Mary-Kate and Ashley are excited to attend their town's annual Halloween Carnival. Every year, the carnival's proceeds go to charity -- but this year, few people are riding the rides or playing the games. That's because there's a ghost at the carnival that's scaring all the kids away! The girls must figure out who or what the spectre is -- and how to get rid of it -- or the carnival doesn’t stand a ghost of a chance!
Ashley and I were planning an awesome Halloween party with our friends. But everything started going wrong. Spiders in the candy, scary warnings...we thought it was all some kind of joke. Then we heard a creepy scarecrow scream -- and Ashley and I had one tricky case to crack!
Patty O'Leary invites all her friends, including Mary-Kate and Ashley, to a sleepover party in a toy store. When all the best toys start vanishing, the Trenchcoat Twins suspect there's an uninvited guest hiding in the store. Can they catch the thief or will Patty's party be a bust?
Our friend Mitch says the outdoor maze is haunted. We didn't believe him -- until we came face-to-face with a ghost! Is the ghost real? Or is someone trying to scare us away? There's only one way to find out. Mary-Kate and I have to go back into the scary maze!
A “haunting debut: suspenseful, atmospheric, and completely riveting” (Megan Miranda, New York Times bestselling author of All the Missing Girls) about a young woman who returns home to care for her ailing mother and begins to dig deeper into her sister’s unsolved murder. Sixteen years ago, Sylvie’s sister, Persephone, never came home. Out late with the boyfriend she was forbidden to see, Persephone was missing for three days before her body was found—and years later, her murder is still unsolved. In the present day, Sylvie returns home to care for her estranged mother, Annie, as she undergoes treatment for cancer. Prone to unexplained “Dark Days” even before Persephone’s death, Annie’s once-close bond with Sylvie dissolved in the weeks after their loss, making for an uncomfortable reunion all these years later. Adding to the discomfort, Persephone’s former boyfriend is now a nurse at the cancer center where Annie is being treated. Sylvie has always believed Ben was responsible for the murder—but she carries her own guilt about that night, guilt that traps her in the past while the world goes on around her. As she navigates the complicated relationship with her mother, Sylvie begins to uncover the secrets that fill their house—and what really happened the night Persephone died. The Winter Sister is a “bewitching” (Kirkus Reviews) portrayal of the complex bond between sisters, between mothers and daughters alike, and “will captivate you from suspenseful start to surprising finish” (Kathleen Barber, author of Are You Sleeping).
Star Wars has reached more than three generations of casual and hardcore fans alike, and as a result many of the producers of franchised Star Wars texts (films, television, comics, novels, games, and more) over the past four decades have been fans-turned-creators. Yet despite its dominant cultural and industrial positions, Star Wars has rarely been the topic of sustained critical work. Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling offers a corrective to this oversight by curating essays from a wide range of interdisciplinary scholars in order to bring Star Wars and its transmedia narratives more fully into the fold of media and cultural studies. The collection places Star Wars at the center of those studies' projects by examining video games, novels and novelizations, comics, advertising practices, television shows, franchising models, aesthetic and economic decisions, fandom and cultural responses, and other aspects of Star Wars and its world-building in their multiple contexts of production, distribution, and reception. In emphasizing that Star Wars is both a media franchise and a transmedia storyworld, Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling demonstrates the ways in which transmedia storytelling and the industrial logic of media franchising have developed in concert over the past four decades, as multinational corporations have become the central means for subsidizing, profiting from, and selling modes of immersive storyworlds to global audiences. By taking this dual approach, the book focuses on the interconnected nature of corporate production, fan consumption, and transmedia world-building. As such, this collection grapples with the historical, cultural, aesthetic, and political-economic implications of the relationship between media franchising and transmedia storytelling as they are seen at work in the world's most profitable transmedia franchise.
Because of their popularity, books in series are great vehicles for fostering literacy among all types of readers, who are almost always adamant about reading every title in the series, in series order. Yet traditional information sources on children's and YA literature include very little about series fiction, so librarians often have difficulty managing this literature. This guide will be a rich resource and time-saver for librarians who work with children. It introduces users to the best and most popular fiction series of today, covering more than 1,000 series with over 10,000 titles, appropriate for elementary readers. Annotations also indicate series and titles accepted by some of the popular electronic reading programs (e.g., Accelerated Reading, Reading First). A numbered list of titles in the series follows.
