Four young children caught between love and hate—hostages to the cruelty of revenge. A deceitful American father and a naïve decision by a Filipino mother transformed their lives forever.   Valorie, Veronica, Vance, and Vincent’s perfect world turned into a nightmare one hot afternoon in 1959 in Cebu, Philippines. What was to be a quick lunch with their father turned into a flight to America, where four dreadfully long years of running from state to state, hiding, and vanishing into the night followed. Kidnapped from the only world they knew, confusion quickly set in. At nine, Valorie, the eldest, liked seeing their father after his absence for over a year. Vance, a timid six-year-old, went along with whatever Valorie did. Vincent, the baby at three, cried for his mother while clinging to Veronica for comfort. Veronica, eight, was the only one who was truly panicked by what was happening around them—and she recognized instantly that she and her siblings would have to stick together in order to survive. In that moment, her childhood ended and the warrior within her emerged.   Moving from state to state and school to school, avoiding the law, looking over their shoulders at every turn, the four Slaughter children found themselves fighting not only the heartbreak of separation from their loving mother but also poverty, discrimination, and abuse. Their only weapons were their deep love for one another and an unwavering determination to survive the trials they faced—and find their way back to their mother.  Author: Veronica Slaughter Publication Date: August 4, 2020  

Even the most integrative, supportive doctor can only do so much for an individual during the worst period of healing from Lyme. The process looks different for everyone, but a patient must feel significantly worse before they begin to recover. When Lyme bacteria (or other coinfections) are first attacked by antibiotics, herbs, or other treatment, they release toxins into the body quicker than they can be dispelled. This is called a Jarisch-Herxheimer (Herx) reaction, and it can often include panic attacks, brain fog, paranoia, depression, pain, affected vision, racing heartrate, dysfunctional thyroid, disrupted digestion, severe confusion, and amnesia among many other symptoms. Herxing, in other words, is a complete—and sometimes seemingly unending—nightmare. When you’ve fretted about that frustrating doctor all night and Herxed all day, these autobiographical poems may go down smoother than a pill. Arranged chronologically in the order that they were written, they move from devastation to determination, addressing the various frustrations and dynamics of living with chronic Lyme disease—the isolation, the trauma, the fear—and also providing a voice of solidarity and inspiration for those suffering from this devastating illness. Written as a love letter for Lyme patients who are running out of patience, as well as for their family and friends, Not If, When is a clear-eyed, defiant, and poignant exploration of what it means to live—and sometimes even thrive—with Lyme. Author: Gail Tierney Publication Date: August 25, 2020  

At age forty, with two growing children and a new consulting company she’d recently founded, Gretchen Cherington, daughter of Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Richard Eberhart, faced a dilemma: Should she protect her parents’ well-crafted family myths while continuing to silence her own voice? Or was it time to challenge those myths and speak her truth—even the unbearable truth that her generous and kind father had sexually violated her? In this powerful memoir, aided by her father’s extensive archives at Dartmouth College and interviews with some of her father’s best friends, Cherington candidly and courageously retraces her past to make sense of her father and herself. From the women’s movement of the ’60s and the back-to-the-land movement of the ’70s to Cherington’s consulting work through three decades with powerful executives to her eventual decision to speak publicly in the formative months of #MeToo, Poetic License is one woman’s story of speaking truth in a world where, too often, men still call the shots. Author: Gretchen Cherington Publication Date: August 4, 2020  

After her mother’s death, Gabrielle Robinson found two diaries her grandfather had kept while serving as doctor during the fall of Berlin 1945. He recorded his daily struggle to survive in the ruined city—“I creep out at 10 o’clock at night to the clinic under whistling grenades and bombs, a wilderness of fire and dust, behind it, although already high in sky, the blood red moon”—and attempts to do what little he could for the wounded and dying without water, light, bedding, and medications. But then the diaries revealed something that had never been mentioned in her family, and it hit Robinson like a punch to the stomach: Api, her beloved grandfather, had been a Nazi. In this clear-eyed memoir, Robinson juxtaposes her grandfather’s harrowing account of his experiences during the war with her memories of his loving protection years afterward, and raises disturbing questions about the political responsibility we all carry as individuals. Moving and provocative, Api’s Berlin Diaries offers a firsthand and personal perspective on the far-reaching aftershocks of the Third Reich—and the author’s own inconvenient past. Author: Gabrielle Robinson Publication Date: September 15, 2020