In the tight-knit community of Mystic Beach, social worker Dr. Clara Starr appears to have conquered her troubled past.
But when the body of local waterman Bobby Ward washes ashore, Clara's darkest secret plunges her into the heart of a chilling mystery. As her clients become the prime suspects in Bobby's murder, Clara must unravel a web of deceit and betrayal.
Aided by her trusted assistant, Addie, they grapple with long-held secrets and the deadly consequences of past mistakes.
When the shocking cause of Bobby's death is revealed, Clara finds herself on the precipice of losing everything. She must decide whether to keep her secret hidden and risk arrest or expose her past and face a devastating truth.
Home-brewed medicines, a mysterious family of women making them, and a threat to the local funding of the Abolition movement: 15-year-old Almyra Alexander struggles with all of these, as well as adapting to the rough, unpolished life in a northern Vermont village. She’s determined to become a minister, like her politically involved but very absent father. Moving in with her aunt and uncle in Vermont seems the quickest way toward the higher education she craves, and a pulpit of her own.
"This ambitious addition to the Winds of Freedom series brings the 1850s to vivid life through captivating details and a compelling story. The Bitter and the Sweet looks unflinchingly at serious topics, including class differences, women’s health and rights, and efforts to abolish — and extend — slavery in our nation. The crisp writing and fully developed characters will enthrall young and older readers alike." — Charles Fergus, author of A Stranger Here Below and Lay This Body Down.
"When most readers think of the American frontier, they imagine the western United States. But in the early nineteenth century, there was another, equally colorful frontier between Vermont and Canada that attracted a colorful cast of lawbreakers: horse thieves, smugglers, and above all, counterfeiters. ... Beth Kanell's entertaining novel brings to life a world that flourished nearly two centuries ago." —Stephen A. Mihm, author of A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States, and Professor, University of Georgia
In the early days of the pandemic, San Francisco realtor and part-time bookie, Eddie Bilker, has two problems: his wife has been kidnapped, and there’s a dead body in his Porsche. In this twisty tale, Eddie is forced to navigate two separate worlds. He goes toe-to-toe with the wildly eccentric criminals, who may or may not be involved in the kidnapping, while simultaneously trying to hold onto his straight life as an upstanding member of society. “As the conspiracy unfolds, you’ll meet characters who are all a bit compromised but each tethered to a dramatic kidnapping that is not what it seems.” -Annie Gaus, SF Standard
Aqua, the novel: saving pure water with a bird, a Greek goddess, and a pair of winged horses.
College student Diana Carter returns to the family ranch after her first year of school, anticipating a summer pack trip into the Wind River Mountains with her father and Willy, their Eastern Shoshone and Crow family friend and ranch hand. Her plans are upended when her grandmother breaks her hip and her dad leaves to work in the oil fields of North Dakota.
Diana learns she is destined to save pure water on our planet. The necklace Willy gives Diana, telling her the elk is her animal, protects her as she joins the Greek goddess Persephone and a little Mountain Bluebird named Indigo on a quest to save clean water.
This bittersweet comedy and romance has touches of tragedy and magic.
Writing during the pandemic and feeling nostalgia for what has been lost, the narrator, Abe, recounts stories told around the dinner table on a Caribbean cruise two years before.
Abe explains the title:
"I'm writing from the midst of this crisis, not with the wisdom of hindsight. Even if it gets no worse than it is right now, much has been lost.
"I'm hoping that we can gether. That's a word that isn't in the dictionary.
"To gether is to find new ways to be together, new ways to meet, to bond, to love.
"Even when physically isolated, we can come together in spirit, to share experiences and emotions to the point that we are intimately connected.”
"In any case, may we always treasure our normal life, knowing, as we now know, that it is fragile and should never be taken for granted."
The Magnificent and Marvelous Book Club (the MAMs) return in this adventure to explore their Irish roots. The ancient spirits of a leprechaun, St. Brigid, and an African-American matriarch conspire to awaken the travelers to possibilities. Grieving, reluctant Abigail considers opening her heart. Black ex-convict Welby and Reagan, a white nurse in recovery, find attraction, yet come from opposite ends of the political divide. The group explores the Emerald Isle, pauses for listening circles, retreats at the well of St. Brigid, gathers at a peace center in Northern Ireland and, ultimately, finds new hope for their own lives and America.
After a threat at her home, retired teacher Aggie May drives through a blizzard to return to the Lodge, the quiet retirement village that serves as a meeting place for a group of senior time travelers who solve mysteries from the past. She reconnects with Lodge director Abe Irving and other friends and is soon involved in a new mission. The source for the mission is Chaya Reese, an elderly woman who escaped Nazi Germany as a child when her parents put her on the Kindertransport. In a bid to understand what was happening in America as Hitler rose to power, Chaya asks the time travelers to investigate the German American Bund and America First, two pro-fascist groups active in the United States in the 1930s. As Aggie and Abe explore this dark history, they grow closer. But when their safety is threatened by unexpected danger, they are forced to confront their obligation to act against evil.
3 generations
2 families
1 terrible truth
Suki Hayashida’s family had their home, their business and their property stolen when they were interned along with 120,000 other Japanese Americans during WWII. Now, 75 years later, if Suki can survive both legal and personal attacks, she will have the opportunity to right that wrong, not only for her own family, but for hundreds of others.
In 1967, Buffalo River is a nice, quiet place ... until a strange new restaurant comes to town. Everybody loves Happy Bird Hamburgers. Except Avery and his dad.
Avery's life spirals out of control when his father disappears and is presumed dead. Avery believes otherwise, but no one believes him.
All seems lost until Avery is befriended by a bug from another world who takes the form of a superhero. Together, they discover that Happy Bird Hamburgers is run by extraterrestrial birds who want to control humanity.
To find his father, Avery must deciide who to trust. And find the courage to face the challenge.
It's bugs against birds in a contest for planetary supremacy.
Shakespeare's twin sister wakes up in the body of a 99-year-old woman in a nursing home in 1987. She has quite a tale to tell:
-- her coming-of-age story, posing as a boy to get an education,
-- twins separated at birth sorting out the mystery of their otherworldly connection to one another,
-- a lifelong three-way love story,
-- soul projection and transference linking individuals to one another and connecting past to present,
-- and the story of a young reporter who falls in love with the soul he finds in the body of an old and dying woman.
As a cross-dressing sword-fighting teenager, Kate beats Mercutio, captain of the King's Musketeers, in a duel in Paris.
As Will's double and writing partner, Kate enables him to do the work of two geniuses.
This outlandish view of Shakespeare's life and times stays true to the facts, while presenting explanations that are intriguingly plausible.
Snatched from the safety of her day-to-day life, young Crysalline wanders in search of the world she has lost.
Alone, she searches for refuge in a wild land of the 1840s.
When her own deep, yet undeniable, yearnings begin to surface, she sets off into her life adventure. The new path only reveals itself after she takes the risk and seeks what lies ahead.
This is the story of a life richly lived.
The Taj Mahal was completed in 1648 inside the city of Agra in India and is still listed as one of the Seven New Wonders of the World, exquisitely alive in its marble purity and grand architecture. And the architect is no other than Shah Jahan, the fifth Moghul Emperor of India. His other wonder, the Peacock Throne, didn’t survive the ravages of wars and invasions. Its jewels were scattered much like the jewels of Moghul Empire by the tyranny of his son Aurangzeb who dethroned the emperor and murdered his own brothers. Taj Mahal is the monument of love in memory of Shah Jahan’s beloved wife, Mumtaz Mahal, who died young. Great love of the emperor for his empress is enshrined on earth and in heavens, for it is believed to be built as a replica of the Garden of Irem—Islamic Paradise so vividly delineated by the Muslim writers and historians. This is the story of this Moghul Emperor and his Taj.
What if the world knew your deepest secrets? What if the government had a monopoly on your thoughts?
In the City of Catonis, everything you think is written across giant screens for public scrutiny, and revolution can only be cloaked with meditation.
Things are the opposite in the Hollow Forest, where people are executed for writing, and ink is rationed for only the tribal council’s use. When the love of her life is killed, Kitaba Mahahara must leave her village and launch a cultural war for human freedom, but she’ll need help. Cybermonks, hactivists, and tech gurus will unite as tradition runs face to face with the oppression that passes for progress.
Two civilizations, one without self-expression, and one forced to reveal everything, will pave a new way for humanity if they don’t destroy it first.
In 2050, the fires and radiation of World War III strip the earth bare. A handful of human survivors, a religious sect on retreat, hunker down in a cavern on far northern Baffin Island. A million years later, their progeny still lives on, much changed and permanently weakened. Not so the Prairie Dogs who sheltered in the same cavern, becoming big and brainy while soaking up the sect’s all-too-human wiles.
Three prescient twentieth-century families time-travel those million years to Baffin Island to restore mankind. Instead of an unpopulated wilderness, they find the sect’s descendants under the Prairie Dogs’ control. As the human population languishes, the prairie dogs plan a genocidal war to be fought in the name of religion.
The families face their own calamity—the deadly wounding and disappearance of their idealistic leader, Sequoyah. Soon the young teens and adults are caught up in the war. Amid the clashing factions, they search for Sequoyah even as their own desires and destinies propel them forward along tortuous and sometimes visionary paths. At every turn they learn more about their strange connection to the isle that had been predicted a million years in the past.
“Day of the Jumping Sun does just that. It jumps into the readers’ thoughts and takes hold of their attention and doesn’t let go until the last page. For the human in us, all will feel the ink bubbling like lava.” —Martin Shone, poet and author
Aqua, the novel: saving pure water with a bird, a Greek goddess, and a pair of winged horses.
College student Diana Carter returns to the family ranch after her first year of school, anticipating a summer pack trip into the Wind River Mountains with her father and Willy, their Eastern Shoshone and Crow family friend and ranch hand. Her plans are upended when her grandmother breaks her hip and her dad leaves to work in the oil fields of North Dakota.
Diana learns she is destined to save pure water on our planet. The necklace Willy gives Diana, telling her the elk is her animal, protects her as she joins the Greek goddess Persephone and a little Mountain Bluebird named Indigo on a quest to save clean water.
We think of neighbors as those that live nearby. But we’re all linked to other people, places, and time periods. Sometimes those connections reflect love and joy, sometimes danger and darkness.
This collection includes stories about coal mining, vaudeville, the Nazi’s exhibition of “degenerate art,” the Coney Island ride A Trip to the Moon, tightrope walking, wasps, poisonous plants, space debris falling from the sky, old people falling in love, young people falling in love, Grand Central Station, Munich in 1937, Central Park in 1873, synesthesia, Picasso’s Bust of Francoise, the Wright Brothers, affordable housing, and the meaning of life.
Neighbors explores relationships we have with other people, with ideas, with history, and with ourselves.
The Magnificent and Marvelous Book Club (the MAMs) return in this adventure to explore their Irish roots. The ancient spirits of a leprechaun, St. Brigid, and an African-American matriarch conspire to awaken the travelers to possibilities. Grieving, reluctant Abigail considers opening her heart. Black ex-convict Welby and Reagan, a white nurse in recovery, find attraction, yet come from opposite ends of the political divide. The group explores the Emerald Isle, pauses for listening circles, retreats at the well of St. Brigid, gathers at a peace center in Northern Ireland and, ultimately, finds new hope for their own lives and America.
After a threat at her home, retired teacher Aggie May drives through a blizzard to return to the Lodge, the quiet retirement village that serves as a meeting place for a group of senior time travelers who solve mysteries from the past. She reconnects with Lodge director Abe Irving and other friends and is soon involved in a new mission. The source for the mission is Chaya Reese, an elderly woman who escaped Nazi Germany as a child when her parents put her on the Kindertransport. In a bid to understand what was happening in America as Hitler rose to power, Chaya asks the time travelers to investigate the German American Bund and America First, two pro-fascist groups active in the United States in the 1930s. As Aggie and Abe explore this dark history, they grow closer. But when their safety is threatened by unexpected danger, they are forced to confront their obligation to act against evil.
3 generations
2 families
1 terrible truth
Suki Hayashida’s family had their home, their business and their property stolen when they were interned along with 120,000 other Japanese Americans during WWII. Now, 75 years later, if Suki can survive both legal and personal attacks, she will have the opportunity to right that wrong, not only for her own family, but for hundreds of others.
Beginning in 1960, covering a span of twenty years, The Elbow Grease Legacy begins with a young girl’s growing awareness of her family’s dysfunctionality. Events solidify hate of her alcoholic father. Frequent household relocations make a mess of Tallulah’s high school years. College art classes build a sense of confidence, the value of different perspectives, and an essential habit of personal honesty, be it unpretty, be it rage.
Employment, marriage, and pregnancy do not wait for her brain to clear the contaminated cobwebs. She craves sources of logic when her father’s sudden death demolishes every defense she had built against him. Like it or not, she must understand him before she can understand herself.
Shakespeare's twin sister wakes up in the body of a 99-year-old woman in a nursing home in 1987. She has quite a tale to tell:
-- her coming-of-age story, posing as a boy to get an education,
-- twins separated at birth sorting out the mystery of their otherworldly connection to one another,
-- a lifelong three-way love story,
-- soul projection and transference linking individuals to one another and connecting past to present,
-- and the story of a young reporter who falls in love with the soul he finds in the body of an old and dying woman.
As a cross-dressing sword-fighting teenager, Kate beats Mercutio, captain of the King's Musketeers, in a duel in Paris.
As Will's double and writing partner, Kate enables him to do the work of two geniuses.
This outlandish view of Shakespeare's life and times stays true to the facts, while presenting explanations that are intriguingly plausible.
Snatched from the safety of her day-to-day life, young Crysalline wanders in search of the world she has lost.
Alone, she searches for refuge in a wild land of the 1840s.
When her own deep, yet undeniable, yearnings begin to surface, she sets off into her life adventure. The new path only reveals itself after she takes the risk and seeks what lies ahead.
This is the story of a life richly lived.
“The Trees know.” A cryptic message from Nana as she dies sends Ruth rushing to her special place in nature, The Listening Tree, for help. Transported through time by the Tree, from 1896 to 2035, she meets Michael and Arabeth from the future. They learn they are members of the Society of Rainwalkers—humans able to time travel through trees. The Trees need their help, or by 2050 climate change will devastate the planet. Will Ruth, aspiring writer and word lover, Michael, wannabe pilot and Star Trek fan, and Arabeth, future geneticist and science enthusiast successfully save the Tree for the future? The Listening Tree is a magical realism adventure filled with the excitement of time travel, the thrill of discovery, and the strength found in our connections with each other and with nature.
Marika is a social worker trying to heal her drug addict clients, but she can't seem to mend her damaged self. She avoids love because love sits too close to death. Her choices have left her carefully ordered life a lonely, disconnected one.
Everything is about to change.
Big-hearted, quirky, emotionally walled-off Marika embarks on a plan that ultimately forces her to confront the very thin
Danzi gave his brother a look and said something in Draconic. Lianos’s jaw tightened as he gazed into the other mage’s fiery eyes. Then he looked at the ground, hesitating.
“Kill him soldier,” the councilor to Molekk’s right shouted. “That’s an order.”
Lianos looked torn. He half-heartedly run a hand along the hilt of one of his daggers, glancing again between his brother and the councilor. T
Aggie May, newly and unhappily retired from teaching, fears dementia when she begins to see visions from the past, like a 1950s-era Super Constellation at JFK airport and World War II soldiers at Grand Central Terminal. Then she gets a recruitment visit from Abe Irving of the American Association of Remarkable Persons (“the other AARP”) who explains she has developed the ability to travel th
When Harold takes his wife, Laura, on vacation to quaint Prescott, Arizona, to jump-start their strained marriage, he finds himself swept through a squirmhole into the arms of the beautiful Talia Sanders, the hotel’s 1929 switchboard operator. Together, they scheme to prevent the Great Depression but, before he can put his plan to the test, the stockbroker re-emerges in 2017. He discovers nothing changed, except for the billion-dollar fortune Talia left him with instructions to derail an imminent, nation-wide, financial collapse.He’s immediately confronted by Talia’s son, who will stop at nothing to gain control of the money. Meanwhile, Harold must navigate the murky political backwaters of Washington, engaging a dangerous power broker with his own traitorous agenda. Caught in a web of greed and deceit, he is forced to find a way back in time to enlist Talia’s assistance. Her valiant attempts backfire and, instead, puts his life in jeopardy. Will he survive to stop the pending disaster? Will the love of his life come to his rescue... and, if so, which one?
During the years after the Civil War, Lonely Cricket, a Native American boy, strives to learn his people’s ways and traditions and to grow to manhood. This is a difficult task for any youngster, but Lonely Cricket is coming of age in a world that is changing. One in which Euro-Americans are determined to change Indians into reflections of the White world. Caught between the tales and traditions of his tribe and the ever-encroaching world of the White Man, Lonely Cricket must figure out how to live, whom to love, and most difficult of all who he really is. As Lonely Cricket battles to find himself, the twists and turns of his story reveal more about his background than he ever expected to know.
When high school English teacher Sean Cullinan comes across a specialty publisher looking for fresh African-American voices, he decides to submit his latest manuscript. One problem: Cully is white. Enter Janine Russell, black lieutenant in the San Francisco fire department and long-time friend of Cullinan. Together, they create a literary hoax that eventually fuels a national race debate. In Shadow Lessons new author Tim Reardon delves deep into the heart of the volatile American race conversation in a work that overflows with humor, honesty, and courage. "Don't let Reardon's breezy style fool you. Underneath the humor and crackling dialogue is a well-crafted novel. It also just happens to be an off-beat examination of race in America. Don't let that fool you either." -Stephen McFeely, screenwriter, The Chronicles of Narnia
Without knowing why or how, two college students wake up 50 years older than they were when they went to sleep and with no memory of what has happened in between. Trying to figure this all out, they read a novel that Frank wrote about them and his family before the missing years. This novel within the novel is a coming-of-age family saga with Charlie, an amateur movie maker; Sarah, his insightful bible-believing mother; Irene, his creative and uninhibited wife; Frank, his nephew, the author of the novel; and Marge, who loves and hates both Frank and Charlie. Can they sort truth from fiction when perception and action are often shaped by lies? Frank and Marge bond with one another as they find ways to slip through cracks in time and space. Cracks that are doors to their past, present, and future. The first door is birth. The second is death. Finally, Frank and Marge go through the fourth door.
Twelve-year-old Victor Valens and his eleven-year-old cousin Sal Sultus live on opposite sides of the country, until Sal and her mother move next door to the Valenses. Victor is a tech-savvy know-it-all. Sal, a science geniusin her own right, is dealing with the death of her father while adjusting to a new home. Victordoesn’t make the move any easier for Sal. In fact, their relationship is tumultuous to say the least. When their grandpa gets sick, their world is shaken. They try to understand the disease that has struck him and determine that theunderlying cause is a deadly disease with a big word, atherosclerosis.“Atherosclerosis Attack by Dr. Cate Moriasi and Dr. Kathleen Coughlan is a fun, light-heartedread on a very serious and important topic. The story is well laid out, with a fun, futuristictechnological twist. The authors do a great job taking a complex subject with detailed medicalcomponents, and frame it in an understandable and relatable way."~Caitlin, Community Outreach Director
Sundogs and Sinners is a tale of love and hate, nurture and neglect, traditions and taboos that shines cold light upon the dangers of chasing what cannot be caught.Jasmine is the daughter of opposite worlds: Angela, her mother, the white privileged debutant from the upper echelons of Fargo’s wealthiest and politically empowered and Jasmine’s biological father, Dave, the eighth of nine children of a Minneapolis single Ojibwe mother. Driven by the death of her elder teenage brother and her resentment at having always resided in his shadow, Angela looks for her missing emotional pieces in Dave’s “otherness” which results in a torrid, tumultuous, but temporary, bond and the unplanned birth of their child. A decade later, Jasmine lives in the affluent Fargo fold of Angela’s and Angela’s husband, Lars’ socially prominent families. Though Jasmine seems to have everything, she now is the one in search of missing pieces. Angela never speaks of Dave; Dave hasn’t had contact with their daughter since she was two-years old, and Jasmine wants to know why. The larger looming question is what, if any, part does Dave being Ojibwe play in Jasmine’s identity.When Rosella, an Ojibwe girl adopted at infancy by non-Native parents, moves to town, she and Jasmine become fast middle school friends. Together, they face off with mean girls armed with racial slurs, confront the complexity of first crushes, and, inevitably, explore Jasmine’s ever-growing need to know the truth about her mother, her legally adoptive father, and, most of all, Dave.As Jasmine pushes the search forward, Angela pulls back from her daughter and husband as the trauma and twisted urges of her youth re-awaken, and Angela pursues the elusive missing pieces she has yet to find. As mother and daughter unwittingly move closer to the same destination, secrets, lies, and raw realities threaten to destroy everyone involved. While some pieces are discovered, others will be lost forever, and Jasmine will be left to build who she truly is out of the ones that remain.
“Over half of my day is dealing with Daniel Conrad complaints.” –Anonymous Evergreen Administrator"Daniel Conrad is a sick pervert." -Tweet by NotYourPuppy19Psychology professor Daniel Conrad is a jerk, plain and simple. He wrote a book extolling the pleasures of sleeping with younger women, arguing that once a woman’s frontal lobe forms, she’s no longer good in the sack. He’s fifty-three, old enough to know better.Blamed for sins he never commits, Daniel Conrad needs an escape, but can he break free before the trappings of an academic life gone amok get him killed first? Daniel Conrad Deserves to Die is a comedic coming of old age novel which confronts the nagging feeling that there’s more to life than safety and comfort. This novel addresses the concept of toxic masculinity and forces readers to wonder if there is a place for men like Daniel in our world or if they really have no other choice but to die.
This compelling story begins on June 6, 1944 when Corporal Paul Pinski of the 101st Airborne Division is killed in action after he covers a hand grenade with his body during the D-Day Invasion. At the same time in Highlandtown, the blue-collar section of east Baltimore, Paul’s wife Lucy gives birth to their first child who learns at an early age the benefits associated with limited competition. Drama is found on every page of this story as the Dexter-type anti-hero follows his natural instincts that lead him down a road to success paved with the bodies of his rivals.
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