A beautiful exploration of the difficult and affirming relationship between mothers and their daughters in the lives of Jewish women.

From the author of In Farleigh Field comes Rhys Bowen's short story "The Face in the Mirror"; it offers just the taste of mystery and mayhem fans will need to tide them over until the next Molly Murphy novel. Molly Murphy—Molly Sullivan, now that she and Daniel are finally married—is bored. Having given up her detective agency when she married, she now finds that her life is much less exciting, her days an endless stretch of housekeeping and chores. But when Molly secretly attends a suffragist meeting with her friends Sid and Gus and meets a shy, distracted woman who claims to live in a haunted house, everything is about to change.

The Face in the Mirror is based on a true story of one woman's dream finally coming true not only against all odds, but after believing that her dream had been lost forever. The story takes place in Chilton, a hamlet in the middle of the farming community of central Wisconsin in 1945-1951. It is about the heartbreaking and instantaneous destruction of one woman's dream-a life as part of a wonderfully romantic couple. Only with the strength and courage to survive enormous tragedy, does she recover that dream. This is a moving tale with an unexpected ending.

Inspired by the author’s own experience, a novel of one female soldier’s fight to maintain her independence while serving in the Israeli army Ariel Ron is the spoiled yet fiercely proud daughter of a renowned Israeli colonel, entering the army for her two-year period of compulsory military service. Rebellious and self-centered, she is determined to keep her independence within this highly structured system. Ariel expects that being the colonel’s daughter will win her favors in the army—but she is sorely mistaken. As she comes to terms with this reality, she embarks on a journey that forces her to look inward and reflect on her own values and connection to her homeland. Based on Yaël Dayan’s own experience in the Israeli army and partly written when she was not yet twenty, this searing and honest first novel is a rare look at a young woman struggling to find her true self in a strange and uncomfortable environment.

Before leaving home, three children gaze into a mirror with feelings of self-doubt, wondering what people will think of them. They adventure out into the world, befriending each other along the way. Their mutual quest for self-assurance takes them to a grand park, with an even grander work of art --- a magical reflective bean. There they meet their inner voice, the image of their self-confidence reflected in their smiling faces. Filled up with self-acceptance, possibility and belief, the children dream about all that they can be. As the children return home, they take with them the gift of knowing that the truth of who they are lies within the mirror of their heart.

A revelatory short memoir from the author and Zen Buddhist priest Ruth Ozeki about how her face has shaped and been shaped by her life

The Story of One Woman’s Journey from the Nightmare of Domestic Abuse to True Healing. Throughout this book, Schwartz offers valuable self-help techniques to enable battered women to discover their self-worth and regain their lives. Her honesty in detailing her thought processes provides enormous insight into the psyche of a victim of abuse, while her ultimate recovery offers hope to others trapped within the cycle of domestic violence. All profits from this book will be donated to charity.

Here, Katherine Tate examines the significance of race in the U.S. system of representative democracy for African Americans. Presenting important new findings, she offers the first empirical study to take up the question of representation from both sides of the constituent-representative relationship. The first half of the book examines whether black members of the U.S. House legislate and represent their constituents differently than white members do. Representation is broadly conceptualized to include not only legislators' roll call voting behavior and bill sponsorship, but also the symbolic acts in which they engage. The second half looks at the issue of representation from the perspective of ordinary African Americans based on a landmark national survey. Tate's findings are mixed. But, in the main, legislators' race does shape how they represent their constituents and how constituents evaluate them. African Americans view black representatives more positively than they do white representatives, even those who belong to their own political party. Black legislators, however, are just as likely as white representatives to sponsor and gain passage of bills in the House. Tate also concludes that black House members are more liberal as a group than are their black constituents, but that there is considerable divergence in the quality and type of representation they provide. The findings reported here will generate controversy in the fields of politics, law, and race, particularly as debate commences over renewing the Voting Rights Act, which is set to expire in 2007.