NAME: Valentine Michael smith

ANCESTRY: Human
ORIGIN: Mars

Valentine Michael Smith is a human being raised on Mars, newly returned to Earth. Among his people for the first time, he struggles to understand the social mores and prejudices of human nature that are so alien to him, while teaching them his own fundamental beliefs in grokking, watersharing, and love.

Warning: This book contains lot's of grokking

The Earthquake Machine, a fun, fantastical and exhilarating tale, explodes the distinction between Young Adult and adult coming-of-age novels, even as it explores the borders between the United States and Mexico, adolescence and adulthood, male and female, English and Spanish.

The Earthquake Machine tells the story of 14 year-old Rhonda. On the outside, everything looks perfect in Rhonda’s world, but at home Rhonda has to deal with a manipulative father who keeps her mentally ill mother hooked on pharmaceuticals. The only reliable person in Rhonda’s life is her family’s Mexican yardman, Jesús. But when the INS deports Jesús back to his home state of Oaxaca, Rhonda is left alone with her increasingly painful family situation.

Determined to find her friend Jésus, Rhonda seizes an opportunity to run away during a camping trip with friends to Big Bend National Park. She swims to the Mexican side of the Rio Grande and makes her way to the border town of Milagros, Mexico. There a peyote- addled bartender convinces her she won’t be safe traveling alone into the country’s interior. So with the bartender’s help, Rhonda cuts her hair and assumes the identity of a Mexican boy named Angel. She then sets off on a burro across the desert to look for Jesús. Thus begins a wild adventure that fulfills the longing of readers eager for a brave and brazen female protagonist.

Maureen Johnson, the somewhat irregular mother of Lazarus Long, wakes up in bed with a man and a cat. The cat is Pixel, well-known to fans of The Cat Who Walks through Walls. The man is a stranger to her, and besides that, he is dead . . .

So begins Robert A. Heinlein's, To Sail Beyond the Sunset. Filled with the master's most beloved characters, this compelling work broadens and enriches his epic visions of time and space, life and death, love and desire. It is also an autobiographical masterpiece -

and a wondrous return to the alternate universes that all Heinlein fans have come to know and love...

Nimuë Taylor thought working for a vampire would be cool. Instead it’s just like any other annoying job, complete with a boss, Colin, who drives her crazy. Other than the daily humdrum routine, nothing much exciting happens. Until the day Sebastian, Colin’s old friend (read: ex-lover) comes to town, bearing a magical stone that can make any vampire immortal. Really immortal. He doesn’t want to use it, just keep it out of the wrong hands. Trouble is, the wrong hands are getting far too close—and the stone is slowly draining Sebastian’s life force.

When Nim unwittingly comes between the stone and its hunter, she’s bitten. Not by just any vampire, but by one whose bite turns victims into mindless zombies. Healing her involves a ritual that creates a blood bond that’s as passionate as it is dangerous.

For in the fight to keep and destroy the stone of ultimate power, one of them will have to break that bond…and make the ultimate sacrifice.

Warning: This book contains high levels of sarcasm, swaths of swearing, sex with two hot vampires at once, and a dog that likes to eat coffee grounds.

Pina's friends think that she’s lucky: her family is happy and her parents are free-spirited.

But sometimes Pina wonders who the grown-up is, her or her mother. When she chances upon an email with some devastating information, everything Pina thought she knew about life and love unravels.

Can her family survive what she has discovered? Two siblings, two boys, two cities, three generations, four friends. How many versions of the truth