Attorney Chase Mason suspected Maris Montague wasn’t who she claimed to be, he sensed it, the moment he hired her. She was a mystery, intriguing. Digging into her past raised troubling questions. For one thing he real name was Lilly Conrad and she dodged his prying questions expertly. Lilly must face the fight of her life, and she needed an alley. She slowly revealed the dark twisted secrets of her past. Then the Bounty Hungers found her. She fled with her son Oliver, and feared that she had she lost Oliver’s only hope. Chase faced the biggest trial of his life, alone. She had fled, and in his mind she wasn’t just a client he defended. They were the family he longed to have. To Lilly, he was a tender love that she hadn’t know existed but she couldn’t risk going back. Time had run out on the trial, and love

Wow, it's already Volume 3 of TIW shorts! The third collection of totally pointless exactly 500 Challenge and exactly 200 Weekend Quickie word nonsense (plus a few collaborations and extra TIW things) to entertain you while doing whatever you do when reading.

The Cleavers Didn't Live on Our Street chronicles one man's tales of growing up on the other side of the tracks in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, where father didn't always know best and the Cleavers never came to visit. J.V. Trott, a former humour columnist, shares his witty pie-in-the-face childhood reflections that illustrate his innate ability to laugh at his family's antics even as they co-existed in the sticks without a refrigerator, furnace, telephone, or car. His essays detail once-in-a-lifetime experiences such as building a Christmas tree from scratch, celebrating Thanksgiving with a "best friend" on the menu, taking driving lessons in a garbage truck, inviting a drunken Santa to spend Christmas Eve with the children, and babysitting in a tomato field. As Trott cleverly illustrates the value of family and the importance of humour, his anecdotes will transport others back to a time when a previous generation both lived-and laughed-through their own set of unique challenges. "Utilizing humour, emotion and wit, John engages the reader with his many hilarious, sentimental and sometimes painful anecdotes from his childhood memories. His family stories will remind you of your own childhood adventures and misadventures." -Nora Zylstra-Savage, Instructor, Hailburton School of Fine Arts

Sumiko Adachi’s life changes after Japan bombs Pearl Harbor. When an arbitrary dividing line is drawn through Phoenix, Sumiko finds herself forced into a confinement camp. Her best friend, Emi, is not. Can Sumiko and Emi maintain their friendship when one of them is imprisoned and the other remains free?

DIVIn this dark comedy, five siblings who are fed up with their mother’s negligent parenting conspire to teach her a lesson /divDIV Caroline Townsend is a nightmare for her children. The former actress and current alcoholic hits her nadir on Christmas Eve. Her five young children hope for a Christmas celebration. Instead, they get a fight with their mother, who’s absolutely plastered and fresh off yet another failed relationship. After lashing out at her children, Caroline passes out under the bent and mangled Christmas tree. For the Townsend children, this proves to be a rare opportunity—a chance to set things right with their mother. Together, they concoct an elaborate ruse designed to teach her a lesson, once and for all./divDIV /divDIVMothertime finds Gillian White at her uproarious best as she nimbly skewers motherhood and modern marriage./div

Pressurized family dynamics, and a dysfunctional church experience, force 16-year-old Olivia to seek her own reality. For her self-image as a thinker, painter, and older sister, Olivia determines who she thinks she ought to be. Her baggy clothes and exhaustive calorie scrutiny can't cover up the fact that she is allowing her body to wither away. As Olivia encounters small town prying and a tighter-than-comfortable rental house, her escape becomes her art. And her goal becomes the impossible perfection of airbrushed magazine models. Feeling For Bones is Olivia's story as her struggles become more than physical and she is finally led to the answers she was running from all along. This story opens up a window to the thought processes and struggles of teen and college-aged women who struggle with eating disorders. Young women will find a friend who thinks like they do. And mothers will find a compatriot in the battle to help their daughters deal with body image.

This research monograph examines familiar letters in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English to provide a pragmatic reading of the meanings that writers make and readers infer. The first part of the book presents a method of analyzing historical texts. The second part seeks to validate this method through case studies that illuminate how modern pragmatic theory may be applied to distant speech communities in both history and culture in order to reveal how speakers understand one another and how they exploit intended and unintended meanings for their own communicative ends. The analysis demonstrates the application of pragmatic theory (including speech act theory, deixis, politeness, implicature, and relevance theory) to the study of historical, literary and fictional letters from extended correspondences, producing an historically informed, richly situated account of the meanings and interpretations of those letters that a close reading affords. This book will be of interest to scholars of the history of the English language, historical pragmatics, discourse analysis, as well as to social and cultural historians, and literary critics.