After having a day in which nothing is right, tired Bella cuddles with her mother and talks about having a more cheerful day tomorrow.

This is a collection of paraprose by author Markus Almond. Showcasing some of his most honest and personal writing, this compilation contains stories of love and redemption, sex and parties, tales of heartbreak and squinting in the morning sun. Things don't always turn out the way we expect. But with the right attitude and some good friends, you can always find your way to the next adventure.

Nakaya, a high school sophomore and ice hockey player, has just lost his mother and ends up moving in with Shino, his long-lost father. Shino's anime voice acting job recently ended, so he finds work on boys' love radio dramas to make ends meet. He gets paired up with the ever-cool Tenryu, and the two bond while another co-worker hits on Shino. Meanwhile, Nakaya is forced to consider dropping out of school, but pressure to get serious about ice hockey is building up! This new, awkward father-son duo must learn how to get along and live together in spite of all odds...and most important, that when you need to shout, you shout out loud!

Decibella is a loud talker. A really loud talker. She’s so loud, she’s hurting ears, startling wait staff, disrupting classmates, and annoying moviegoers. She doesn’t realize different environments and situations sometimes demand a softer, quieter voice. That is until a caring teacher introduces her to the silly-sounding word “Slurpadoodle” and the five volumes of voice (Whisper, 6-inch, Table Talk, Strong Speaker, and Outside).

Lacey Walker needs to stop talking so she can learn to listen.

Rhyming text depicts the chaos caused by shouting at the zoo.

For twenty-two years, Katherine Bouton had a secret that grew harder to keep every day. An editor at The New York Times, at daily editorial meetings she couldn't hear what her colleagues were saying. She had gone profoundly deaf in her left ear; her right was getting worse. As she once put it, she was "the kind of person who might have used an ear trumpet in the nineteenth century." Audiologists agree that we're experiencing a national epidemic of hearing impairment. At present, 50 million Americans suffer some degree of hearing loss—17 percent of the population. And hearing loss is not exclusively a product of growing old. The usual onset is between the ages of nineteen and forty-four, and in many cases the cause is unknown. Shouting Won't Help is a deftly written, deeply felt look at a widespread and misunderstood phenomenon. In the style of Jerome Groopman and Atul Gawande, and using her experience as a guide, Bouton examines the problem personally, psychologically, and physiologically. She speaks with doctors, audiologists, and neurobiologists, and with a variety of people afflicted with midlife hearing loss, braiding their stories with her own to illuminate the startling effects of the condition. The result is a surprisingly engaging account of what it's like to live with an invisible disability—and a robust prescription for our nation's increasing problem with deafness. A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2013