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In this debut collection of poetry, The Mother Self guides readers along the raw and transformative path of early motherhood. The Mother Self is a collection of poetry that poignantly unveils the journey of a new mother navigating the complexities of early motherhood. Accessible and engaging, each poem captures a mother's delicate dance as she embraces her new identity and grieves her past self, all while finding solace in the sacred bond with her son. Readers are invited to explore the beauty and challenges of this period of life with grace and authenticity and to linger in the quiet spaces of a mother’s heart, where love and loss intertwine and a meaningful journey of growth unfolds. This collection weaves the universal themes of presence, nature, loss, and transformation. It guides readers on a path of healing and empowerment and offers a comforting hand through the transformative power of words. More than a collection of poems, it is a companion for new and seasoned mothers as they turn each page, nodding in recognition. Above all, this book is a poetic testimony to every incomparable and holy step of motherhood. Author: Talia Gutin Publication Date: May 6, 2025 -
Hannah Webber fears she will never be a mother, but her prayers are finally answered when she gives birth to a son. In an era of high-stakes parenting, nurturing Sam’s intellect becomes Hannah’s life purpose. She invests body and soul into his development, much to the detriment of her marriage. She convinces herself, however, that Sam’s acceptance at age fourteen to the most prestigious of New England boarding schools overseen by an illustrious headmaster, justifies her choices. When he arrives at Dunning, Sam is glad to be out from under his mother’s close watch. And he enjoys his newfound freedom―until, late one night, he stumbles upon evidence of sexual misconduct at the school and is unable to shake the discovery. Both a coming-of-age novel and a portrait of an evolving mother-son relationship, The Nine is the story of young man who chooses to expose a corrupt world operating under its own set of rules―even if it means jeopardizing his mother’s hopes and dreams. Author: Jeanne McWilliams Blasberg Publication Date: August 20, 2019 -
Just before taking her vows, Sister Gilda, along with Lord Justin, King Louis’s counselor, is given a task: investigate grounds for the annulment of a marriage between Count Cedric and Lady Mariel. Together, they discover that Mariel believes she actually married Cedric’s younger half-brother Phillip—Cedric’s surrogate—at the marriage ceremony, and that Cedric plans to marry Lady Emma as soon as the annulment is granted. Emma and Phillip, meanwhile, have declared their love for each other. Gilda and Justin must find a fair and just solution that will satisfy the principals, the archbishop, and the king—and at the same time deal with the distracting passion developing between the two of them. As they work together to unravel the mysterious circumstances of the count’s marriage, their attraction grows—threatening Gilda’s freedom and Justin’s reputation. Set in ninth-century France, The Nun’s Betrothal is a suspenseful, romantic tale of court intrigue and forbidden love. Author: Ida Curtis Publication Date: July 7, 2020 -
The Nutcracker Chronicles, a modern twist on the beloved holiday ballet, intertwines the story of Clara and her nutcracker prince with the true-life stories that unfold backstage. The curtain rises on Ballet El Paso’s production of The Nutcracker, where young Janine Kovac is cast as Fritz, the boy who breaks the nutcracker. Her director is Ingeborg Heuser, a German woman who once performed for Hitler and who peppers her teaching with insults like, “Why can’t you just dance like a pretty girl?” At least it’s better than “You look like a cow on ice skates,” which is what the other girls hear daily. Onstage, Janine wins the battle and embarks on a voyage through a snowy forest to the Land of the Sweets, where she serves as spectator to a beautiful dance. She also travels offstage, leaving El Paso to study at San Francisco Ballet before landing a job in Iceland and returning to California, where she rises through the ranks from soldier to snowflake to candy soloist. Eventually, however, she is relegated to watching other people dance—her husband, her children, her students—and her claim to the spotlight is replaced by the quest to find joy in her new roles. Author: Janine Kovac Publication Date: November 12, 2024 -
When the last of members of a secretive Druid cult are forced to abandon their hidden sanctuary, they send the youngest of their remaining priests in search of Annwr, their chief priestess’s sister, who was abducted by a Saxon war band fifteen years ago. With only a rudimentary grasp of English and the ambiguous guidance of an oracle’s prophecy, Caelym manages to find Annwr living in a hut on the grounds of a Christian convent. Annwr has spent her years of captivity caring for the timid Aleswina, an orphaned Saxon princess who was consigned to the cloistered convent by her cousin, King Gilberth, after he assumed her father’s throne. Just as Caelym and Annwr are about leave together, Aleswina learns that Gilberth, a tyrant known for his cruelty and vicious temper, means to take her out of the convent and marry her. Terrified, she flees with the two Druids—beginning a heart-pounding adventure that unfolds in ways none of them could have anticipated. Publication Date: June 15, 2021 Author: A.M. Linden -
“The Odyssey and Dr. Novak is a profound, poignant, and important journey through history, lands, and times too powerful to forget. A Sensory delight.” —Kim Chinquee. Professor of Creative Writing, SUNY College at Buffalo. Author of Oh Baby and Pistol and Veer. One summer afternoon in northern England in 1946, when Ann Colley was a child, she met a man from Czechoslovakia named Dr. Novak. This encounter launched her lifelong fascination with Central and Eastern Europe, one that resulted in her spending two years, in 1995 and 2000, teaching at universities in Poland and Ukraine. In The Odyssey and Dr. Novak, Colley records personal experiences, interactions with colleagues, and descriptions of the landscape, creating a composite portrait of these countries at a time when each is struggling to chart its course after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. She recalls moments that are disturbing, absurd, discordant, frustrating, humorous, and endearing—a missing parrot flying in through the window; a robber on a train threatening her life; clouds of smoke from Chernobyl hanging over Kiev. Colley’s journey ends with her return to the figure of Dr. Novak when she searches in the archives of the Harvard Divinity School Library for letters sent from Prague in 1945—letters which, just like her memoir, speak of a past that pursues the present. Author: Ann C. Colley Publication Date: May 22, 2018 -
2017-18 Reader Views Literary Award, Novel: Finalist “Overall, this is a deftly constructed coming-of-age story with well-drawn characters and the narrative momentum of a thriller. Gschwandtner (Carla’s Secret, 2013, etc.) is a gifted storyteller who ably balances the past and present throughout the novel and never puts a foot wrong. A potent exploration of youth, innocence, and the abuse of authority. ―Kirkus Reviews During her first week at coed Quaker prep Foxhall School, sassy Susannah Greenwood, one of two girls who’ve entered as sophomores, gets pulled into the cool girls’ clique. While the school is instructing her in the moral and ethical tenets of the Quaker faith, the cool girls allow her to enter their world beyond the rule book—but in trying to find a balance between idealistic faith and the reality of a competitive system, Susannah runs afoul of the school’s most authoritarian dean and befriends the only other new sophomore, a brainy, socially inept outcast. Then her new friend runs away after being shamed by the dean, and Susannah finds herself caught between the two forces of loyalty and authority: Should she cooperate with the unforgiving, and now vulnerable, dean, who, with her job on the line, is pleading for information from her about her runaway friend? Or should she keep the secret she’s sworn to protect? Author: LB Gschwandtner Publication Date: September 26, 2017 -
The day after her eighteenth birthday, Julia Reeves checks herself into a psychiatric facility, longing to find a way out of the grief and guilt that have engulfed her since her father’s untimely death. What she finds is fellow suicide attempt survivor Sam Lorenzo, a brilliant twenty-three-year-old photographer. Sam brings beauty and light back into Julia’s life, so when he asks her to escape with him on a cross-country odyssey, she agrees. Before Julia can process what she’s done, the two young lovers are on the run. When Julia’s mother, Laura, learns Julia has disappeared and authorities will do nothing to help find her, Laura forms an uneasy alliance with the sole person who has as much to lose as she does: Sam’s mother, Arabella. Armed with only a handful of clues, the two mothers embark on a journey of their own, desperately hoping to save their children before they are lost forever. A moving exploration of family, friendship, and how far we are willing to go for the ones we love, The Other Side of Nothing is a powerful read about loss, self-determination, and second chances. Author: Anastasia Zadeik Publication Date: May 28, 2024 -
2015 National Indie Excellence Award Winner in Autobiography 2015 Writer’s League of Texas Book Awards Winner in Non-Fiction “What makes this book particularly valuable is its vivid depiction of the abhorrent consequences of legalized segregation. What gives it heart is the window it opens to the personal journeys of mother and daughter. An important, riveting history lesson that, unfortunately, is still relevant today.” —Kirkus Reviews In 1967, when Jo Ivester was ten years old, her father transplanted his young family from a suburb of Boston to a small town in the heart of the Mississippi cotton fields, where he became the medical director of a clinic that served the poor population for miles around. But ultimately it was not Ivester’s father but her mother—a stay-at-home mother of four who became a high school English teacher when the family moved to the South—who made the most enduring mark on the town. In The Outskirts of Hope, Ivester uses journals left by her mother, as well as writings of her own, to paint a vivid, moving, and inspiring portrait of her family’s experiences living and working in an all-black town during the height of the civil rights movement. Author: Jo Ivester Publication Date: April 7, 2015 -
1953. WWII veteran Charles Hawkins sweet-talks his daughter, Lyla, into climbing the family’s oak tree and hanging the rope for their tire swing. Eager, Lyla crawls along the branch and ties off a bowline, following her father’s careful instructions, becoming elated when he playfully tests the rope and declares the knot to be “strong enough to hold the weight of a grown man. Easy.” But when her father walks out back one November night and hangs himself from the rope, Lyla becomes haunted by the belief that his death is her fault, a torment amplified by her grief-stricken mother, who sneaks up to the attic and finds comfort in the arms of her dead husband’s sweaters, and a formidable grandmother, who seemingly punishes Lyla by locking her outside, leaving her to stare down the enormous tree rooted at the epicenter of her family’s loss. Set among the fault-prone landscape of Northern California, The Pale Flesh of Wood is told by three generations of the Hawkins family. Each narrative explores the effects of trauma after the ground shifts beneath their feet and how they must come to terms with their own sense of guilt in order to forgive and carry on. Author: Elizabeth A. Tucker Publication Date: February 11, 2025 -
The Parrot’s Perch opens in 2013, when Karen Keilt, age sixty, receives an invitation to testify at the Brazilian National Truth Commission at the UN in New York. The email sparks memories of her “previous life”—the one she has kept safely bottled up for more than thirty-seven years. Hopeful of helping to raise awareness about ongoing human rights violations in Brazil, she wants to testify, but she anguishes over reliving the horrific events of her youth. In the pages that follow, Keilt tells the story of her life in Brazil—from her exclusive, upper-class lifestyle and dreams of Olympic medals to her turmoil-filled youth. Full of hints of a dark oligarchy in Brazil, corruption, crime, and military interference, The Parrot’s Perch is a searing, sometimes shocking true tale of suffering, struggle—and survival. Karen Keilt lived through the darkest days of Brazil’s military dictatorship. In her courageous and compelling memoir, Keilt narrates an emotionally honest reckoning of her desire to find true happiness. Forbidden by her wealthy family to even mention her imprisonment, torture, and rape, Keilt is forced to make a change that will affect the rest of her life. Seen through her testimony to the Brazilian National Truth Commission at the UN, readers become witnesses to both her vulnerability and her quiet strength. Author: Karen Keilt Publication Date: April 16, 2019 -
A richly imagined novel based on the life of artist Agnes Pelton, whose life tracks the early days of modernism in America. Born into a family ruined by scandal, Agnes becomes part of the lively New York art scene, finding early success in the famous Armory Show of 1913. Fame seems inevitable, but Agnes is burdened by shyness and instead retreats to a contemplative life, first to a Long Island windmill, and then to the California desert. Undefeated by her history—family ruination in the Beecher-Tilton scandal, a shrouded Brooklyn childhood, and a passionate attachment to another woman—she follows her muse to create more than a hundred luminous and deeply spiritual abstract paintings. Author: Mari Coates Publication Date: April 7, 2020 -
Zandy Watson, a thirty-year-old documentary maker from New York with a scumbag father and a broken past, is a social justice warrior, hell-bent on making movies that will expose important truths. Except she has to pay the bills, and her boss insists she go to the South of France to make some puff piece about a 300-year-old perfume house. In Grasse—the perfume capital of the world, a heavenly garden rich in delicate flowers—Zandy is seduced by the perfumer’s art. And by Dominique Severin, a secretive, debonair heir who is battling to preserve his honor by keeping his family business alive. But behind the glamorous façade, Zandy discovers a shameful secret. Holding a glittering chance to do what’s right by telling the truth, she faces a heartbreaking choice. Will she betray the lover who has trusted her with his secrets? And will she destroy thousands of innocent lives along the way? The Perfumer’s Secret is an enchanting journey through the captivating world of perfume with an indomitable young woman who in her darkest moment discovers the wisdom and courage to improve countless lives—and change her own life forever. Author: Neroli Lacey Publication Date: February 11, 2025 -
Growing up in West Texas, Jane Little Botkin didn’t have designs on becoming a beauty queen. But not long after joining a pageant on a whim in college, she became the first protégé of El Paso’s Richard Guy and Rex Holt, known as the “Kings of Beauty”—just as the 1970’s counterculture movement began to take off. A pink, rose-covered gown—a Guyrex creation—symbolizes the fairy tale life that young women in Jane’s time imagined beauty queens had. Its near destruction exposes reality: the author’s failed relationship with her mother, and her parents’ failed relationship with one another. Weaving these narrative threads together is the Wild West notion that anything is possible, especially do-overs. The Pink Dress awakens nostalgia for the 1960s and 1970s, the era’s conflicts and growth pains. A common expectation that women went to college to get “MRS” degrees—to find a husband and become a stay-at-home wife and mother—often prevailed. How does one swim upstream against this notion among feminist voices that protest “If You Want Meat, Go to a Butcher!” at beauty pageants, two flamboyant showmen, and a developing awareness of self? Torn between women’s traditional roles and what women could be, Guyrex Girls evolved, as did the author. Author: Jane Little Botkin Publication date: September 10, 2024 Download Book Club Questions -
For fans of Stephanie Foo’s What My Bones Know, a memoir of a middle-aged Japanese immigrant mother’s struggle to raise her teenage son and save her marriage when she finds herself triggered by memories of her own childhood trauma as he enters adolescence. At age twenty-two, Shigeko Ito immigrated to America to escape Japan’s rigid society and a neglectful childhood home that landed her in a mental hospital at seventeen. She thrived in her new, healthier environment and thought her traumatic past was all behind her. Until it wasn’t. Motherhood, she realized, was far more challenging than she could have ever imagined. But it was her son’s high school years that proved to be particularly daunting, and that was when her past reemerged—in the form of intense flashbacks to her childhood trauma and tumultuous teenage years. With the stream of daily stresses compounded by menopausal irritability, Shigeko often found herself regressing into a bunker-like mentality with childish coping mechanisms, a pattern that threatened to undo her most prized achievement: her happy family. In The Pond Beyond the Forest, Shigeko faces her past head-on, taking the reader along on her quest to uncover the root causes of her lifelong struggles—a journey that leads to deeper self-awareness, understanding, and acceptance, and ultimately saves her family and marriage. Author: Shigeko Ito Publication Date: October 7, 2025 -
Based on a true story, this is the tale of Adélaïe Labille-Guiard’s fight to take her rightful place in the competitive art world of eighteenth-century Paris. With a beautiful rival who’s better connected and better trained than she is, Adélaïde faces an uphill battle. Her love affair with her young instructor in oil painting gives rise to suspicions that he touches up her work, and her decision to make much-needed money by executing erotic pastels threatens to create as many problems as it solves. Meanwhile, her rival goes from strength to strength, becoming Marie Antoinette’s official portraitist and gaining entrance to the elite Académie Royale at the same time as Adélaïde. When at last Adélaïde earns her own royal appointment and receives a massive commission from a member of the royal family, the timing couldn’t be worse: it’s 1789, and with the fall of the Bastille her world is turned upside down by political chaos and revolution. With danger around every corner in her beloved Paris, she must find a way to adjust to the new order, carving out a life and a career all over again. Author: Susanne Dunlap Publication: August 30, 2022 -
In this sexually charged memoir, Sue Camaione sets off on a rebellious course to make her way as a young woman determined to live on her own terms despite societal mores. Full of a precocious curiosity about sexuality, Sue questions her religious education, challenges her school dress code, sets herself on a quest to lose her virginity, and, as she grows older, encounters challenges that at times leave her broke, sick, and homeless. She flees upstate New York, embarking on romantic adventures across the country. She discovers orgasmic joy in the Rocky Mountains, falls in love in Tucson, struggles with open marriage in San Diego, and explores forbidden intimacy in the arms of a Chilean graduate student in Boston. These experiences, men, places, and friendships transform her. Both a coming-of-age story and a depiction of an era, The Practical Seductress exposes the gender double standard and the dangers and joys of sexual freedom that defined the 1970s and ’80s. Filled with humor and learned wisdom, this is a story of desire and survival, navigating treacherous and unpredictable paths, defying social norms, and finding redemption. Author: Sue Camaione Publication Date: April 30, 2024 -
This is Rossi’s wild, queer coming-of-age story. Rossi was taught only to aspire to marry a nice Jewish boy and to be a good kosher Jewish girl. At sixteen she flowers into a rebellious punk-rock rule-breaker who runs away to seek adventure. Her freedom is cut short when her parents kidnap her and dump her with a Chasidic rabbi—a “cult buster” known for “reforming” wayward Jewish girls—in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Rossi spends the next couple of years in a repressive, misogynistic culture straight out of the nineteenth century, forced to trade in her pink hair and Sex Pistols T-shirt for maxi skirts and long-sleeved blouses and endure not only bone-crunching boredom but also outright abuse and violence. The Punk-Rock Queen of the Jews is filled with wonderfully rich characters, hilarious dialogue, and keen portraits of the secretive hothouse Orthodox world and the struggling New York City of the 1980s: dirty, on the edge, but fully vital and embracing. Author: Rossi Publication Date: April 23, 2024 -
Set in early medieval Britain and perfect for Lord of the Rings fans, this fourth installment of The Druid Chronicles tells the story of a Saxon sheriff who’s on the hunt for fugitive Druids—unaware that he is being pursued as well. Obedient to the dictates of their chief priestess, a small band of goddess-worshipping Britons leave the shelter offered them by a loyal innkeeper for a desolate mountain valley believed to be the site of their cult’s ancestral home. Rebuilding stone walls reduced to rubble over centuries of abandonment would have taken years for a legion of skilled masons; the five Druid priests and priestesses have only one skilled laborer with them and only a matter of months before winter sets in. Time is equally pressing for a pair of Christian Saxon lovers, neither of whom is motivated by any higher cause than their compelling need to finish what they’ve traveled from the capital city of Atheldom to the remote shire of Codswallow to do: kill the woman’s husband before he finds out that she is pregnant. Although the two situations are unrelated by anything other than their proximity to one another, the moment when Caelym, high priest of the shrine of the Great Mother Goddess, will be caught in the crossfire between Stefan, sheriff of Codswallow, and the forces his estranged wife has gathered against him, is rapidly approaching. Author: A.M. Linden Publication Date: November 5, 2025 -
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 -
In the summer of 1994, a freak lightning and thunder storm explodes on the southern coast of Maine, killing Nancy Bills’s husband and critically wounding her younger son. She promises her late husband that she will write their family’s story and bind it with a red ribbon of love and courage. In language alternately tender and gritty, The Red Ribbon documents the aftermath of Bills’s husband’s death. As a wife, she grieves and attempts to rebuild her life; as a mother, she strains to be the parent her young adult sons need. Then, one year later, she is faced with more loss—this time, the father whom she adores. After his death, other deaths, some anticipated and others unpredictable, follow. Meanwhile, the impending death of her aging mother is a particular challenge; Nancy struggles to be a good daughter, and on many visits to Montana, her home state, she tries to mend their painful history. Insightful, moving, and full of intelligence and humanity, The Red Ribbon is a story of surviving the many and often devastating lightning strikes of life, and a gift of compassion and wisdom for readers who are struggling with their own losses. Author: Nancy Freund Bills Publication Date: May 28, 2019 -
Her brother’s letter touched a match to the wick of Annie’s doused dreams. Dream enough for her, to stroll the length of a town without the abortive glances, the stilted greetings, the wider berth given her on the sidewalk. “I could use some help out here,” he wrote. “What’s holding you to Iowa anyway?” Annie Rushton leaves behind an unsettling past to join her brother on his Montana homestead and make a determined fresh start. There, sparks fly when she tangles with Adam Fielding, a visionary businessman-farmer determined to make his own way and answer to no one. Neither is looking for a partner, but they give in to their undeniable chemistry. Annie and Adam’s marriage brims with astounding success and unanticipated passion, but their dream of having a child eludes them as a mysterious illness of mind and body plagues Annie’s pregnancies. Amidst deepening economic adversity, natural disaster, and the onset of world war, their personal struggles collide with the societal mores of the day. Annie’s shattering periods of black depression and violent outbursts exact a terrible price. The life the Fieldings have forged begins to unravel, and the only path ahead leads to unthinkable loss. Based on true events, this sweeping novel weaves a century-old story, timeless in its telling of love, heartbreak, healing, and redemption embodied in one woman’s tenacious quest for control over her own destiny in the face of devastating misfortune and social injustice. Author: Ellen Notbohm Publication Date: May 8, 2018 -
Samantha Lockwood, Day Sets, and Harriet Robinson come to Fort Snelling from very different backgrounds. It’s 1835 and the world is changing, fast, and they are all struggling to keep up. After she refuses another suitor he’s chosen for her, Samantha’s father banishes her to live in the territory with her brother. He, too, tries to take over her marriage plans—but she is determined to find her own husband, even when her choices go awry. Day Sets demands that her white husband create a school to educate their daughter, supporting her father’s belief that his people must learn the ways of the white man in order to ensure the tribe’s future. Until events prove her father wrong. Harriet’s life in the territory is more like that of a free person than anywhere she’s lived. She even falls in love with Dred Scott and dreams of a life with him. But they are both enslaved, and she keeps being reminded of how little control she has over her own fate. As their cultures collide, each of these three women must find a way to direct her own future and leave a legacy for her children. Pub Date: June 27, 2023 Author: Linda Ulleseit -
For readers who found comfort in Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, a 9/11 widow’s memoir of rediscovering joy and finding love again after the violent loss of her husband. One sunny Tuesday morning, Maryellen Donovan’s beloved husband, Steve Cherry, lost his life in the 9/11 attacks—rocking her to her core, and changing her family forever. Maryellen’s life and love with Steve was all she could have hoped for; in the wake of his death, she was inconsolable. But ultimately, she had no choice but to be strong for her two young sons—and even when deep in the grip of hopeless despair, she found solace in her deep faith and belief that, with the support of friends and family, she would eventually find love and happiness once again. Her route to her happy ending proved long and winding and full of obstacles—cancer, family conflict, even more loss—but she always found a way forward, no matter the setbacks she encountered. An inspirational story that will provide hope to anyone who’s experienced unfathomable loss and loneliness, The Road to Yesterday is a testament to the idea that there is always a path to love and joy—if only you’re determined enough to keep yourself open to it. Author: Maryellen Donovan Publication Date: September 9, 2025
