It's 1852 and cousins Patrick and Beth sail to Fiji on the HMS Calliope under the command of Captain James E. Home. They arrive at the islands to find that the Christian Fijians are at war with the non-Christian Fijians. Missionary James Calvert is trying to make peace and suggests that the captain allow peace negotiations on board the British vessel. Patrick and Beth learn about sacrificial living when they observe Calvert's determination to live on Fiji despite the dangers and impoverished conditions and that he is willing to risk his life to live as Jesus would. Views: 45
Frances Itani's lauded and award-winning American debut novel has been sold in sixteen countries, was a Canadian best seller for sixteen weeks, reaching #1, and has been awarded the Commonwealth Writers Prize Best Book Award for the Caribbean and Canadian Region. Set on the eve of the Great War, Deafening is a tale of remarkable virtuosity and power. At the age of five, Grania emerges from a bout of scarlet fever profoundly deaf, and is suddenly sealed off from the world that was just beginning to open for her. Sent to the Ontario School for the Deaf, Grania must learn to live away from her family. When Grania falls in love with Jim Lloyd, a young hearing man, her life seems complete, but WWI soon tears them apart when Jim is sent to the battlefields of Flanders. During this long and brutal war of attrition, Jim and Grania's letters back and forth-both real and imagined-attempt to sustain the intimacy they discovered in Canada. A magnificent tale of love and war, Deafening is also an ode to language-how it can console, imprison, and liberate, and how it alone can bridge vast chasms of geography and experience.Amazon.com ReviewIn Deafening, Canadian writer Frances Itani's American debut novel, she tells two parallel stories: a man's story of war and a woman's story of waiting for him and of what it is to be deaf. Grania O'Neill is left with no hearing after having scarlet fever when she is five. She is taught at home until she is nine and then sent to the Ontario Institution for the Deaf and Dumb, where lifelong friendships are forged, her career as a nurse is chosen, and she meets Jim Lloyd, a hearing man, with whom she falls in love.The novel is filled with sounds and their absence, with an understanding of and insistence on the power of language, and with the necessity of telling and re-telling our stories. When Grania is a little girl at home, she sits with her grandmother, who teaches her: "Grania is intimately aware of Mamo's lips--soft and careful but never slowed. She studies the word as it falls. She says 'C' and shore, over and over again… This is how it sounds." After she and Jim are married and he is sent to war, he writes: "At times the ground shudders beneath our boots. The air vibrates. Sometimes there is a whistling noise before an explosion. And then, all is silent." When Grania's brother-in-law, her childhood friend, Kenan, returns from war seriously injured, he will not utter a sound. Grania approaches him carefully, starting with a word from their childhood--"poom"--and moves through "the drills she thought she'd forgotten… Kenan made sounds. In three weeks he was rhyming nonsense syllables." A deaf woman teaching a hearing man to make sounds again is only one of the wonders in this book. Because Itani's command of her material is complete, the story is saved from being another classic wartime romance--a sad tale of lovers separated. It is a testament to the belief that language is stronger than separation, fear, illness, trauma and even death. Itani convinces us that it is what connects us, what makes us human. --Valerie RyanFrom Publishers WeeklyWar and deafness are the twin themes of this psychologically rich, impeccably crafted debut novel set during WWI. Born in the late 19th century, Grania O'Neill comes from solid middle-class stock, her father a hotel owner in Deseronto, Ontario, her mother a God-fearing daughter of an Irish immigrant. When Grania is five, she loses her hearing to scarlet fever. When she is nine, she is sent to the Ontario Institution for the Deaf and Dumb in Belleville and given an education not only in lipreading, signing and speaking but also in emotional self-sufficiency. After graduating, she works as a nurse in the Belleville hospital, where she meets and falls in love with Jim Lloyd. They marry, but Jim is bound for the war as a stretcher bearer. His war is hell on earth: lurid wounds; stinks; sudden, endless slaughter redeemed only by comradeship. Itani's remarkably vivid, unflinching descriptions of his ordeal tend to overshadow Grania's musings on the home front, but Grania's story comes to the fore again when her brother-in-law and childhood friend, Kenan, comes back to Deseronto from the trenches in Europe with a dead arm and a half-smashed face, refusing to speak. Grania, who was educated to configure sounds she couldn't hear into words that "the hearing" could understand, brings Kenan back to life by teaching him sounds again, and then by making portraits of the people in the town whom she, Kenan and her sister Tress know in common. As she talks to Kenan, she reinvigorates him with a sense that his life, having had such a rich past, must have a future, too. This subplot eloquently expresses Itani's evident, pervasive faith in the unexpected power of story to not only represent life but to enact itself within lives. Her wonderfully felt novel is a timely reminder of war's cost, told from an unexpected perspective.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. Views: 45
Trina Muller has always had a passion for healing abandoned and injured animals. Her parents encourage this tenderness towards God’s creatures until Trina confesses her dream of going to veterinary college. Why can’t she accept that God’s will is for her to be a wife and a mother? Graham Ortmann loves Trina, but how can he possibly marry someone who is determined to go against the dictates of the Old Order Mennonite fellowship? Trina can never be happy if she is outside of God’s will for her life. But which life will she choose-one with Graham or one in pursuit of her heart’s calling? Blessings is book 3 in the Sommerfeld Trilogy. Other books in the trilogy include Bygones: Book 1 and Beginnings: Book2. Views: 45
Katherine Collins wishes her lovely stepsister Constance to inherit their father's fortune by marrying before she turns twenty-one. What the notoriously picky Constance needs is the perfect gentleman, and Katherine's covert questioning points to the dashing Alexander Wescott, Viscount Borin. But Lord Borin has a secret passion of his own--international espionage. How will he react when he discovers Katherine has been spying, on him? Regency Romance by Regina Scott; originally published by Zebra Views: 45
A gripping thriller, The Nazi Hunter mixes fierce partisan Washington politics, the search for ex-Nazi criminals, and a crazed, right-wing militia intent on bringing down the government. Nicknamed the Nazi Hunter," Marek Cain, deputy director of the Office of Special Investigations at the Justice Department, has for ten years been the point man for tracking down ex-Nazis who have fraudulently entered the United States since World War II and bringing them to justice. One late afternoon, a distraught German woman eludes security and slips into Cain's office. I have documents," she says, important documents only for the Nazi Hunter." She promises to bring them the next day. When she doesn't show, he dismisses her as just another crackpot. But when he reads in the Washington Post the next morning that the woman has been brutally murdered, he senses he's on to something big. He must find those documents. The trail leads from Washington to Miami to... Views: 45
Think outside of the box—that’s what Annie Dawson must do when she discovers a mysterious birchbark box in the attic of Grey Gables, the home bequeathed to her by her grandmother, Betsy Holden. The old box, exquisitely carved by an American Indian artist, contains a beaded ceremonial regalia collar and an obscure verse: Sister Otter, water dancing, sun splashes over circles you draw. If love took you to desert dry, where would you dance? Annie knows of no American Indian connection to her family in the region around Stony Point, the quaint New England fishing village on Maine’s rugged coastline where the mystery unfolds. But this very personal glimpse into Passamaquoddy life is somehow threaded through Annie’s family history. She is driven to find the connection. The poem poignantly reminds Annie of the loss of Wayne, the love of her life who was swept away by a heart attack nearly two years earlier. She feels that love has taken her to “desert dry.” Will the grief that cries out to her ever be filled again with the dancing waters of love? Meanwhile Annie, her best friend Alice MacFarland and the members of Stony Point’s Hook and Needle Club are preparing handcrafted items for charitable fundraising at the village’s annual Harvest on the Harbor autumn festival. With the mystery of the box and its contents hanging heavy in the air, the crafters decide a First Nations theme would be perfectly appropriate. Is there a simple explanation as to how the beautiful box found its way into the attic at Grey Gables? Or will Annie’s mystery again tear at the seams of Stony Point’s quiet façade? Join Annie, Alice, and the other members of the Hook and Needle Club as they follow the thread of this latest trail wherever it leads. As the mystery reaches its climax, someone will be boxed in. But who? Views: 45
Set in 1860 as the first wagon trains rumble into the American West, this adventure-filled novel centers on a frontier girl and the beloved pony she tries to save Born in the back of a covered wagon traveling west from Vermont, Annie Dawson dreams of someday seeing what's on the eastern side of the great Mississippi. For now, she'll have to be content living with her parents and younger brother in the Nebraska Territory at the Red Buttes Pony Express station run by her family. That is, until her favorite pony starts going wild, and Annie's friend—Pony Express rider Billy Cody—suspects that someone is poisoning her. But who'd want to hurt gentle Magpie? Indian tribes stirring up trouble? Or the Butterfield Mail, the Pony Express rival that seems to feel threatened by the ponies' speed in delivering mail to California? The night before Magpie is scheduled to be put down, Annie steals out to see if her half-Shoshone friend Redbird... Views: 45
Charity Stratton's bleak childhood is changed for ever when both her parents are killed in a fire. Separated by the authorities from her younger brothers and sister, Charity is sent out to work as a skivvy in a boys' boarding school. Her loneliness and misery are eased when she falls deeply in love with the dashing but fickle sixth-former, Hugh Mainwaring, but when she discovers she is pregnant with Hugh's baby she soon realises just how alone she really is. Determined to be reunited with her siblings and to make something of herself, Charity runs away to London and begins to forge a new life. Views: 45
His love is the key to her release.Sentenced to seven years of servitude in the penal colony of New South Wales, Bridgit Madden is thrust into a world unlike anything she's known, dangers she never imagined and enemies with their own interests at heart. Certain the conviction has ruined her chances of ever having a real family, she is fearful of her future.Despite his reluctance to take in a convict, grazier and pioneer cattleman Jonah Andrus needs a servant to care for his orphaned niece. When presented with Bridgit, who is far too beautiful and distracting, he initially tries to refuse. However, with a busy cattle station to oversee, he needs help right away.Upon her first meeting with Jonah's niece, Bridgit immediately falls in love with the baby and hopes to unravel the mystery surrounding her birth. As she gets to know her employer better, Bridgit makes it her mission to remind him that family is priceless. When it seems as though she might have found the place... Views: 45
