When a sixteen-year-old Spanish girl sees a religious vision while praying in a convent, she becomes involved in a series of humorous adventures. Catalina is a crippled girl, supposedly cured by divine intervention after witnessing a vision of the Virgin Mary. As a result of this, she is pressured into becoming a nun in a Carmelite convent. The Bishop of Segovia, himself undergoing a crisis of faith, becomes involved in the debate about the debt owed to god by Catalina for her cure, but the girl resists all attempts to control her life, determined to marry the man she loves. She joins a troupe of strolling players and becomes the most famous actress in all of Spain.

Presents the words and music--and varying forms of the name--of a classic camp song that dates at least from the 1940s.

Eight-year-old Catalina Castañeda uses Tía Abuela's sewing kit to turn ordinary clothing into a magical disguise, enabling her to uncover a thief at the local library.

Throughout its history, the 76-square-mile island of Catalina has played host to Native Americans, smugglers, otter hunters, ranchers, miners, entrepreneurs, vacationers, movie stars, and nature enthusiasts. William Wrigley Jr. (of chewing-gum fame) bought the island in 1919 and later constructed the recognizable casino building, which was never used for gambling but did become one of the best-known ballrooms in America. In the 1970s, the Wrigley family deeded 88 percent of the island to the Catalina Island Conservancy, which protects the natural state of the island and her inhabitants. Today nearly one million tourists visit annually to take in the fishing, parasailing, glass-bottomed tour boating, scuba diving, cycling, camping, galleries, shopping, and dining.

A fancy flight of lyrics specifies that Santa Catalina Island is "26 miles across the sea." But mapmakers put the distance at 19.7 miles from the closest island point, Doctor's Cove (near Arrow Point), to the closest mainland locale, Point Fermin at San Pedro. Today boats and helicopters operating out of the Ports of Los Angeles, Long Beach, Newport Beach, and Dana Point transport musing songwriters and everyone else to Catalina for the song's much-promised "romance, romance, romance, romance," as well as fishing, sightseeing, and gainful employment. But the history of getting to and from the island's ports of Avalon and Two Harbors has been an epic across centuries of business and pleasure, involving a collective flotilla of side-wheelers, yachts, lumber schooners, steamships, water taxis, converted military vessels, crew boats, and today's fast and convenient jet boats.

A magnetic, provocative debut novel chronicling a young woman’s downward spiral following the end of an affair Elsa Fisher is headed for rock bottom. At least, that’s her plan. She has just been fired from MoMA on the heels of an affair with her married boss, and she retreats to Los Angeles to blow her severance package on whatever it takes to numb the pain. Her abandoned crew of college friends (childhood friend Charlotte and her wayward husband, Jared; and Elsa’s ex-husband, Robby) receive her with open arms, and, thinking she’s on vacation, a plan to celebrate their reunion on a booze-soaked sailing trip to Catalina Island. But Elsa doesn’t want to celebrate. She is lost, lonely, and full of rage, and only wants to sink as low as the drugs and alcohol will take her. On Catalina, her determined unraveling and recklessness expose painful memories and dark desires, putting everyone in the group at risk. With the creeping menace of Patricia Highsmith and the bender-chic of Bret Easton Ellis, Liska Jacobs brings you inside the mind of an angry, reckless young woman hell-bent on destruction—every page taut with the knowledge that Elsa’s path does not lead to a happy place. Catalina is a compulsive, deliciously dark exploration of beauty, love, and friendship, and the sometimes toxic desires that drive us.