Audiobook

Marnie MacGraw wants an ordinary life—a husband, kids, and a minivan in the suburbs. Now that she’s marrying the man of her dreams, she’s sure this is the life she’ll get. Then Marnie meets Blix Holliday, her fiancé’s irascible matchmaking great-aunt who’s dying, and everything changes—just as Blix told her it would.When her marriage ends after two miserable weeks, Marnie is understandably shocked. She’s even more astonished to find that she’s inherited Blix’s Brooklyn brownstone along with all of Blix’s unfinished “projects”: the heartbroken, oddball friends and neighbors running from happiness. Marnie doesn’t believe she’s anything special, but Blix somehow knew she was the perfect person to follow in her matchmaker footsteps. And Blix was also right about some things Marnie must learn the hard way: love is hard to recognize, and the ones who push love away often are the ones who need it most.

Connecting deeply with our kids can be difficult in our busy, technology-driven lives. Reading aloud offers us a chance to be fully present with our children. It also increases our kids’ academic success, inspires compassion, and fortifies them with the inner strength they need to face life’s challenges. As Sarah Mackenzie has found with her own six children, reading aloud long after kids are able to read to themselves can deepen relationships in a powerful way. Founder of the immensely popular Read-Aloud Revival podcast, Sarah knows first-hand how reading can change a child’s life. In The Read-Aloud Family, she offers the inspiration and age-appropriate book lists you need to start a read-aloud movement in your own home. From a toddler’s wonder to a teenager’s resistance, Sarah details practical strategies to make reading aloud a meaningful family ritual. Reading aloud not only has the power to change a family—it has the power to change the world.

All Louisa wants is to finish her doctoral dissertation on Jane Austen and find her Colonel Brandon. Or Mr Darcy. Or Henry Tilney. Or Edward Ferrars. Honestly, at this point, she’s stopped being picky about which Austen hero will (finally) come along and whisk her off to her happily ever after. But she still has someone in mind: for the past five years, she’s sat in the graduate students’ shared office space—twenty PhDs-in-progress to a single desk-packed room—and waited patiently for Daniel to realize that she just might be his own romantic heroine. But Daniel, a grad student obsessed with male beat poets of the twentieth century, has hardly noticed her since they both arrived in the same cohort five years ago. Louisa is determined to get his attention this year, though, as they enter their final semester of graduate study and prepare to defend their dissertations… If only her office mate Emilio would stop ragging on her about the value of studying Austen and leave her alone. When Emilio turns out to be Darcy-level dependable when it comes to sorting out her personal life (and even offers to be her “fake date” to try and get Daniel’s attention), however, Louisa starts to wonder what Austen herself would think of this new “hero” she’s encountered, one who seems nothing like the men she’s read about in novels.