Maria Scholte is running from her late husband’s family in Europe and finds herself immigrating to America through Portland Maine. She lands on an island in Casco Bay and is at the mercy and gratitude of a local shipping tycoon. There is a fiery attraction between herself and Captain Jim O’Hara. Occupied with managing his fleet, the captain puts her in the hands of his friend and attorney, a consulate for Canadian and Maine relations. Eli Perrier is a much different man, enigmatic but also frustrating. The two travel up and down the New England coast, relationships intertwining, as Mariah seeks her way forward in a new country.
It seems like a sign of liberation—of adulthood’s indefinite postponement—when partisans bomb the university and every student’s personal records, from transcripts to debts, are consumed in erasing fire. If nothing else, it lends Margaux the freedom to continue her preferred art form of list-making unfettered by the authority of academia—until she encounters the breakdowns, disappearances, and deaths of the people she admires and cherishes most. A monochromatic painter. A BDSM documentary photographer. A transgendered Aphrodite. A mathematician with an invisible cat. Yet, as the concrete details of her world dissolve into the abstraction of loss, they also become more rarefied, more essential. Something small enough to be contained. Small enough to be protected.
The Last Whaler follows beluga whaler Tor Handeland and his wife Astrid, a botanist specializing in Arctic flora. During the dark season of 1937, the couple becomes stranded together at their remote whaling station on Svalbard. Still mourning the tragic death of their son, they confront not only bitter cold, treacherous storms, and the looming threat of polar bears, but also Astrid’s unexpected pregnancy, a circumstance that amplifies their isolation and vulnerability. The Last Whaler is a moving meditation on the resilience of the human spirit, the fragile threads that connect us to each other and to our environment, and the enduring power of love and remembrance. Publishers Weekly hails The Last Whaler as "a dramatic tale of survival. . .This emotionally rich historical will keep readers turning the pages." This book is "poignant...a vibrant historical novel in which grief and triumph are set against the severe Arctic wilderness" —Foreward starred review.
1894 - Devastated by the deaths of her husband and son during an epidemic in Ghana, Dr. Leah Maays returns home to Edith's Bay, Maine. Hoping to continue her medical career, she discovers the community is hostile to female doctors. Enter Duncan Shay. After years of being ostracized for murdering a man while robbing a bank, he's developed a persona that can freeze a glass of water. Unaware Duncan is shunned, Leah tends to a gouge on his hand as if he's just another regular fellow, making Duncan realize the walls he's built to keep others out are too weak to contain his yearnings to belong. Though drawn to him, Leah resists Duncan's friendship because she can't establish a practice if she, too, is ostracized. To have Leah in his life, Duncan must convince everyone, including himself, that he's more than the worst thing he's ever done.
Finn Carroll is a second-rate artist living a marginal existence in his late parents’ maintenance-deferred home. So why would a team of killers want to murder him and frame it as a suicide? Seems a fact worth knowing. He survives the encounter to discover the killers have left behind a “suicide note” detailing a dark incident from his past no one could possibly know about. Finn escapes to Musqasset Island, Maine, his former home, to seek refuge with an old friend, but soon realizes he’s trapped himself on the island with the very people who want him dead—and with old debts that need paying. His only hope for survival, and redemption, is to figure out who’s trying to kill him and why they’ve waited eighteen years to act. No easy task in a raging nor’easter, where nothing is on solid ground—including Finn’s own mind.
Africa Opened My Heart is a love story. Heading to Uganda to reinvent herself after her husband's death, the author sought a new sense of purpose. There, she worked with AIDS orphans and found Ugandans open-hearted and welcoming. Subsequently in Benin, West Africa, while serving with the Peace Corps, she found herself falling in love with one special man and wanting to share what she had with him. A memoir and travelogue, Africa Opened My Heart provides a thought-provoking look at the challenges of building a more equal world and the joys of finding new love late in life.
One Bad Mother: A Mother's Search for Meaning in the Police Academy
After one of her six-year-olds puts a hammer through a wall, Megan Williams feels she has been failing the test that is motherhood–failing ever since her twins were born at twenty-nine weeks. Recognizing a hole in her life eerily similar to the space left in her drywall, Williams abandons her academic career to apply to the Police Academy. During the application process, she confronts her psychological limits. She runs laps around younger candidates but fails her physical because she takes Prozac, and her polygraph says she deals drugs. During it all, Williams measures herself against the other candidates and mothers with brutal honesty and grim humor. She confronts the paralyzing fear that she is a bad mother as well as the real possibility that she might not make the cut at the Academy. In the end, she makes peace with a motherhood far different from the dream sold by our culture.
Solstice, Helene McGlauflin’s third collection of poetry is a sweet selection of poems written for and during the dark days before the winter solstice. Helene’s poems utilize imagery from the night sky, root cellars, fireflies, gestation in darkness, and birth to remind readers to search for light, wait for light, hope for light, see light. Her poems are an accessible, welcome comfort in these times of uncertainty when every soul needs the reassurance of the beauty and faith found in poetry. Helene is also the author of Calm and Alert: Yoga and Mindfulness Practices to Teach Self Regulation and Social Skills to Children (Pesi Publishing, 2018), Tiny Sabbath (2010 Finishingline Press) and Teacher I Honor You (2016, Finishing Line Press).
Discover the enormous world of some of the planet’s tiniest creatures―and the giant job they do in our ecosystem. "Set against black backgrounds, vivid microphotos of the (mostly) small but intricately constructed plants and animals making up the “sea soup” that keeps Earth’s oceans and atmosphere healthy provide riveting visuals for Cerullo’s breezy, richly factual survey…Enticing and informative" —Kirkus Starred Review.
It is Juddy's first day of summer vacation, and new neighbors have moved into the house next door. Juddy is excited to have two new friends to play with—until he discovers that he cannot tell them apart! The two girls look exactly the same! After some tears and a trick or two, the girls tell Juddy a secret. Softcover. For early readers, ages 6-9.
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