In the midst of a judgmental society with double standards and the wrath of her mother, Mildred is isolated in a winter paradise full of magic. She embarks on the precarious journey of life enduring an endless loop of challenges that involve her making the most difficult decisions of her life. After years of endurance and perseverance, she undergoes a journey of emotional and principle transformation to the point of bloodshed and war. Will Princess Mildred get the happy ending she yearned for during the entirety of her survival?

She could remember standing in a park near the falls, hypnotized by the sight and sound, and holding her father’s hand as they took a walk that would lead them closer. That’s what everyone wonders when they see Niagara . . . How close will their courage let them get to it? At the turn of the nineteenth century, a retired sixty-two-year-old charm school instructor named Annie Edson Taylor, seeking fame and fortune, decided to do something that no one in the world had ever done before—she would go over Niagara Falls in a wooden barrel. Come meet the Queen of the Falls and witness with your own eyes her daring ride!

Whether pulled from the folds of memory, channeled through the icons of Greek mythology and Roman Catholicism, or filtered through the lens of pop culture, Sonja Livingston’s Queen of the Fall considers the lives of women. Exploring the legacies of those she has crossed paths with in life and in the larger culture, Livingston weaves together strands of memory with richly imagined vignettes to explore becoming a woman in late 1980s and early 1990s America. Along the way, the award-winning memoirist brings us face-to-face with herself as an inner-city girl—trying to imagine a horizon beyond poverty, fearful of her fertility and the limiting arc of teenage pregnancy. Livingston looks at the lives of those she’s known: friends who’ve gotten themselves into “trouble” and disappeared never to be heard from again, girls who tell their school counselor small lies out of necessity and pain, and a mother whose fruitfulness seems, at times, biblical. Livingston interacts with figures such as Susan B. Anthony, the Virgin Mary, and Ally McBeal to mine the terrain of her own femininity, fertility, and longing. Queen of the Fall is a dazzling meditation on loss, possibility, and, ultimately, what it means to be human. Watch a book trailer

The Fifth Queen trilogy consists of three historical novels, The Fifth Queen, Privy Seal and The Fifth Queen Crowned. The trilogy presents a fictionalized account of Katharine Howard's arrival at the Court of Henry VIII, her eventual marriage to the king, and her death. Katharine Howard is introduced as a devout Roman Catholic, impoverished, young noblewoman escorted by her fiery cousin Thomas Culpeper. By accident, she comes to the attention of the king, in a minor way at first, is helped to a position as a lady in waiting for the then bastard Lady Mary, Henry's eldest daughter, by her old Latin tutor Nicholas Udal. Udal is a spy for Thomas Cromwell, the Lord Privy Seal. As Katharine becomes involved with the many calculating, competing, and spying members of Henry VIII's Court, she gradually rises, almost against her will, in Court. She is brought more to the attention of the King, becomes involved with him, gets used by Cromwell, Bishop Gardiner and Thomas Cranmer as well as the less powerful though more personally attached Nicholas Throckmorton. Her connection to the latter puts her in some peril, as in January 1554 he is suspected of complicity in Wyatt's Rebellion and arrested, during which time Katherine is also briefly implicated. Katharine's forthrightness, devotion to the Old Faith and learning are what make her attractive to the King, along with her youth and physical beauty.