absolute 'must read' for any person wanting to understand the reality of modern warfare and super-power competition." THE SAKER While exceptionalism is not unique to America, the intensity of their conviction and its global ramifications are. This view of its exceptionalism has led the US to grossly misinterpret—sometimes deliberately—the causative factors of key events of the past two centuries. Accordingly, the wrong conclusions have been derived, and very wrong lessons learned. Nowhere has this been more manifest than in American military thought and its actual application of military power. Time after time the American military has failed to match lofty declarations about its superiority, producing instead a mediocre record of military accomplishments. Starting from the Korean War the United States hasn’t won a single war against a technologically inferior, but mentally tough enemy. The technological dimension of American “strategy” has completely overshadowed any concern with the social, cultural, operational and even tactical requirements of military (and political) conflict. With a new Cold War with Russia emerging, the United States enters a new period of geopolitical turbulence completely unprepared in any meaningful way—intellectually, economically, militarily or culturally—to face a reality which was hidden for the last 70+ years behind the curtain of never-ending Chalabi moments and a strategic delusion concerning Russia, whose history the US viewed through a Solzhenitsified caricature kept alive by a powerful neocon lobby, which even today dominates US policy makers’ minds. Martyanov’s former Soviet military background enables deep insight into the fundamental issues of warfare and military power as a function of national power—assessed correctly, not through the lens of Wall Street “economic” indices and a FIRE economy, but through the numbers of enclosed technological cycles and culture, much of which has been shaped in Russia by continental warfare and which is practically absent in the US.
