-
Are you highly sensitive? Empathetic? Empathic? An empath? The Space in Between captures the essence of what it means to live as an empath—and demonstrates how an ordinary person can open up to living an extraordinary life. Longtime spiritual counselor and seasoned guide Signe Myers Hovem takes readers on a journey through her life, demystifying empathic receptivity and revealing that it is not a “gift” or “power” but a feature of one’s sensory perception and intuition, an ability that allows us to live in extended communication with nature and humanity. She elucidates the difference between having empathic traits and sensitivities and actually having the skills and abilities of an empath. And she explores the five different landscapes and fields of consciousness that provided her with insight and movement as she traveled her own path of discovery—Field of Reflection, Field of Definition, Field of Sensing, Field of Awareness and Experience, and Field of Mystery—helping readers to dismantle long-held beliefs, illuminating the intentional path towards balance and belonging, and encouraging us all to rediscover what it means to live a truly authentic life. Written for persons who identify as highly sensitive, as empathic, or as empaths, The Space in Between is a road map to cultivating both self-awareness and connectivity with the greater world. Author : Signe Myers Hovem Publication Date: October 12, 2021 -
From an author of the best-selling women’s health classic Our Bodies, Ourselves comes a bracingly forthright memoir about a life-long friendship across racial and class divides. A white woman’s necessary learning, and a Black woman’s complex evolution, make These Walls Between Us a “tender, honest, cringeworthy and powerful read.” (Debby Irving, author, Waking Up White.) In the mid-1950s, a fifteen-year-old African American teenager named Mary White (now Mary Norman) traveled north from Virginia to work for twelve-year-old Wendy Sanford’s family as a live-in domestic for their summer vacation by a remote New England beach. Over the years, Wendy's family came to depend on Mary’s skilled service—and each summer, Mary endured the extreme loneliness of their elite white beachside retreat in order to support her family. As the Black “help” and the privileged white daughter, Mary and Wendy were not slated for friendship. But years later—each divorced, each a single parent, Mary now a rising officer in corrections and Wendy a feminist health activist—they began to walk the beach together after dark, talking about their children and their work, and a friendship began to grow. Based on decades’ worth of visits, phone calls, letters, and texts between Mary and Wendy, These Walls Between Us chronicles the two women’s friendship, with a focus on what Wendy characterizes as her “oft-stumbling efforts, as a white woman, to see Mary more fully and to become a more dependable friend.” The book examines obstacles created by Wendy’s upbringing in a narrow, white, upper-class world; reveals realities of domestic service rarely acknowledged by white employers; and draws on classic works by the African American writers whose work informed and challenged Wendy along the way. Though Wendy is the work’s primary author, Mary read and commented on every draft—and together, the two friends hope their story will incite and support white readers to become more informed and accountable friends across the racial divides created by white supremacy and to become active in the ongoing movement for racial justice. Author: Wendy Sanford Publication Date: October 5, 2021 -
A PopSugar Best New Books of 2021 Selection Weed inspires her. Acid shows her another dimension. Ecstasy releases her. Nitrous fills her with bliss. Cocaine makes her fabulous. Mushrooms make everything magical. Special K numbs her. Crystal meth makes her mean. Sixteen-year-old Samantha, raver extraordinaire, puts the “high” in high school. A ’90s time capsule buried inside a coming-of-age memoir set against the neon backdrop of the San Francisco Bay Area's rave scene, Raver Girl chronicles Samantha’s double life as she teeters between hedonism and sobriety, chaos and calm, all while sneaking under the radar of her entrepreneur father—a man who happened to drop acid with LSD impresario Owsley Stanley in the ’60s. Samantha keeps a list of every rave she goes to—a total of 104 over four years. During that time, what started as trippy fun morphs into a self-destructive roller coaster ride. Samantha opens the doors of her mind, but she's left with traumas her acid-fried brain won't let her escape; and when meth becomes her drug of choice, things get progressively darker. Through euphoric highs and dangerous lows, Samantha discovers she’s someone who lives life to the fullest and learns best through alternative experience rather than mainstream ideals. She’s a creative whose mind is limitless, whose quirks are charms, whose passion is inspirational. She’s an independent woman whose inner strength is rooted in unwavering family ties. And if she can survive high school, she just might be okay. Author: Samantha Durbin Publication Date: October 12, 2021 -
When fifteen-year-old Victoria grudgingly accompanies her mother to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, she has no idea her life is about to change forever. While there, she falls under the spell of the famous John Singer Sargent portrait The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit. Drawn into the portrait’s shadowy depths, Victoria finds herself transported back in time to the world of the four troubled Boit sisters. By the time she returns to her own world, Victoria understands that the sisters are in serious trouble and need her help. She dedicates herself to solving the mystery of their peculiar loneliness and isolation—only to discover that at the same time she is having an impact on the Boit sisters’ future, they are having an equally dramatic effect on her own. Spanning a brief period in the lives of John Singer Sargent and the Boit family, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit is a coming-of-age tale that explores both the murky world of Paris in 1882 and the upheaval going on in Victoria’s own time, the early sixties, all the while pondering possible answers to the questions raised by Sargent’s most enigmatic work of art. Author : Sara Loyster Publication Date: August 31, 2021 -
Karen Grassle, the beloved actress who played Ma on Little House on the Prairie, grew up at the edge of the Pacific Ocean in a family where love was plentiful, but alcohol wreaked havoc. In this candid memoir, Grassle reveals her journey to succeed as an actress even as she struggles to overcome depression, combat her own dependence on alcohol, and find a loving relationship. With humor and hard-won wisdom, Grassle takes the reader with her through the sexual revolution and upheavals of the ’60s, to training at the famed London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art, behind the curtains of Broadway, and onto storied Hollywood sets. We know Karen Grassle best as the actress playing the strong prairie woman Caroline Ingalls, but here is the complex, funny, rebellious, and soulful woman we didn’t know. Raw, emotional, and empathic, Bright Lights celebrates and honors womanhood, in all its complexity. Author: Karen Grassle Publication Date: November 16, 2021 -
Leora, a juvenile court judge, wife, mother, and daughter, is caught in the routine of work, taking care of her family and aging parents, and playing it safe. But she’s also a second-generation Holocaust survivor. It’s an identity she didn’t understand was hers until she accidentally discovered a secret file of handwritten notes addressed to her father. A further discovery of a seemingly random WWII postcard in a thrift store sets her on a collision course with the past in this lyrical memoir about secrets hidden within secrets, both present-day and buried deep within wartime Europe. Author: Leora Krygier Publication Date: August 24, 2021 -
In 1977, Jeanne’s German nationalist ex-husband, Klaus, tells her he’s gotten a new job and wants to take their three-year-old daughter and six-year-old son away for a long weekend to celebrate. Jeanne relents. But Klaus never returns and instead sends Jeanne a letter, delivered by a mutual friend, in which he declares that he has fled to Germany and she will never see him, or her children, again. The next four months are filled with agony, despair, and anger as Jeanne seeks legal support but quickly learns that federal parental kidnapping laws will offer her little help. She reflects on her tumultuous ten-year marriage to Klaus and the unsettling events that followed their divorce. A product of the patriarchal culture of the 1950s, Jeanne’s nice-girl mentality is being tested and reshaped by the feminist movement of the 1970s, and she finds that the kidnapping ultimately becomes a doorway to unexpected strength. You’ll Never Find Us is the story of a young mother coming into her own power, regardless of past mistakes, bad judgment, and fears; the story of a woman who realizes she must tap into her newfound resilience and courage to find her stolen children—and steal them back. Author: Jeanne Baker Guy Publication Date: August 17, 2021 -
Allison Hong is not your typical fifteen-year-old Taiwanese girl. Unwilling to bend to the conditioning of her Chinese culture, which demands that women submit to men’s will, she disobeys her father’s demand to stay in their faith tradition, Buddhism, and instead joins the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Then, six years later, she drops out of college to serve a mission—a decision for which her father disowns her. After serving her mission in Taiwan, twenty-two-year-old Allison marries her Chinese-speaking American boyfriend, Cameron Chastain. But sixteen months later, Allison returns home to their Texas apartment and is shocked to discover that, in her two-hour absence, Cameron has taken all the money, moved out, and filed for divorce. Desperate for love and acceptance, Allison moves to Utah and enlists in an imaginary, unforgiving dating war against the bachelorettes at Brigham Young University, where the rules don’t make sense—and winning isn’t what she thought it would be. Author: Allison Hong Merrill Publication Date: September 21, 2021 -
At age fifty, Susan Morris is diagnosed with breast cancer—and she’s floored. Desperate to pinpoint the cause, one night she decides to type a question into her search engine: “What are the risk factors of getting breast cancer?” She’s surprised to discover research showing that long-term exposure to stress and traumatic childhood experiences can both increase the risk of breast cancer. The Sensitive One is a braided memoir that alternates between Morris’s childhood—as a sensitive child and then teenager who shouldered the burden of caring for her younger siblings as her dad’s alcoholism tore at the threads of their home life—and an adult who for a decade-plus has been living a trauma-free life with a caring husband and rewarding career in nursing . . . only to be diagnosed with breast cancer. This is a story of redemption—of a woman who manages to escape harrowing circumstances and start anew—but it’s also a story of how our legacy lives within us, and how healing from the adverse effects of childhood can truly take a lifetime. Author: Susan F. Morris Publication Date: August 24, 2021 -
During Ellen Snee’s eighteen years as a Catholic nun, she gained a number of essential—and, happily, transferable—skills: how to discern a call or deep desire, how to work collaboratively with other women, and how to be a savvy operator within male hierarchies. In Lead, she draws on that knowledge—as well as lessons learned and insights gained from her Harvard dissertation on psychological dimensions of authority for women, two decades of work with executive women as CEO of Fine Line Consulting, and five years as VP of Organizational & Leadership Development at VMware, a global technology leader—to address the exercise of authority by women. Lead guides readers through specific challenges of leadership Snee has identified as most vital to success through her own corporate experience and consulting work: developing resilience, presenting with authority, gaining financial literacy, managing in every direction, and more. Throughout, Snee urges women to find and speak with their unique voice and claim their personal power. Full of illuminating personal and client anecdotes and surprising research insights, Lead is an accessible, instructive, and empowering road map to finding external success—by drawing on the strengths you’ve carried inside you all along. Author: Ellen Snee Publication Date: August 2021 -
“My brain was famous, but I was not. Not every gifted child invents a pollutant-free fuel, paints a masterpiece, or finds the cure for cancer,” Jack MacLeod tells us. “Some of us just live out our lives.” Jack died in 1974, and he narrates his story from beyond the grave. His prodigious memory, which allows him to memorize books, and his penchant for psychic connections give him unusual insights into the events of his past life and make him fiercely curious about his current state of existence. Jack immerses us in interconnected tales of his childhood participation in a research study on the intellectually gifted, his dual career as a clinical psychologist and university professor, his participation in the unmasking of an unscrupulous colleague, his long-term health issues, his brief but life-changing love affair with a student, his deep friendship with another man, and his eventual acceptance and celebration of the circumstances of his fate. How Jack dies, and how he deals with the murder of someone close to him, mirrors how he has lived and grown, and marks the significance of everyone and everything that has brought him to yet another level of brilliance. Author: Diane Wald Publication Date: October 5, 2021 -
It’s the end of summer, 2001. Erin O’Connor has everything she’s ever dreamed of: good friends, a high-powered career at a boutique Manhattan firm, and a husband she adores. They have plans for their life together: careers, children, and maybe even a house in the country. But life has other plans. Daniel works on the 101st floor of the World Trade Center. Erin is drinking margaritas on a beach in Mallorca, helping her best friend get over a breakup, when she hears a plane has crashed into Daniel’s building. On a television at the smoky hotel bar, she watches his building collapse. She makes her way home with the help of a stranger named Alec, and once there, she haunts Ground Zero, nearby hospitals, and trauma centers, plastering walls and fences with missing-person flyers. But there’s no trace of Daniel. After accepting Daniel’s death, Erin struggles to get her life back on track but makes a series of bad decisions and begins to live her life in a self-destructive fog of booze and pills. It’s not until she hits rock bottom that she realizes it’s up to her to decide: Was her destiny sealed with Daniel’s? Or is there life after happily ever after? Author: Tabitha Forney Publication Date: September 7, 2021 -
What do politics, living donor kidney transplants, and the current opioid crisis all have in common? Sarah Golden and Jackie Larsen, best friends since nursing school, could never have imagined that they’d end up as amateur sleuths searching to find a killer—for the second time! Jackie, a stay-at-home mom with marriage troubles, is racing the clock to get her young son, Wyatt, a living kidney donor to avoid the ravages of dialysis. Sarah, who has been living her career in the fast-paced world of organ transplantation, is helping expedite Wyatt’s kidney transplant. Then a much-despised hospital colleague turns up dead of an opiate overdose—despite the fact that she’d never used drugs—and Sarah smells foul play. Her curiosity and tenacity pull Jackie, once again, into a life-and-death adventure that neither woman could have expected. Armed with smarts, tenacity, big hearts, and their raucous senses of humor, the pair gets the help of a few colorful friends to pursue the killer and take on the mission in the only style they both know how: straight on and arm-in-arm as the friends they’ve always been. Author: Amy Peele Publication Date: April 13, 2021 -
Moms enter the world of motherhood with no sense of the impact that entry will have upon them. They need orientation and guidance to get through this bewildering maze—and The ABC’s of Being Mom, with its abundance of wisdom acquired directly from the trenches of motherhood struggles, is that roadmap. In this instructive guide, Karen Bongiorno addresses the changes parenthood brings and how to manage them, the importance of being part of a supportive community and taking time for personal care and restoration, the need for equal participation from spouses or partners, and more, with a steady voice of encouragement and understanding that will get moms through even the toughest of times. The wise friend every mom needs to accompany her in her new role, The ABC’s of Being Mom offers mothers everything they need to feel confident in managing motherhood so they can rid themselves of useless worry and have more time and energy to enjoy their early years of “Being Mom.” Publication Date: April 6, 2021 Author: Karen Bongiorno -
At the age of seven, Barbara witnesses a frightening incident between her parents. She goes on to spend much of her childhood toggling between the happy family she longs for and the unhappy one she’s in but can’t repair. Disturbed by the smell of rotting leaves and an uneasy feeling about her father, she will spend half her life trying to get to the bottom of the reasons why. As an adult, a summer in Africa allows Barbara to live without labels—wife, mother, daughter, sister—and become the woman she wants to be: funny, compassionate, complex, and often flawed. The Red Kitchen is the story of both Barbara and her mother, who, like many women, both spend much of their lives surrendering to society’s expectation to be one thing while yearning to be another. Ultimately, both women—in very different ways—come of age, find the loving parts of their mother-daughter relationship, and start living their best lives. Publication Date: April 6, 2021 Author: Barbara Clarke -
Melanie Gibson was an independent woman with a good job, multiple college degrees, and a condo in the trendy part of town. She also had a few mental illnesses, a minor substance abuse problem, and rotten relationship skills. She was a high-functioning crazy who needed a good kick in the pants, literally and metaphorically. In early 2013, as a last desperate means to save her sanity, Melanie turned to a nearly forgotten childhood activity: the Korean martial art of taekwondo. As if the universe were listening, she discovered her West Texas childhood taekwondo instructors’ Grandmaster operated a taekwondo school a few miles from her home in Fort Worth, Texas—and she decided to start her training over as a white belt In taekwondo, Melanie felt like she had a fresh start in more ways than one. She found an inner peace she’d never known before, a sense of community, a newfound confidence, and a positive outlook on life. The kicking and screaming she was doing in class quieted the long-term kicking and screaming in her mind. Funny and frank, Kicking and Screaming: A Memoir of Madness and Marital Arts is the story of Melanie’s life-changing journey from troubled, lost soul to confident taekwondo black belt. Publication Date: April 20, 2021 Author: Melanie D. Gibson -
As her stultifying marriage to Jack is unravelling and she is mourning the loss of her creative self, Caro has a nightmare about Peter, an old love whom she hasn’t seen in twenty years. She takes this as a sign he still needs her and—with her three children safely off at summer camp—embarks on a pre-Facebook, pre-cell phone road trip to recapture who she once was and what she thinks she once had. Set in the sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll ’60s of Tucson, Arizona, when Caro and Peter were kooky, colorful, and inseparable, and in the suburban ’80s, when Caro’s creative spark has been quashed to serve the needs of her husband and children, So Happy Together explores the conundrum of love and sexual attraction, creativity and family responsibilities, and what happens when they are out of sync. It is a story of missed opportunities, the tantalizing possibility of second chances, and what we leave behind, carry forward, and settle for when we choose. It sits in that raw, messy, confounding, beautiful place where love resides. Publication Date: April 20, 2021 Author: Deborah K. Shepherd -
Writer Susan Tweit and her economist-turned-sculptor husband Richard Cabe had just settled into their version of a “good life” when Richard saw thousands of birds one day—harbingers of the brain cancer that would kill him two years later. This compelling and intimate memoir chronicles their journey into the end of his life, framed by their final trip together, a 4,000-mile-long delayed honeymoon road trip. As Susan and Richard navigate the unfamiliar territory of brain cancer treatment and learn a whole new vocabulary—craniotomies, adjuvant chemotherapy, and brain geography—they also develop new routines for a mindful existence, relying on each other and their connection to nature, including the real birds Richard enjoys watching. Their determination to walk hand in hand, with open hearts, results in profound and difficult adjustments in their roles. Bless the Birds is not a sad story. It is both prayer and love song, a guide to how to thrive in a world where all we hold dear seems to be eroding, whether simple civility and respect, our health and safety, or the Earth itself. It’s an exploration of living with love in a time of dying—whether personal or global—with humor, unflinching courage, and grace. And it is an invitation to choose to live in light of what we love, rather than what we fear. Publication Date: April 27, 2021 Author: Susan J. Tweit -
Del Rio, California, a once-thriving Central Valley farm town, is now filled with run-down Dollar Stores, llanterias, carnicerias, and shabby mini-marts that sell one-way bus tickets straight to Tijuana on the Flecha Amarilla line. It’s a place you drive through with windows up and doors locked, especially at night—a place the locals call Cartel Country. While it’s no longer the California of postcards, for local District Attorney Callie McCall, her dying hometown is the perfect place to launch a political career and try to make a difference. But when the dismembered body of a migrant teen is found in one of Del Rio’s surrounding citrus groves, Callie faces a career make-or-break case that takes her on a dangerous journey down the violent west coast of Mexico, to a tropical paradise hiding a terrible secret, and finally back home again, where her determination to find the killer pits her against the wealthiest, most politically connected, most ruthless farming family in California: her own. Publication Date: May 18, 2021 Author: Jane Rosenthal -
Julie is adopted. She is also a twin. Because their adoption was closed, she and her sister lack both a health history and their adoption papers—which becomes an issue for Julie when, at forty-eight years old, she finds herself facing several serious health issues. To launch the probe into her closed adoption, Julie first needs the support of her sister. The twins talk things over, and make a pact: Julie will approach their adoptive parents for the adoption paperwork and investigate search options, and the sisters will split the costs involved in locating their birth relatives. But their adoptive parents aren’t happy that their daughters want to locate their birth parents—and that is only the first of many obstacles Julie will come up against as she digs into her background. Julie’s search for her birth relatives spans eight years and involves a search agency, a PI, a confidential intermediary, a judge, an adoption agency, a social worker, and a genealogist. By journey’s end, what began as a simple desire for a family medical history has evolved into a complicated quest—one that unearths secrets, lies, and family members that are literally right next door. Publication Date: May 11, 2021 Author: Julie Ryan McGue -
It’s 1977 and Cassie Lyman, a graduate student in women’s history, is struggling to find a topic for her doctoral dissertation. When she discovers a trove of drawings, suffrage cartoons, letters, and diaries at Smith College belonging to Kate Easton, founder of the Birth Control League of Massachusetts in 1916, she believes she has located her subject. Digging deeper into Kate’s life, Cassie learns that she and Kate are related—closely. Driven to understand why her family has never spoken of Kate, Cassie travels to Cape Ann to attend her sister’s shotgun wedding, where she questions her female relatives about Kate—only to find herself soon afterward in the same challenging situation Kate faced. Publication Date: May 11, 2021 Author: Ames Sheldon -
After a decade of caring for crazy and keeping her mother’s mental illness a secret from the outside world, twenty-year-old Paolina Milana longs for just one year free from the madness of her home. When she gets the chance to go to an out-of-state school, she takes it, but her family won’t leave her be. Letter after letter arrives, constantly reminding her of the insanity rooted in her family tree. Even worse, the voices in her own head whisper words she’s not sure are normal. “Please don’t make me be like Mamma,” she prays to a God she’s not sure is listening. The unexpected death of her father soon after she returns home leaves Paolina in shock—and in charge of her paranoid schizophrenic mother. But it isn’t until she is twenty-seven and her sister two years her junior explodes in a psychotic episode and, just like Mamma, is diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and must be committed, that Paolina descends into her own despair, nearly losing herself to the darkness. Poignant and impactful, Committed is one woman’s story of resilience as she struggles to stay sane despite the madness that surrounds her. Publication Date: May 4, 2021 Author: Paolina Milana -
Rachel likes to think of herself as a nice Jewish girl, dedicated to doing what’s honorable, just as her parents raised her to do. But when her husband, David, survives a plane crash and is left with severe brain damage, she faces a choice: will she dedicate her life to caring for a man she no longer loves, or walk away? Their marriage had been rocky at the time of the accident, and though she wants to do the right thing, Rachel doesn’t know how she is supposed to care for two kids in addition to a now irrational, incontinent, and seizure-prone grown man. And how will she manage to see her lover? But then again, what kind of selfish monster would refuse to care for her disabled husband, no matter how unhappy her marriage had been? Rachel wants to believe that she can dedicate her life to David’s needs, but knows in her heart it is impossible. Crash tackles a pervasive dilemma in our culture: the moral conflicts individuals face when caregiving for a disabled or cognitively impaired family member. Publication Date: April 27, 2021 Author: Rachel Michelberg -
Closer to Fine is the story of Rachel Levine, a young, Jewish, bisexual woman finding her adult footing in a world full of uncertainties. Rachel has many teachers along the way—a stubborn grandfather, a progressive Rabbi, a worldly girlfriend, a wise supervisor, and an insightful therapist—but in the end, it is her own anxiety that is the best teacher of all. As Rachel learns that accepting that which she cannot control is the mark of true growth, she becomes ever more connected to the people who matter most in her life. Publication Date: May 25, 2021 Author: Jodi S. Rosenfeld
