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Showing 1 - 20 of 46 items
The bite of the mango
By Mariatu Kamara, Susan McClelland. 2008
Sierra Leone. At the age of 12, Mariatu Kamara was raped by a family friend, then captured by rebels who…
cut off her hands. Despite her wounds, Kamara walked out of the bush and sought help, ending up in an amputee camp, where she gave birth to a son who died of malnutrition. When foreign journalists interviewed Kamara in the camp, her story garnered international interest and assistance, which eventually brought her to Toronto. Her autobiography testifies to Kamara's horrific trauma, but with the aim of fostering hope and reconciliation. Winner of the 2011 Red Maple Non-Fiction Award. For junior high and older readers. Some strong language, some descriptions of sex, and some descriptions of violence. c2008.Shadow maker: the life of Gwendolyn MacEwen
By Rosemary Sullivan. 1995
Using the personal impressions of the poet's intimate friends, Rosemary Sullivan builds a composite portrait of Gwendolyn MacEwan, the Toronto…
poet who died in 1987 at the age of 46. The daughter of an alcoholic father and mentally ill mother, MacEwen's story is a painful one, yet the richness of her art and inner life redeemed the pain. Winner of the 1995 Governor General's Award for Non-fiction.Confessions of an immigrant's daughter (Social History of Canada. #34.)
By Laura Goodman Salverson, K. P Stich. 1981
Salverson's autobiography describes the struggles of a young Icelandic woman to rise above an early life of poverty, isolation and…
upheaval. It also depicts the sometimes agonizing process of the immigrant, adjusting to a life in a new country. It discusses the discrimination against women and ethnic minorities she encountered as she attempted to fulfill her own dreams. Winner of the 1939 Governor General's Award. (Social History of Canada ; 34)The first major effort to portray the intellectual forces which have moulded the thinking and writing of those English-speaking historians…
who sought to explain our past during the period 1900-1970. Winner of the Governor General's Award. 1976.The right cheek: an autobiography (The French writers of Canada series)
By Claire Martin. 1968
In the second part of her autobiography, the author describes her adolescence and early womanhood in her father's house, one…
of gloom and oppressive brutality. The attitudes of the times towards sex and women are bitterly attacked and ridiculed. Sequel to "In an iron glove" (DC00901). 1975, c1968. Uniform title: Dans un gant de fer, v. 2, La joue droite.Betty Doll
By Patricia Polacco. 2001
Tattoo for a slave
By Hortense Calisher. 2004
Fictional family history spanning two centuries. Author of Sunday Jews (RC 56942) portrays the eccentric interplay of a Jewish woman's…
gentlemanly Virginia father, German-immigrant mother, and array of relatives. She broods about the probability that ancestors owned slaves. Evokes the era of the father's late-nineteenth-century relocation to New York. 2004Martin Bridge ready for takeoff! (Beginning chapter book)
By Joseph Kelly, Jessica Scott Kerrin, Jessica Kerrin. 2005
Three stories about Martin at home and at school. "Riddles" is about school bus drivers, "Faster Blaster" concerns telling lies,…
and "Smithereens" tells about exploding friendships and rockets. A beginning chapter book. For grades 2-4. 2005My mama's waltz: a book for daughters of alcoholic mothers
By Eleanor Agnew. 1999
The authors share their personal accounts along with the memories and experiences of hundreds of women who are the daughters…
of alcoholic mothers. Co-author is Sharon Robideaux, foreword by Dr. Robert J. Ackerman. 1999Let the lion eat straw
By Ebele Oseye, Ellease Southerland. 2004
Young African American Abeba Williams moves from rural North Carolina to Brooklyn to live with her mother, who dreams of…
a better life. Abeba begins to develop a promising musical talent but soon becomes distracted by marriage and children. Despite economic and social hardships, Abeba perseveres with dignity. 1979The restaurant critic's wife
By Elizabeth LaBan. 2016
Lila's husband, Sam, takes his job as a restaurant critic too seriously. To protect his professional credibility, he's determined to…
remain anonymous and that preoccupation takes over their lives. Meanwhile, Lisa craves adult conversation and relief from her homemaker role. With her husband obsessed with anonymity, Lila begins to wonder if her own identity has disappeared. Adult. UnratedRosie colored glasses
By Brianna Wolfson. 2018
Whimsical, heartbreaking and uplifting, this is a novel about the many ways love can find you. Rosie Colored Glasses triumphs…
with the most endearing examples of how mothers and fathers and sons and daughters bend for one another. Just as opposites attract, they can also cause friction, and no one feels that friction more than Rex and Rosie's daughter, Willow. Rex is serious and unsentimental and tapes checklists of chores on Willow's bedroom door. Rosie is sparkling and enchanting and meets Willow in their treehouse in the middle of the night to feast on candy. After Rex and Rosie's divorce, Willow finds herself navigating their two different worlds. She is clearly under the spell of her exciting, fun-loving mother. But as Rosie's behavior becomes more turbulent, the darker underpinnings of her manic love are revealed. Rex had removed his Rosie colored glasses long ago, but will Willow do the same? UnratedHopeless in Hope
By Wanda John-Kehewin. 2023
Fourteen-year-old Eva’s life is like her shoes: rapidly falling apart. With Nohkum in the hospital, Eva’s mother struggles to keep…
things together and loses custody of Eva and her little brother. As Eva tries to adjust to living in a group home, can she find forgiveness for her mother within the pages of an old diary?Mommy's Coming Home from Treatment
By Mike Motz, Denise D. Crosson. 2009
In this sequel to Mommy's Gone To Treatment, Janey learns to face some of the challenges a family must confront…
when a parent returns from addiction treatment as the whole family adjusts to a new way of life. Includes a parent guide to help talk with children about addiction and treatment and what happens after a parent/loved one returns.The Secret of Willow Ridge
By Claudia Black, Helen H. Moore, John C. Blackford. 2010
Likeable Gabe makes the journey from being an almost friendless, unhappy, and skeptical young boy reeling from mistreatment at the…
hands of his addicted father and the effects the disease of addiction have had on his family, to a hopeful, happy youngster who takes pride in his dad's greatest accomplishment: recovery.Mommy's Gone to Treatment
By Mike Motz, Denise D. Crosson. 2008
Written specifically for children ages 4 to 8, this brightly illustrated book candidly tackles the confusion and fear children face…
when a parent enters treatment. With vibrant illustrations by Mike Motz and a parent guide page included, parents now have a helpful tool to ease children's apprehension when someone they love must confront reality.Living Doll
By Jane Bradley. 1995
Little Shirley lives in a bewildering home inhabited by her mother, her sister, a younger brother, relatives, a number of…
"Daddies" and an assortment of people who pass through her house. Retreating from this world of exploitation and pain, she pretends that she is a living doll, a perfect Shirley Temple. She carefully constructs an inner life of Barbie dolls, pet cemeteries, and a constant winning smile. But as the years progress, Shirley yearns for a better and different world, and with courage and determination begins to take the first unsettling and painful steps that lead to a re-invention of herself.Crossing the Continent
By Michel Tremblay, Sheila Fischman. 1998
Born in Providence, Rhode Island, to a Cree mother and a French father, Réauna, affectionately known throughout Tremblay's work as…
"Nana," was sent with her two younger sisters, Béa and Alice, to be raised on her maternal grandparents' farm in Sainte-Maria-de-Saskatchewan, a francophone Catholic enclave of two hundred souls. At the age of ten, amid swaying fields of wheat under the idyllic prairie sky of her loving foster family, Nana is suddenly told by her mother, whom she hasn't seen in five years and who now lives in Montreal, to come "home" and help take care of her new baby brother.So it is that Nana, with her faint recollection of the smell of the sea, embarks alone on an epic journey by train through Regina, Winnipeg, and Ottawa, on which she encounters a dizzying array of strangers and distant relatives, including Ti-Lou, the "she-wolf of Ottawa."To our delight, Michel Tremblay here takes his readers outside Quebec for the first time, on a quintessential North American journey - it is 1913, at a time of industry and adventure, when crossing the continent was an enterprise undertaken by so many, young and old, from myriads of cultures, unimpeded by the abstractly constructed borders and identities that have so fractured our world of today.This, the first in Tremblay's series of "crossings" novels, provides us with the back-story to the characters of his great Chronicles of Plateau Mont-Royal, particularly of his mother, "The Fat Woman Next Door ..." and his maternal grandmother, who, though largely uneducated, was a voracious reader and introduced him to the world of reading and books, including Tintin adventure comics, mass-market novels, and The Inn of the Guardian Angel, which fascinated the young Tremblay with its sections of dramatic dialogue, inspiring the many great plays he would eventually write.&‘But now, having travelled to the frontier of the world of sins, I no longer hesitated in trampling over the…
remnants of the goodness in my heart.&’Manada, Maani didi, Feroza Bibi, Miss Mukherjee – the jostling identities of our beguiling and charming protagonist as she glides through a life that can be seen as exploitative yet, also, curiously, empowering and honest. Manada&’s fascinating life story takes her from her wealthy cossetted upbringing to a life of debauchery and prostitution after she elopes with her married lover when in her mid-teens. She is capable, attractive and doesn&’t ask for pity as she struggles with illness, poverty and abandonment, but ensures that she emerges relatively unscathed and carves a niche for herself in her profession.Manada matures and settles into a life of prostitution, entertains barristers, doctors and other men of high society. She describes her colourful life with relish but is often introspective as she places her own position as a sex worker in the context of the times, calling out young sanctimonious patriotic men who maintain a high standing in society yet secretly fancy prostitutes. Rather tantalisingly she takes no names, only occasionally hinting at their identities, to avoid scandals and protect the double lives of men who are well-known in Calcutta in the 1920s. Weaving together multiple strands, looking beyond ideas of morality and accusations, we are presented a life of immense beauty and endurance, which is both grand in its scope and deeply intimate in its portrait.I'm Just a Teenage Punchbag: POIGNANT AND FUNNY: A NOVEL FOR A GENERATION OF WOMEN
By Jackie Clune. 2020
'Obligatory reading for all parents of teenagers!' NIGELLA LAWSON'Bloody marvellous. Horribly familiar, funny, touching, sad, brutally honest...clutch this book to…
your stained T-shirt and never let it go.' JO BRAND'Terrific. A remarkable blend of hilarity and heartbreak with a really satisfying plot. Being childless never felt so good.' GRAHAM NORTON'Warm and witty... The competitive mothering, the hell that is other people's children, the fights and accusations of Homeland inquisition all rang deliciously true... a most entertaining read.' KATHY LETTE'Very poignant... A moving read as well as a funny one.' JANE GARVEY 'Honest, hilarious and painful' WOMAN & HOMEWarning!! This novel may lead you to make rash and life-changing decisions!**Probably don't read if you fear you may be ripe for liberation. Or if you sometimes wee when you laugh...First there was Having It All, then there was Bridget Jones' s Diary and I Don't Know How She Does It. Now there is Teenage Punchbag.I'm Just A Teenage Punchbag is a laugh-out-loud, sob-on-the bus journey through the so-called life of a middle-aged woman.Ciara is mother to three ungrateful, entitled teenagers, is married to steady Martin, a man with hairy udders, and is grieving for her mum who now lives in the wardrobe in a cardboard box from the crematorium. She finds solace in her anonymous blog, and in the daily chats she has with her mum's ashes (often the best conversations she has all day.)Despite the menopause, the invisibility of middle age and the daily self-esteem bashings, courtesy of her kids, Ciara manages to navigate the stormy waters of grief and family life - until her mask slips and she is cast out from the family bosom. She embarks on a mission to fulfil her mum's dying wishes to have her remains sprinkled from the top of the Empire State Building, finding company, distraction and - ultimately - herself in the process.If motherhood is a job - who says you can't resign?