Children's librarian Hope Randall has her hands full during the holiday season. She's directing the Christmas pageant, supervising the decorating of her small-town Iowa church, and hiding her growing feelings for widowed minister Noah Langdon.Noah, who's struggling to be both mother and father to his young daughter, is afraid to love again. Will Hope be able to give him the gift of hope this Christmas?This is a new Christmas novella by the authors of "Faith, Fireworks and Fir." Views: 47
After winning the Civil War against the Confederate Wielders, the Union Machinists have outlawed magic to usher in a new age of steam-powered technology. Diah, an alchemist and the only non-wielder in his family, owes his brother for saving his life in the war; so when Cager is blackmailed into procuring the magical hide of the White Buffalo, Diah accompanies him to the Dakota territory.Their guide is Oni, a half-Lakota woman with plenty of secrets to hide. She's a magic wielder with an illegal wand concealed in her knife—and she's a coyote shifter. To her people, killing the White Buffalo is not only sacrilege, it's dangerous. Oni has no intention of helping them actually achieve their mission—until she falls in love with Diah...83,340 words Views: 47
A celebrated winner of fiction's Orange Prize, Helen Dunmore is as spellbinding a storyteller in her poetry as in her novels. As in her fiction, these haunting narratives draw us into darkness, engaging our fears and hopes in poetry of rare luminosity. Her poems also cast a bright, revealing light on the living world, by land and sea, on love, longing and loss. "Out of the Blue" presents a comprehensive selection from her seven previous books of poetry. It also includes a collection of completely new poemsremarkable for their sensuous magic, sharp delicacy and sureness of touch. Views: 47
Rachel Friedman has always been the consummate good girl who does well in school and plays it safe, so the college grad surprises no one more than herself when, on a whim (and in an effort to escape impending life decisions), she buys a ticket to Ireland, a place she has never visited. There she forms an unlikely bond with a free-spirited Australian girl, a born adventurer who spurs Rachel on to a yearlong odyssey that takes her to three continents, fills her life with newfound friends, and gives birth to a previously unrealized passion for adventure. As her journey takes her to Australia and South America, Rachel discovers and embraces her love of travel and unlocks more truths about herself than she ever realized she was seeking. Along the way, the erstwhile good girl finally learns to do something she’s never done before: simply live for the moment.From the Trade Paperback edition.Review"Friedman's coming-of-age memoir captures the excitement (and bewilderment) of testing out life's possibilities on the far side of the world. You'll laugh and empathize as you get lost with her." --Rolf Potts, author of Vagabonding"Curious, candid, energetic, and witty, Rachel Friedman is the ideal travel mate, and her sense of humor makes every page of this book a pleasure to read. A beautifully written and engrossing story, The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost reminds us how much a person can grow when she defies the expectations of her parents, her culture, and her youngest self. Rachel, like so many fresh college grads, doesn't know what to do with her life. Just be warned: Rachel's company is so delightful, you won't want to come home." – Colleen Kinder, author of Delaying the Real World“Teeming with warmth, The Good Girl’s Guide to Getting Lost is a wonderful read for anyone who wants to travel, misses traveling, or has ever entertained thoughts of dropping everything to go explore new territory. With humor and honesty, Rachel Friedman beautifully captures the pitfalls and exhilaration of backpacking, ultimately reminding us that our world is an infinitely fascinating and (mostly) open-hearted place. Please read this funny, insightful, adventurer’s book.” --Rebecca Barry, author of Later, at the Bar"Friedman deftly moves from musings on family to specifics about working abroad to first-rate travelogue about the places she visited, striking just the right balance between personal and universal." -Publisher's WeeklyFrom the Trade Paperback edition.Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.[1]Our heroine, verily drowning in self-pity at the tender age of twenty, embarks on a grand adventure that is not yet either grand or an adventure but, rather, a hastily concocted plan to escape the confines of her current existence and the quotidian yet oppressive pressures contained therein.The plane descends through a thick belt of clouds into blinding light. I haven’t fully registered the transition from night to day until sun pours through the oblong windows, jarring me out of semi-consciousness. For the past eight hours, ever since I waved goodbye to my father at the airport and marched myself onto a plane bound for Dublin, I’ve been wondering if I was in some altered state when I planned this trip, because the reality of it feels distinctly like a bad hangover. Being bathed in golden light only adds to my surreal arrival. Isn’t it supposed to be raining in Ireland?We thud against the tarmac, and my fellow passengers shuffle to life, folding in half to gather their belongings from beneath the seats. Eager to depart, the frizzy-haired girl in the row ahead of me springs up like a jack-in-the-box as soon as the seat-belt light clicks off for the last time. I remain belted in, doing my best deer-in-headlights impression. I might just stay on this plane all day, ride it round-trip like I did once when I was little and too frightened to get off the revolving ski lift at the top of the mountain. The elderly woman sitting next to me, a tiny person with papery hands and merlot-stained lips, leans over and taps the book sitting in my lap: Angela’s Ashes.“Oh, that poor Angela,” she sighs in one of those lilting Irish accents that make a grocery list sound like a Yeats poem. “Heaven knows she did the best for those boys, then Frank comes along and airs their business to the whole bloody world.” Her tone is heavy with disdain, as if the author sold naked photos of his mother to the tabloids, not penned a Pulitzer Prize winner about his Irish childhood. Coming from the land of “all publicity is good publicity,” I’d just assumed McCourt’s native country embraced his memoir, proudly adding him to their long list (suspiciously long, really, considering Ireland’s size) of distinguished writers. But like I was wrong about the weather, it seems I am mistaken about this, too.Here are the facts of the present moment. It’s 2002. I’m twenty years old. I’ve just embarked on four months in a foreign country alone. I’m carrying six hundred dollars in traveler’s checks, money saved up from waitressing last semester. I booked two nights in a Dublin hostel before I left. Other than that, I’ve got no plan. And this greatly confounds me because I always have a plan. At least I used to be the kind of girl who always has a plan.In a few months, I’ll be a college senior. School has been the organizing principle of my existence for as long as I can remember, and I have no idea what comes after that. My academic parents raised me to be ambitious and goal-oriented. In particular, my father, a film professor, molded me into a second-wave feminist whose duty it was to burst forth into the world and crush the male competition. He used to routinely deconstruct the PG films we watched together to comment on the functioning of the male gaze, say, or to illustrate how gender is performative. I still remember his lecture on The Little Mermaid: “It’s just not equitable. Ariel has to give up everything for this guy—first her voice, then her home. On a very real level, Rachel, she has to give up who she is. What are we to make of this?”“Jesus, Lester,” my mother would sigh.I was eight.But I listened. I always listened.I was a scholarship kid at a small, eccentric college-preparatory high school, the kind of place where you juggled two dozen AP classes at once. Much of my teenage world revolved around studying, carefully calibrated extracurricular activities, and endless rounds of practice SATs.There was never a question of whether I would attend college—only where. And I was desperate to go, both because my parents’ divorce when I was fifteen had left me without a place I truly identified as “home” and because I genuinely loved school, where the formula for success was straightforward. Study and you get good grades. Simple, safe. But no class has prepared me for the post-student leap I am facing now, and being an eternal overachiever who bases her self-worth on her GPA, I am woefully ill-equipped to take on the unpredictable, unscheduled life awaiting me after college graduation. I am terrified of this unknown.In the Dublin airport, confident, purposeful travelers swirl around me, off to meetings and reunions and homes. All of them seem to know exactly where they are headed—except me. For a few moments, I am frozen and directionless, lost amid the drifting crowds. My brain works in slow motion, registering my tasks: pick up suitcase, exchange money, find hostel.I’ve never been to a foreign country alone, though I’ve been abroad a few times, starting with Germany when I was ten. My brother Dan was stationed there, and I flew over with my parents to visit him. We rented a car and dashed all over Europe. Ten days in at least as many cities, pausing just long enough to snap photos. It was exhausting, and I’m told I didn’t appreciate much of it. Every few years, my brother reminds me, shaking his head with renewed disgust, that I slept (slept!) through the pristine Alps.After my sophomore year of high school, my parents discharged me to Israel with a temple youth group, even though I had recently articulated that I was “so over Judaism.” But it was difficult to stay pissed off for an entire summer, especially on a bus with twenty-five other teenagers and Yamud, our gigantic, hairy Israeli graduate-student guide who insisted on blasting “We Built This City on Rock and Roll” on his boom box every morning at six a.m. as we boarded the bus, still bleary-eyed. If you were drooping sleepily into the aisle, one of his enormous flailing wrists would smack you in the head. You might slip quietly into a window seat in the back and shut your eyes only to find his meaty fingers jabbing them open.Each of us was assigned an identifying number and forced to shout it out (in order) at least twelve times a day, making our trip resemble one long Sesame Street episode. Peter, an unruly Canadian, insisted on substituting his name for his number. He was Rastafarian and claimed he was simply “too burned out to remember my number, brotha.” We found this, along with the dreadlock wig he wore over his shaved head and the fact that he smoked an invisible joint for hours at a time, across-the-board hilarious. Our Israeli guides, so unlike our regimented parents back home, just smirked and checked him off the list. They told the bus driver—a skinny man with the same real cigarette burning out of the corner of his mouth, seemingly for days, as if fueled by miracle menorah oil—that we were all accounted for and ready to go.My souvenir from this first semi-independent trip to a faraway land was a small tattoo. I acquired it in a dingy corner of Jerusalem from one of those muscly guys who have inked every available nook of their flesh canvas. The tattoo is a simple quarter-sized blue flower on the lower-right side of my back: five blue petals with a hint of purple at the base, outlined in black ink. Tiny tendrils poke out like rays of sunlight. I arrived at the tattoo parlor with two quivering guy friends who insisted I go first. I smiled reassuringly up at their worried faces as the needle scratched into my bare flesh. I felt incredibly wild.But this trip to Ireland is my first time alone in a foreign country: no family, no friends, no crazy Yamud making sure number twenty-eight is on the bus. I have only myself to rely on—which is precisely what worries me. My friends’ and families’ collective concerns echo in my brain: Where will you live? How will you find work? Won’t you be lonely? I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. All I knew was that I needed to get away. I hadn’t actually pictured myself on the other side of that con- viction.“You’re so brave to go off on your own,” my best college friend, Erica, told me a week ago, bestowing “brave” upon me with the distinct tone usually reserved for the word “insane.” Erica is interning at an art gallery in New York City this summer. It’s the kind of thing I think I should be doing, trying out my career instead of skipping town for no discernible reason.I can barely heave my massive red suitcase off the conveyor belt. It feels twice as heavy as when my father and I launched it into the trunk of his Hyundai before heading off to the airport. I’m here for just over four months (an impossibly long time, now that I think about it) and have, I think, packed accordingly. Several outfits for day or night, flats for walking, sandals for warm days, sneakers for running, boots for trekking (will I be trekking anywhere? I don’t trek back home), two pairs of pretty heels for nights out, though, of course, I don’t know anyone in Ireland to go out with. I’ve packed toiletries, twelve books, twenty pairs of underwear, ten pairs of socks, three sweaters, two jackets, three swimsuits, enough vitamin C to turn me into an orange, and two fluffy bath towels.A guy with greasy blond hair and Atlantic-blue eyes hoists a backpack onto his shoulders. He snaps it around his waist. It’s half the size of his body, and I could fit four of them inside Big Red. Surely, with such modest gear, he must be traveling only for a week or two. And he must be moving around a lot. I plan on staying right here in Dublin. My instinct, as always, is to settle down,... Views: 47
When Alex Bradshaw's unscrupulous boss kicks him to the curb after 20 faithful years as an executive with the world's largest shipping company, he sets out to reclaim his dignity and his pension. Assembling a team of fellow corporate castoffs, he sails to the Caribbean to intercept an illegal diamond shipment. None of them counted on quirky blonde stowaway Juli Flynn, who has a perplexing array of talents, a few big secrets, and an intoxicating romantic chemistry with Alex... Views: 47
Billy Sure, twelve-year-old inventor and CEO of Sure Things, Inc., has come up with another zany invention that tells you what you’re best at in the fourth book of a hilarious middle grade series!Everyone is talking about Billy Sure, the twelve-year-old genius and millionaire inventor whose inventions have become instant hits. Billy’s lucky because in addition to being a rich and famous inventor, he already knows what he’s best at: inventing, of course! He wants to help other kids figure out what they’re best at too, and his latest invention—The Best Test—will do just that! But when Billy takes the test himself and the results come back saying he isn’t the best at inventing, and what he’s best at has nothing to do with inventing at all, he begins to wonder who is. And what that means for the future of Sure Things, Inc. Views: 47
Bestselling author B.J. Hoff will delight readers as her unforgettable characters from A Distant Music and The Wind Harp reunite for a dramatic conclusion to The Mountain Song Legacy trilogy.When a shadow falls over the MacAuley family, newlyweds Jonathan and Maggie Stuart find their faith and newly discovered happiness tested in unforeseen ways. An abrupt summons to return from their honeymoon wrenches them from the joy of their early days of marriage and thrusts them into the midst of a family in anguish.Responsible for helping their loved ones heal, while maintaining and nurturing their own relationship and their love for each other, the young couple faces a challenge that will ultimately define their marriage and decide their future. Views: 47
Shipwrecked and stranded with a sexy stranger, a runaway bride finally risks losing her heart. Cristy Walters planned the perfect wedding: five-star resort, beautiful dress, millionaire husband-to-be. So how come on her wedding day she’s shipwrecked on a tropical island, her gown in tatters, and carried over the threshold of a survival hut by a hot, hunky stranger? With no rescue in sight, Cristy is all alone with sexy Matt Slade—a man who makes her pulse race like it never did for her fiancé. She and Matt explore the island—and each other. Passion is instant, trust comes slowly—especially as Matt is not the carefree boat bum he appears to be. Can the love they discover survive in the real world away from their castaway fantasy? Views: 47
