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Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Girl who Saved the World by Angel Lawson The Girl Who Saved the World. In an epic showdown Alexandra defeated the leader of the Hybrid Army. In the process she lost her strongest ally and discovered a larger obstacle to peace in the future. Under the rule of a new leader Alex and Wyatt learn more about the start of The Crisis, the real reason for the ETR-Virus and the plans those in charge have for the future. The hunters become the hunted and in the end, not everyone will survive. Read the final installment of The Death Fields Series! Genre: Thriller. Fantasy figure. J essica Alba is hiking in Hollywood's Runyon Canyon. She is talking about her body. The body showcased to full, undulating perfection in films including Sin City and the Marvel comics adaptation Fantastic Four, which opens this Friday. 'I hear people in this industry talking all the time about how Jennifer Lopez is fat,' she says tersely. 'And I know if they're calling her fat, they're saying the same about me.' Rightly, Jessica Alba worries about this. At 24, she has so far been defined largely by her body. Of her last eight films, she has been nearly naked in seven of them. She is 5ft 6in, 34-25-34, and weighs around 120lb, depending upon her training schedule. But the numbers tell little of the story. Even beneath the baggy sweats she favours, Alba's body is a marvel of feminine proportion. A siren song. As a result, Alba has consistently ranked in the top 10 of men's magazine polls. Websites devoted to her celebrity hammer on about her hotness with creepy persistence. Mark Wahlberg's reality-infused HBO show, Entourage, devoted an entire story arc to the conquest of Alba, her body hounded like the Holy Grail by the young male cast, a quest Wahlberg himself has allegedly pursued in real life. US Weekly even reported the rumour that Alba was Tom Cruise's first choice for a publicity girlfriend. She is good-humoured about the scrutiny, but confesses the one-note quality of it is starting to wear her out. 'The scripts I get are always for the whore, or the motorcycle chick in leather, or the horny maid. I get all these screenplays that start, "Tawnya is in the shower. The water streams down her naked, perky breasts."' She sighs, then laughs a tired laugh. 'I don't think that this is happening to Natalie Portman.' There are many reasons for this, and Alba, to her credit, has a firm grasp on most of them. Cast as she is, she hasn't yet had much opportunity to act. The closest she comes to a scene-stealing turn is in the 1999 Drew Barrymore vehicle, Never Been Kissed, in which she is indisputably funny and natural. The rest of her CV - including schlocky thrillers, the short-lived James Cameron sci-fi TV series Dark Angel, and the ill-conceived hip-hop picture Honey - is less impressive. Her turn in Sin City, however, stands out, but largely because Alba plays a stripper with a heart of gold. And a lasso. 'It's not always so great to be objectified,' she says. 'But I don't feel I have much of a choice right now. I'm young in my career. I know I have to strike when the iron is hot.' Alba plans to capitalise on her assets for the moment, saturate the market with her sultry image and then, when she won't have to do that stuff just to get people's attention, she hopes to transform herself into someone like Diane Keaton or Goldie Hawn, women she admires for their kookiness and pluck. 'I look forward to the day when I can do a small movie and act,' she says, 'and it's not about me wearing a bathing suit or chaps.' Alba grew up in the Los Angeles suburbs, one of two children of Mark and Cathy Alba. Mark is dark Mexican, Cathy is French and Danish. The genetic mix has been kind to Alba, leaving her with an intriguing ethnic palate that netted her roles as everything from a part-Malaysian in The Sleeping Dictionary - most famous for showing what fans prayed were Alba's breasts ('They weren't!') - to superhero Sue Storm (aka the Invisible Woman) in Fantastic Four. Fans of the original Marvel comics were up in arms about her being cast in the latter role, until a newly blonde Alba appeared, eyes twinkling, on stage at a press event and melted their collective hearts. Alba says that her ethnic melange, while photogenic, made for a challenging childhood. 'I never really belonged anywhere,' she says. 'I wasn't white. I was shunned by the Latin community for not being Latin enough. My grandfather was the only one in our family to go to college. He made a choice not to speak Spanish in the house. He didn't want his kids to be different.' Alba is taking Spanish lessons now. 'I have a great accent,' she says, 'because I grew up hearing it in the neighbourhood. But I have no idea what I'm saying.' There were other struggles. Her parents met and married in their teens. By the time they were 20 and 21, they had Jessica and her brother Joshua. 'We all grew up together,' Alba explains. 'My parents were so young. My dad hates it when I talk about our past, about not having things, living with Grandma, wearing thrift-store clothes, cutting coupons.' Alba's parents held several jobs apiece. At night, her father was a cook in a rib joint. 'He was terrible,' she says, 'but you could see them working, and he would ham it up for the customers, so they kept him.' Her mother logged days at McDonald's and evenings tending bar. 'At every place, she would make up a drink and name it after herself,' Alba says. When money got especially tight, Mark would drive the kids to Mexico, and point out the shacks and the filthy water. 'He wanted us to see that we had nothing to complain about,' she says. Still, she craved more. 'I was born with a wicked sense of entitlement,' she admits. 'I always thought I was born into the wrong family, that I was fucking royalty and nobody knew it but me.' Her attitude made school difficult. 'From a very early age, I remember thinking that adults were always acting like assholes,' she says. 'I couldn't understand why I had to respect them. My pre-school teacher forced me to write right-handed when I was left-handed. I didn't get why I had to change. Nobody could give me a reason. I have had a big problem with authority ever since.' 'Since she was a baby, she's always been a leader,' says Mark. 'She's really assertive. You know how hard it is to talk to adults and try to get a job when you're a kid? She met [Dark Angel creator] Jim Cameron when she was 17 and just said, "I think I'm the best person for the job." » Alba was a clever, observant child. She noticed things. Like how much her parents enjoyed cutting loose. They needed to, to break out of the box of their lives. She remembers being unable to sleep most nights, and how she would wander into the kitchen and see her parents partying or arguing, drama they tried to protect their kids from in the daylight hours. 'I would stand there and listen,' she says. 'I would see stuff I shouldn't.' Today Alba considers her parents her best friends. She has no complaints about her upbringing. She understands that people do the best they can, that they were kids having kids and that now, maybe, they will finally have their time to shine. 'I want them to move here to Beverly Hills,' she explains. 'I want them to expand their minds a little, get out of the suburbs.' Alba sighs. 'I wasn't given a whole lot in my life. I was on the bottom of the class system. But I got wisdom. I never just did what people told me. I questioned everything. When I look back, it is really no surprise that I started working at 12.' She broke into movies and TV with relative ease; within a year of her first audition, she had a regular role on the TV series The New Adventures of Flipper. 'She never had a childhood,' says Alba's friend Braganza. 'She had to be the adult in her family. She worked all the time. I remember with Dark Angel, she was supposed to be a bike messenger, and I had to teach her how to ride a bike. She had never learned.' If Alba mourns her lost childhood, it doesn't show. 'I don't like to waste time,' she says. Alba is all about tomorrow - who she will become and what that will mean. She wants to have kids, some hers, some adopted, with a husband or without. She wants to start a business. She wants to run a production company - 'and not just so I can put myself in movies. So many people do that. It's pathetic.' Alba has no patience for weakness, especially weakness born of ego - 'you know, like some woman in her forties who dates a 20-year-old so she can keep getting her picture in US Weekly'.

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