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After the Rain: Virginia's Civil War Diary Book 2 (My America Series)
By Mary Pope Osborne. 2001
In the final months of the Civil War, Virginia and her family move to Washington, D.C. where the cold winter…
brings uncertainty and hardship. Virginia takes a job as a servant in a wealthy home to help her family. But, just as things start to improve as her father gets a job, and the war finally comes to an end, the tragic assassination of Ginny's beloved President Lincoln occurs. In this, her second diary chronicling the Civil War, Ginny learns that life is constantly changing. Indeed, even as Lincoln dies, her nephew is born. Throughout, Ginny faces life with hope and courage.In Union
By Raewyn Caisley. 2005
Twelve-year-old Christian Phillips doesn?t think he will make the junior rugby team. When his parents give him a pair of…
footy boots before the trial ? a gift from his late grandfather, a staunch Wallabies fan ? Christian is still not convinced. Shocked when he makes the team, and relegated to the wing, Christian soon realises his idea of teamwork is a little different from that of the coach and other boys. Christian spends most games waiting for a pass and decides conforming is easier than challenging the culture of the team. But when they have to face the brutal Scots team on their home turf, a new leader emerges ? From Raewyn Caisley, the acclaimed and established author of TOP MARKS, NOT CRICKET, HOT SHOT, TENNIS STAR, QUEEN?S CUBBY, FREE STYLE and GREAT LEAD, comes another book in the popular Junior Sports Series.Still Kicking
By Cheryl Critchley. 2006
Sam Scott is not your average 13-year-old girl. When Sam?s friends are off chasing boys, she?s on the local footy…
oval training for Richmond Juniors? upcoming matches. Her mother and father desperately want her to give up her obsession with football and get serious about law or medicine like her sister Kate. Sam is blitzing her junior Aussie Rules competition when two major disasters threaten to upset her season. First, she almost quits when the class snob calls her butch. Then, when she turns fourteen on the eve of the finals, red tape looks like forcing Sam out of the game she loves. Her battle to play makes her a public hero, but Sam soon realises that being a winner in the money-fuelled AFL world comes at a big price. From Cheryl Critchley, the author of UNSPOIL YOUR KIDS, ESCAPE THE PARENT TRAP, OUR FOOTY and REAL FANS VS BIG BUCKS, comes another book in the popular Junior Sports Series.Michigan Legends: Folktales and Lore from the Great Lakes State
By Sheryl James. 2013
Over the course of its history, the state of Michigan has produced its share of folktales and lore. Many are…
familiar with the Ojibwa legend of Sleeping Bear Dunes, and most have heard a yarn or two told of Michigan's herculean lumberjack, Paul Bunyan. But what about Detroit's Nain Rouge, the red-eyed imp they say bedeviled the city's earliest residents? Or Le Griffon, the Great Lakes' original ghost ship that some believe haunts the waters to this day? Or the Bloodstoppers, Upper Peninsula folk who've been known to halt a wound's bleeding with a simple touch thanks to their magic healing powers? In Michigan Legends, Sheryl James collects these and more stories of the legendary people, events, and places from Michigan's real and imaginary past. Set in a range of historical time periods and locales as well as featuring a collage of ethnic traditions--including Native American, French, English, African American, and Finnish--these tales are a vivid sample of the state's rich cultural heritage. This book will appeal to all Michiganders and anyone else interested in good folktales, myths, legends, or lore.Season of Gene
By Dallas Hudgens. 2007
Somewhere between incarceration and sainthood stands Joe Rice, a man who relishes peace, painkillers, and his Friday-night baseball league. When…
his shady business partner Gene dies rounding the bases, Joe knows this isn't going to be an ordinary season. Soon enough, a suburban ex-mobster, his entrepreneurial son, and a gun-toting minister have Tasered, maced and harassed Joe over the location of a three-million-dollar Babe Ruth baseball bat he doesn't know anything about. Joe just wants to save his car-detailing/ticker brokerage business from Gene's mountain of debt, crime and craziness. (Winning a game of Madden NFGL against his ex-girlfriend's twelve-year-old son would also be a relief. ) But first, he must confront the ghosts of his past - namely, his murdered uncle and his mentally unstable mother. He must also deal with the present, navigating the space between the two women he cares about. And finally, he must face the future, every man's least favorite obstacle. Dallas Hudgens, the acclaimed author ofDrive Like Hell, blends Guatemalan chicken, online pharmaceuticals, and unforgettable characters in a raucous but moving story of love and baseball. Season of Geneis a wild ride of a novel about a troubled man, the troubled women who love him and a legendary baseball bat that could either save their lives or get them killed.Sammy Wong, All-American
By Charley Rosen. 2014
Sammy Wong, All-American tells the tale of a very talented Asian basketball player's rise and stumble in the all-American sport…
of basketball--among the most international of team sports, yet one where until very recently Asians were completely unrepresented. The novel unwinds in spectacular fashion. On his high school, college, and professional teams, Sammy isn't given much of a chance. Then when he does get into games, he turns out to be the kind of player who can turn a losing team into a winning one. Wong's career turns on chance opportunities and unexpected twists as much as on talent, persistence and hard work. There are great scenes describing pivotal plays on the hardwood floor as only Charley Rosen can. Like all Rosen's novels, this is about more than basketball. Sammy Wong, All-American is a book about identity in multi-ethnic American culture and the cost of innocence in the modern world. Sammy Wong, All-American will delight basketball fans and fiction readers alike, a sports novel that delivers on multiple levels.Shadow Knights
By Gary Kamiya, Jeffrey Smith. 2010
Pulp History brings to life extraordinary feats of bravery, violence, and redemption that history has forgotten. These stories are so…
dramatic and thrilling they have to be true. In SHADOW KNIGHTS, everyday men and women risk their lives on top-secret missions to sabotage Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. Hell-bent on conquering Europe, Hitler had just set his sights on England when Winston Churchill reached into his bag of tricks and invented a secret spy network of ordinary citizens. These schoolteachers, housewives, prostitutes, and farmers abandoned their former lives, trained in covert black ops, and set Europe ablaze. Parachuting into Nazi territory under the cover of night, they destroyed factories, armed resistance networks, and turned Hitler's juggernaut on its head.Devil Dog
By Rodriguez, Talbot. 2010
Pulp History brings to life extraordinary feats of bravery, violence, and redemption that history has forgotten. These stories are so…
dramatic and thrilling they have to be true. In DEVIL DOG, the most decorated Marine in history fights for America across the globe--and returns home to set his country straight. Smedley Butler took a Chinese bullet to the chest at age eighteen, but that did not stop him from running down rebels in Nicaragua and Haiti, or from saving the lives of his men in France. But when he learned that America was trading the blood of Marines to make Wall Street fat cats even fatter, Butler went on a crusade. He threw the gangsters out of Philadelphia, faced down Herbert Hoover to help veterans, and blew the lid off a plot to overthrow FDR.Billy Boy
By Bud Shrake. 2001
Not since Larry McMurtry's The Last Picture Show has a novelist captured the poignant contradictions of young manhood in the…
American West the way Bud Shrake does in Billy Boy. And no novel has ever combined history, spirituality and golf into so potent a triumph of the human spirit. There are tough times ahead for sixteen-year-old Billy. He's just come to Fort Worth with his father, Troy, after the death of his mother back in Albuquerque. Troy's drinking and gambling will leave them all but penniless, and he'll soon move on and abandon Billy in this strange town to fend for himself. With only a vague idea of how he's going to live, Billy heads over to Colonial Country Club, where he hopes he can get work as a caddie and where he just might see his hero, Ben Hogan. What he finds there, under the watchful eye of his guardian spirit, teaches him unforgettable lessons about golf, life, love and honor. In Billy Boy, longtime novelist and screenwriter Bud Shrake takes us back to the early 1950s, in a story thick with the Texas dust. Hardscrabble Billy, tough as he thinks he is and smarter than he knows, makes a place for himself behind the walls of privilege at Colonial. He first draws the approval, then the ire, of the club's most eccentric millionaire member, while his looks and manner draw the attention of the millionaire's beautiful granddaughter -- to the displeasure of her boyfriend, the club champion. Billy survives a fierce initiation and a dreadful scene with his drunken father -- but most important, he comes in contact with two of the greatest figures in the history of golf in Texas, Ben Hogan and John Bredemus, each of whom takes Billy under his wing for different reasons and with different results. Shrake skillfully weaves these historical figures and his richly drawn characters into the fabric of the town and the tenor of the time. Billy must face down his fears and doubts, and he does so in a climactic confrontation that combines the yearnings of youth with the redemption of the spirit. Billy Boy is an unforgettable novel of coming of age in a time and a place filled with mythic echoes and frontier dreams.Nostalgia
By Dennis Mcfarland. 2013
This stunning Civil War novel from best-selling author Dennis McFarland brings us the journey of a nineteen-year-old private, abandoned by…
his comrades in the Wilderness, who is struggling to regain his voice, his identity, and his place in a world utterly changed by what he has experienced on the battlefield. In the winter of 1864, Summerfield Hayes, a pitcher for the famous Eckford Club, enlists in the Union army, leaving his sister, a schoolteacher, devastated and alone in their Brooklyn home. The siblings, who have lost both their parents, are unusually attached, and Hayes fears his untoward secret feelings for his sister. This rich backstory is intercut with scenes of his soul-altering hours on the march and at the front--the slaughter of barely grown young men who only days before whooped it up with him in a regimental ball game; his temporary deafness and disorientation after a shell blast; his fevered attempt to find safe haven after he has been deserted by his own comrades--and, later, in a Washington military hospital, where he finds himself mute and unable even to write his name. In this twilit realm, among the people he encounters--including a compassionate drug-addicted amputee, the ward matron who only appears to be his enemy, and the captain who is convinced that Hayes is faking his illness--is a gray-bearded eccentric who visits the ward daily and becomes Hayes's strongest advocate: Walt Whitman. This timeless story, whose outcome hinges on friendships forged in crisis, reminds us that the injuries of war are manifold, and the healing goodness in the human soul runs deep and strong.Marion Jones
By Bill Gutman. 2000
Race for the record! At the Sydney Games, Marion Jones strove to become the first person ever to win five…
gold medals in track and field at a single Olympics, making headlines for simply believeing she could do it. Driven to succeed at a very early age, Marion won multiple titiles at the Junior National Championships and set a junior record in the 200 meters. A multisport athlete, she helped lead the University of North Carolina women's basketball team to a national championship during her freshman year and also competed in track and field, until an injury forced her to reevaluate her priorities. Refocused on her track career, Marion quickly became the woman to beat, racking up an impressive thirty-five wims of the thiry-six events she entred in 1998. And after another injury sidelined her hopes of winning four gold medal at the 1999 World Championships, marion fought back in the 2000 season and is once again dominating the field. Get the full story of this amazing runner's race for the record, from her childhood dreams of gold medals to her tough choice between two sports and her determined drive to become the fastest woman in the world.Rochester Knockings
By Jennifer Grotz, Hubert Haddad. 2015
"Hats off to one of the most inventive writers of French literature. . . . Hubert Haddad concocts a colorful…
novel, funny and inventive, as clever as the Fox sisters themselves."--Jean-François Delapré, Saint Christophe bookstoreThe Fox sisters grew up just outside of Rochester, NY, in a house that had a reputation for being haunted, due in large part to a series of strange "rappings" or "knockings" that plagued its inhabitants. Fed up by whatever was responsible for the knockings, the youngest of the sisters (who was twelve at the time) challenged the ghost and ended up communicating with the spirit of Charles Haynes, who had been murdered in the house and buried in the cellar.Thanks to the enthusiasm of one Isaac Post, the Fox sisters became instantly famous for talking to the dead, launching the Spiritualist Movement in the US. After taking Rochester by storm, the sisters moved to New York where they were the most famous mediums of the time, giving séances for hundreds of people.Then, it all fell apart, and the sisters were exposed as frauds. Nevertheless, even today the Fox sisters are considered to be the founders of Spiritualism, one of the most popular religious movements of the past couple centuries (consider the success of Long Island Medium and the hundreds of thousands who visit Lily Dale every year).Rich in historical detail, Rochester Knockings novelizes the rise and fall of these most infamous of mediums. Hubert Haddad was born in Tunisia, and is the author of dozens of works, including the novels Palestine (winner of the Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie), Tango chinois, and La Condition magique (winner of the Grand Prix du Roman de la Société des Gens de Lettres).Now in November
By Josephine W. Johnson, Nancy Hoffman. 1962
Brilliant, evocative, poetic, savage, this first novel (1934) depicts a white, middle-class urban family that is turned into dirt-poor farmers…
by the Depression and the great drought of the thirties. The novel moves through a single year and, at the same time, a decade of years, from the spring arrival of the family at their mortgaged farm to the winter 10 years later, when the ravages of drought, fire, and personal anguish have led to the deaths of two of the five. Like Ethan Frome, the relatively brief, intense story evokes the torment possible among people isolated and driven by strong feelings of love and hate that, unexpressed, lead inevitably to doom. Reviewers in the thirties praised the novel, calling its prose "profoundly moving music," expressing incredulity "that this mature style and this mature point of view are those of a young women in her twenties," comparing the book to "the luminous work of Willa Cather," and, with prescience, suggesting that it "has that rare quality of timelessness which is the mark of first-rate fiction." Pulitzer Prize Winner1970: "I" Hotel
By Karen Tei Yamashita. 2010
"I Hotel" is the third novella of I Hotel, a National Book Award finalist and epic of America's struggle for…
civil rights as it played out in San Francisco's Chinatown. Yamashita's cast of students, laborers, artists, revolutionaries, and provocateurs make their way through the history of the day, caught in riptides of politics and passion, clashing ideologies and personal turmoil.The Cyclist Conspiracy
By Randall A. Major, Svetislav Basara. 2008
Told through a series of "historical documents"--memoirs, illustrations, letters, philosophical treatises, blue prints, maps--the novel details the tale of a…
secret Brotherhood who meet in dreams, gain esoteric knowledge from contemplation of the bicycle, and seek to move in and out of history, manipulating events.The Contest
By James Hurley. 2013
"The only constant passion in my life was my love of fly fishing and all that went with it. I…
coveted the escape I could find sitting at my vise for hours, tying deceitful little flies. I loved to be in the world where trout lived--the rivers and mountains and forests and meadows, away from people and the demands and requirements that created stress in my life."Meet Benedict Salem, whose friends call him BS, a frustrated writer and teacher looking to find himself. Middle-aged and blocked creatively, his dreams are filled with those magical moments when the weather, the lay of the cast, the fly, and the water converge with the fish in one fluid arc of perfection. The desire to perpetuate these moments takes BS to a small town in Maine, home to the crossing house inn, behind which lies a tract of virtual wilderness, a clean-running river, and a bounty of large, smart, and mostly fearless trout.BS soon befriends the owner of the inn, Bill Cahill, and together they and a group of fellow anglers found the Samuel Tippett Fly Fishers club. They soon devise a fishing contest between them, but what starts out as a friendly game to determine the best trout fly to represent their new club, quickly descends into a bitter rivalry that threatens to overtake reason. Feelings and friendships are forgotten as a fight over rules and the hunger to win takes hold of the men.In a deftly interwoven tale that explores the camaraderie and sportsmanship among anglers, The Contest challenges the wisdom of chasing perfection, and instead, encourages the reader to revel in life's most important moments, however brief or passing.The Language of Silence
By Peggy Webb. 2014
Following in the footsteps of her tiger-taming grandmother, a woman flees her abusive husband to join the circus in this…
masterful, heartfelt work of women's fiction.Peggy Webb won raves for her debut novel, The Tender Mercy of Roses*, with novelist Pat Conroy calling her "a truly gifted writer." Now Webb has crafted a poignant portrayal of a woman on the edge seeking solace in the past.Nobody in the family talks about Ellen's grandmother Lola, who was swallowed up by the circus and emerged as a woman who tamed tigers and got away scot-free for killing her husband. When Ellen's husband, Wayne, beats her nearly to death, she runs to the only place she knows where a woman can completely disappear--the same Big Top that once sheltered her grandmother. Though the circus moves from one town to the next, Wayne tracks it, and Ellen, relentlessly. At the same time, Ellen learns more about her feisty, fiery relative, and the heritage that is hers for the taking--if she dares. With her violent husband hot on her trail, Ellen must learn to stand up and fight for herself, to break the cycle of abuse, and pass down a story of love and redemption to her children.*writing as Anna MichaelsThe Language of Silence
By Peggy Webb. 2014
Following in the footsteps of her tiger-taming grandmother, a woman flees her abusive husband to join the circus in this…
masterful, heartfelt work of women's fiction.Peggy Webb won raves for her debut novel, The Tender Mercy of Roses*, with novelist Pat Conroy calling her "a truly gifted writer." Now Webb has crafted a poignant portrayal of a woman on the edge seeking solace in the past.Nobody in the family talks about Ellen's grandmother Lola, who was swallowed up by the circus and emerged as a woman who tamed tigers and got away scot-free for killing her husband. When Ellen's husband, Wayne, beats her nearly to death, she runs to the only place she knows where a woman can completely disappear--the same Big Top that once sheltered her grandmother. Though the circus moves from one town to the next, Wayne tracks it, and Ellen, relentlessly. At the same time, Ellen learns more about her feisty, fiery relative, and the heritage that is hers for the taking--if she dares. With her violent husband hot on her trail, Ellen must learn to stand up and fight for herself, to break the cycle of abuse, and pass down a story of love and redemption to her children.*writing as Anna MichaelsTime Between Trains
By Anthony Bukoski. 2011
"This collection stands as a lovely and bittersweet tribute to a small corner of America."--The Dallas Morning News In his…
fourth collection, Anthony Bukoski brings to life once again the working-class town of Superior, Wisconsin, telling thirteen well-crafted and linked tales of its immigrant inhabitants. These characters, like the Jewish railroad track inspector in the exquisite title story, occupy a definite place in the community, and the only predicament several of them share is that they are impossibly in love. Anthony Bukoski has published five short story collections, including Twelve Below Zero: New and Expanded Edition (Holy Cow! Press, 2008). He lives near Superior, Wisconsin.Into the Free
By Julie Cantrell. 2012
Just a girl. The only one strong enough to break the cycle.In Depression-era Mississippi, Millie Reynolds longs to escape the…
madness that marks her world. With an abusive father and a "nothing mama," she struggles to find a place where she really belongs.For answers, Millie turns to the Gypsies who caravan through town each spring. The travelers lead Millie to a key that unlocks generations of shocking family secrets. When tragedy strikes, the mysterious contents of the box give Millie the tools she needs to break her family's longstanding cycle of madness and abuse. Through it all, Millie experiences the thrill of first love while fighting to trust the God she believes has abandoned her. With the power of forgiveness, can Millie finally make her way into the free?Saturated in Southern ambiance and written in the vein of other Southern literary bestsellers like The Help by Kathryn Stockett and Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin, Julie Cantrell has created in Into the Free--now a New York Times Best Seller--a story that will sweep you away long after the novel ends.