While spending summer vacation on Uncle Pat and Auntie Pat's financially-strapped farm, a child finds a way to generate more income after consulting the wishing well.

Whitney Kingston's life changes when she and her family move to Lexington Falls, a suburb that is nothing short of being a utopia. Whitney learns that things aren't always what they seem when someone she loves turns up deadmurdered. Whitney enlists the help of Britney Beaumont, the most popular girl in school, to find the killer. Whitney and Britney soon realize that solving a murder mystery is harder than they anticipated when they encounter lack of suspects and more questions unanswered. When the girls discover something unimaginable, will they have the courage to step up and close the case?

A “contagiously exuberant” celebration of Italian food, culture, and history that “will be the companion of visitors for years to come” (The Washington Post Book World). In an absorbing journey down the Italian peninsula, essayist, journalist, and fiction writer Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, offers a fascinating mixture of history, politics, folklore, food, architecture, arts, and literature, studded with local anecdotes and personal reflections. From fashionable Milan to historic Rome and primitive, brooding Calabria, Harrison reveals her country of origin in all its beauty, peculiarity, and glory. Italian Days is the story of a return home; of friends, family, and faith; and of the search for the good life that propels all of us on our journeys wherever we are. “Harrison’s wonderful journal will make you update your passport and dream of subletting your job, home, etc. . . . With Harrison, you never know with whom you’ll be lunching, or climbing down a ruin. You just know you want to be there.” —Glamour

How would you like to have your funeral at any place you wanted? Well, in this book, you will see what my uncle did. He was a major coach. What is a major coach? Well, that is where you coach literally everything: basketball, baseball, track, football, martial arts, swimming, golf, and dancing lessons. He tutored adults and children and worked a regular job. Lazy wasn't a word he knew. What better way than to go out the way you lived your life? I personally thought it was very cool. My uncle's funeral was on the track and football field where over three hundred people attended to celebrate and paid their respects. It made my father feel like he was putting on a gospel celebrity concert that he waited for all his life. Lord Jesus help us. If only Erica from Mary Mary would have just given my father a solo at their church. My beautiful great-aunt had us join a procession at the funeral as if it was a wedding. We sat in white chairs on the football field as if we were holding a presidential election. He was just that special. My uncle's only daughter's wedding colors were purple and white. And she wanted to honor him by the family wearing those colors since he would not be here to walk her down the aisle. My father felt like this was his time to shine. He didn't have to shine that much to make us go viral. We were embarrassed. We had just seen Kobe and his daughter buried the day before. I was grateful for the tribute they gave to all nine lives that were lost. Everyone was watching at the airport. We were delayed due to the fog. After watching the funeral, no one complained about the fog again. I flew all the way from St. Louis. I couldn't miss my uncle's funeral. Who would have thought the world would shut down five weeks later? I say God is trying to tell us all something. With me being six months pregnant, and bleeding for five of those six months, I believed it would be a double funeral. God said, "You both shall live," yet the devil was trying to take me out. I believe in my heart that this book will show you that no matter your skin color, we are the same. Even if your faith is paper thin, this book is for you. Religion shouldn't be anyone's cup of tea. Even in the COVID pandemic, Jesus has never left us nor forsaken us. His blood is why we breathe. Now that's love. That should be our cup of tea. Not religion.

Michael Mahana's personal disclosure to his parents leads to the uncovering of another family secret – about his uncle, Sam, who had fought in the Vietnam War. Now, armed with his uncle's diary, Michael goes searching for the truth about his uncle, about the secret the Mahana family has kept hidden for over thirty years, and what happened to Sam. Set in the war-torn jungles of Vietnam and in present-day New Zealand and North America, Witi Ihimaera's dramatic novel combines the superb story-telling of Bulibasha, King of the Gypsies with the unflinching realism of Nights in the Gardens of Spain. A powerful love story, it courageously confronts Maori attitudes to sexuality and masculinity and contains some of Ihimaera's most passionate writing to date. Also available as an eBook

This book explores the significant contributions of African American women radical activists from 1955 to 1995. It examines the 1961 case of African American working-class self-defense advocate Mae Mallory, who traveled from New York to Monroe, North Carolina, to provide support and weapons to the Negroes with Guns Movement. Accused of kidnapping a Ku Klux Klan couple, she spent thirteen months in a Cleveland jail, facing extradition. African American women radical activists Ethel Azalea Johnson of Negroes with Guns, Audrey Proctor Seniors of the banned New Orleans NAACP, the Trotskyist Workers World Party, Ruthie Stone, and Clarence Henry Seniors of Workers World founded the Monroe Defense Committee to support Mallory. Mae’s daughter, Pat, aged sixteen also participated, and they all bonded as family. When the case ended, they joined the Tanzanian, Grenadian, and Nicaraguan World Revolutions. Using her unique vantage point as Audrey Proctor Seniors’s daughter, Paula Marie Seniors blends personal accounts with theoretical frameworks of organic intellectual, community feminism, and several other theoretical frameworks in analyzing African American radical women’s activism in this era. Essential biographical and character narratives are combined with an analysis of the social and political movements of the era and their historical significance. Seniors examines the link between Mallory, Johnson, and Proctor Seniors’s radical activism and their connections to national and international leftist human rights movements and organizations. She asks the underlying question: Why did these women choose radical activism and align themselves with revolutionary governments, linking Black human rights to world revolutions? Seniors’s historical and personal account of the era aims to recover Black women radical activists’ place in history. Her innovative research and compelling storytelling broaden our knowledge of these activists and their political movements.

From the beloved author of Anne of Green Gables, this charming story introduces Patricia Gardiner, a young girl with a deep aversion to change and an unwavering love for her home, Silver Bush. Pat's life at Silver Bush is filled with warmth and happiness. Her childhood was spent surrounded by her loving family and the ever-enchanting housekeeper, Judy Plum, whose magical tales bring wonder to every occasion. But as Pat grows up, she must learn to cope with the inevitable changes and tragedies that threaten to disrupt her idyllic world. Through these trials, Pat's resilience and the strength of her bonds with her family and friends are put to the test. Pat of Silver Bush is a captivating novel by Lucy Maud Montgomery, originally published in 1933. A heartwarming tale of love, loyalty, and the courage, Montgomery's rich storytelling brings Pat's world to life, making readers fall in love with Silver Bush just as deeply as Pat does.

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This intimate portrait of Lou Costello (1906-1959) offers a rare look at one of the most talented comedians of all time. Starting in the 1930s, Costello attained enormous fame touring the burlesque circuits with straight man Bud Abbott (1895-1974). Their live skits (including "Who's on First?"), radio programs, and films such as One Night in the Tropics, Buck Privates, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, and In the Navy made comic history. Behind the scenes, however, Costello faced numerous crises: a bout with rheumatic fever that left him bedridden for months, the drowning death of his young son, and constant haggles with Universal Studios over its reluctance to adequately finance productions of Abbott and Costello films. Lou's on First goes beyond Costello's clownish persona to explore his Pagliacci nature: the private demons behind the happy public face, the heartbreaking moments in an otherwise storybook marriage, the business ventures soured by unscrupulous managers, and the true nature of the breakup of his twenty-one-year partnership with Bud Abbott.

The book is a collection of memories of childhood and adolescence, of growing up as one of a family of seven in a small South Staffordshire mining village in the 1940s and 1950s. The family home had no electricity and relied on an open fire for all cooking and heating. The book looks at different aspects of life, such as earliest memories, starting school, wartime experiences, chores and scavenging for fuel, Christmas and leisure activities, immersing the reader in a time, which, though still within living memory is a world away from the 21st century. It is very much a personal account of how a less fortunate family coped in these difficult times and is very different from the usual memoirs of these times. Its final two chapters deal with the death of the parents, when the writer and his brother become the legal guardians of their five younger siblings and can now be considered as finally out of childhood and adolescence.