An electric contemporary reimagining of the myth of Persephone and Demeter set over the course of one summer on a lush private island, about addiction and sex, family and independence, and who holds the power in a modern underworld. Camp counselor Cory Ansel, eighteen and aimless, afraid to face her high-strung single mother in New York, is no longer sure where home is when the father of one of her campers offers an alternative. The CEO of a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company, Rolo Picazo is middle-aged, divorced, magnetic. He is also intoxicated by Cory. When Rolo proffers a childcare job (and an NDA), Cory quiets an internal warning and allows herself to be ferried to his private island. Plied with luxury and opiates manufactured by his company, she continues to tell herself she's in charge. Her mother, Emer, head of a teetering agricultural NGO, senses otherwise. With her daughter seemingly vanished, Emer crosses land and sea to heed a cry for help she alone is convinced she hears. Alternating between the two women's perspectives, Rachel Lyon's Fruit of the Dead incorporates its mythic inspiration with a light touch and devastating precision. The result is a tale that explores love, control, obliteration, and America's own late capitalist mythos. Lyon's reinvention of Persephone and Demeter's story makes for a haunting and ecstatic novel that vibrates with lush abandon. Readers will not soon forget it.

When Mucky decides it would be better if he was a unicorn, Owl tries to help but wouldn't a true friend like him just the way he is?

Mucky is fed up with being a "drab old brown" horse who smells so bad that none of the other horses want to share his field.Instead, he wants to be a unicorn with a gleaming white coat and a long horn that the other horses admire.So Owl comes up with a plan to make Mucky s wish come true, and enlists the help of the other animals. They use a shell from the beach for a horn and milk from the cows to paint him. He wakes up thinking he s turned into a unicorn, but it soons rains and everything gets washed away. Mucky then realizes he doesn t need to be unicorn to have great friends who will notice him.