Max's twin brother and sister annoy him so much that he runs away from home.

Max's twin brother and sister annoy him so much that he runs away from home.

Fans went wild for this gripping, emotional addition to the Stranger Things' universe after its successful launch! Fall into the never-before-told backstory of the beloved Dig Dug maven, Max Mayfield, written by New York Times bestselling author Brenna Yovanoff. Meet Max. She's from California. She skateboards. Her family just dumped her in the middle of Indiana. And she's really not ready to call Hawkins her new home. Whether she's facing off against her bully brother, Billy, the new kids at school, or monsters abound, Max tackles life with sass and grit. This must-read novel based on the hit Netflix series Stranger Things explores Max's past--with all the good and the bad it's given her--in the lead up to the thrilling season that introduces our favorite new member of the gang.

Melinda, her father, and Teensie are back! This time, Melinda's tired of being bossed around. Flu shot season has arrived and the only way Melinda and her friend Maria believe they can make their parents listen to them is by running away. Will Melinda be able to talk with her father before he sets up the appointment or is she already too late? Don't miss the adventure in Melinda Runs Away! Melinda Runs Away is book 4 of the Melinda series. MELINDA books feature a large vocabulary, but shorter chapters to keep younger readers engaged. Melinda is a socially awkward girl, however the problems she encounters have nothing to do with her gender. Every Melinda book centers around a safe, wholesome adventure where Melinda must use the tools and skills she has previously developed to fix the problem. NO catty girl drama NO boy-crazy idolizing NO children doing adult jobs Clean. Safe. Fun.

Not wishing to be sent away to Camp Putt, Addie is determined to run away, unless her friend Max can convince her to change her mind.

Carnegie Vitali, a self-made billionaire and hit man/assassin for an Italian mob family and a private organization, who lives a twisted lifestyle, tries to hold his family together by keeping them safe from unforeseen danger. He marries twice and shares children with both of his wives. His first wife never loved him. She only wanted the money. But his second wife, whose faith was strong in God, loved him through it all, hard and unconditionally. Carnegie also suffers off and on, dealing with three mental illnesses, multiple personality disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and paranoid schizophrenia. The one that affects him the most is multiple personality disorder, which causes him to turn into some of his alter egos unknowingly. Even though his wife and mother prayed consistently to God and needed him too, he still didn't believe in a God that would make someone mentally ill. Ordered to do another job, Carnegie kills a young boy's father, not knowing that he would soon grow up to avenge his father's death. The young man vowed that if he ever saw Carnegie again, he would kill him. Years later, tables turn. His past finally catches up to him, and near tragedy strikes hard, leaving his wife in the hospital with a 10 percent survival rate from a bullet taken in the chest that was meant for him. Feeling helpless, not knowing if his wife will make it through the night, Carnegie puts his differences aside and turns to God for the first time, hoping that his prayers will be answered.

The novel has often been characterized as the art form without a form. Although there may not be any rules for how to write a novel, as Matthew Clark shows in his new work of practical analysis, a good novel is as carefully formed as a good poem. From Paragraphs to Plots uncovers large compositional features of narrative construction, thereby excavating elements that constitute the architecture of the novel. Clark begins by discussing the segmentation of narratives, from the paragraph level up to the whole novel, with case studies of the composition of Jane Austen’s Emma and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. The next chapter explores an important, though often neglected, feature of narrative architecture called ring composition: a particular kind of repetition where the beginning and the end of a text are the same or similar. From there, Clark analyzes in detail two novels, Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, identifying the repetitions, inversions, links, and fragmented narrations that comprise each narrative. The book’s second half focuses on simple and complex plot forms. Examining iterations of simple forms—plots that begin with a specific initiating event and proceed in an essentially regular chronological progression from beginning to middle to end—Clark outlines several common beginnings (Arrival, Departure, Meeting, Need, Birth, Death) and endings (Departures, Returns, Marriages, Need Satisfied, Death), along with a short account of less common ways to begin a novel. Subsequent discussions examine devices used in complex plot forms, such as Beginning with the Ending, Second Chapter Retrospects, Ghosts from the Past, Multiple Retrospects, One-Day Novels, One-Year Novels, Mirror Plots, Simultaneous Narration, Unnatural Chronology, and Non-Narrative Elements. The final chapter draws together the preceding discussions with a detailed case study of a recent novel, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize–winning The Sympathizer. By analyzing common practices of narrative construction, From Paragraphs to Plots identifies sources of beauty and meaning in literature, approaching the aesthetic and the thematic as simultaneous and inextricable.