A Sweet Goodbye to the Friend in My Head: It’s a Different Day By: Gigi Durham From the 60s to today, Gigi Durham’s collection A Sweet Goodbye to the Friend in My Head shares stories throughout the decades, showing the ever-increasing polarization of the United States, the loss of friendships over time, and the powerful relationships of lifelong partners. Durham speaks to these experiences through the lens of a slowly deteriorating relationship with the friend in her head, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and captures the beauty and tragedy of life.

From the creator of The Rabbit Listened comes a gentle story about the difficulty of change . . . and the wonder that new beginnings can bring. Change and transitions are hard, but Goodbye, Friend! Hello, Friend! demonstrates how, when one experience ends, it opens the door for another to begin. It follows two best friends as they say goodbye to snowmen, and hello to stomping in puddles. They say goodbye to long walks, butterflies, and the sun...and hello to long evening talks, fireflies, and the stars. But the hardest goodbye of all comes when one of the friends has to move away. Feeling alone isn't easy, and sometimes new beginnings take time. But even the hardest days come to an end, and you never know what tomorrow will bring.

The loss of an animal companion can be a painful, wrenching experience. In Goodbye, Friend, Gary Kowalski takes you on a journey of healing, offering warmth and sound advice on how to cope with the death of your pet. Filled with heartwarming stories and practical guidance on such matters as taking care of yourself while mourning, creating rituals to honor your pet’s memory, and talking to children about death, Goodbye, Friend is a beautiful and comforting book for anyone grieving the loss of a beloved animal.

"Stunning . . . . This is an immensely courageous story that will break your heart, leave you in tears, and, finally, offer hope and redemption. Brava, Kelly Sundberg." —Rene Denfeld, author of The Child Finder In this brave and beautiful memoir, written with the raw honesty and devastating openness of The Glass Castle and The Liar’s Club, a woman chronicles how her marriage devolved from a love story into a shocking tale of abuse—examining the tenderness and violence entwined in the relationship, why she endured years of physical and emotional pain, and how she eventually broke free. "You made me hit you in the face," he said mournfully. "Now everyone is going to know." "I know," I said. "I’m sorry." Kelly Sundberg’s husband, Caleb, was a funny, warm, supportive man and a wonderful father to their little boy Reed. He was also vengeful and violent. But Sundberg did not know that when she fell in love, and for years told herself he would get better. It took a decade for her to ultimately accept that the partnership she desired could not work with such a broken man. In her remarkable book, she offers an intimate record of the joys and terrors that accompanied her long, difficult awakening, and presents a haunting, heartbreaking glimpse into why women remain too long in dangerous relationships. To understand herself and her violent marriage, Sundberg looks to her childhood in Salmon, a small, isolated mountain community known as the most redneck town in Idaho. Like her marriage, Salmon is a place of deep contradictions, where Mormon ranchers and hippie back-to-landers live side-by-side; a place of magical beauty riven by secret brutality; a place that takes pride in its individualism and rugged self-sufficiency, yet is beholden to church and communal standards at all costs. Mesmerizing and poetic, Goodbye, Sweet Girl is a harrowing, cautionary, and ultimately redemptive tale that brilliantly illuminates one woman’s transformation as she gradually rejects the painful reality of her violent life at the hands of the man who is supposed to cherish her, begins to accept responsibility for herself, and learns to believe that she deserves better.

Moving to America turns H&à's life inside out. For all the 10 years of her life, H&à has only known Saigon: the thrills of its markets, the joy of its traditions, the warmth of her friends close by, and the beauty of her very own papaya tree. But now the Vietnam War has reached her home. H&à and her family are forced to flee as Saigon falls, and they board a ship headed toward hope. In America, H&à discovers the foreign world of Alabama: the coldness of its strangers, the dullness of its food, the strange shape of its landscape, and the strength of her very own family. This is the moving story of one girl's year of change, dreams, grief, and healing as she journeys from one country to another, one life to the next.

Bridge has always been a bit of an oddball, but since she recovered from a serious accident, she's found fitting in with her friends increasingly hard. Tab and Em are getting cooler and better and they don't get why she insists on wearing novelty cat ears every day. Bridge just thinks they look good. It's getting harder to keep their promise of no fights, especially when they start keeping secrets from each other. Sherm wants to get to know Bridge better. But he’s hiding the anger he feels at his grandfather for walking out. And then there is another girl, who is struggling with an altogether more serious set of friendship troubles... Told from interlinked points of view, this is a bittersweet story about the trials of friendship and growing up.

In 2002, while on a training run in Houston, Texas, with her husband, Raul, in preparation for the Marine Corps Marathon, author Kristin Abello was struck by a car. As a result, she sustained a traumatic brain injury and other physical traumas. The initial consensus was that she wasn’t going to survive. In Sunrise, she tells her story of faith, love, hope and healing from TBI. While a love story, it is also the true story of her fight for survival. She and Raul were a young couple in love when the catastrophic car accident nearly pulled them apart. Abello tells how the support and prayers of her husband, family, and friends formed the basis of her miraculous recovery.

Shakespeare in Tehran is a personal history of Iran through the eyes of an award-winning Iranian American artist. Drawing on parallels between life and the stage, it uses A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a roadmap to explore social, political, economic, and cultural aspects of Iran before and after the revolution of 1979. Through first-person accounts, interspersed with emotional reflections of the universal human experience, it delves into the historical and sociological context of a divided country. Storytelling, flashbacks, and flashforwards paint an intimate picture of public life in Iran in a time of uncertainty. Accessible, engaging, and nuanced, this volume will be of interest to scholars and researchers of politics, history, theater and performance studies, and West Asian studies.

Breaking up is hard to do, especially when it's with your best friend. Can these two ex-besties survive summer camp together? Maddie and Chloe have always been best friends, until last year, when Chloe’s popularity and budding fame as an actor left Maddie in the dust one too many times. Their friendship is over, and they’re both ready to move on. But when the girls arrive at summer camp, they discover that the universe isn’t ready to let go of this friendship just yet: They’re cabinmates, and each of them has to spend the summer with her ex–best friend. Is it time to try again, or are they doomed to drift apart for good?

DeLaine is embarking on an intense and surprising journey through the junior high jungle of 8th-grade. Now an upperclassman of the newly minted and rebuilt Milam Junior High, she, along with her best friend, Bailey Rains, encounter many new, wonderful and sometimes heartbreaking lessons in life. DeLaine's new life seems to begin almost the minute she walks into the doors of her school! Unbelievably, she is no longer invisible or it seems a peasant, in the school's social hierarchy! DeLaine is finding that being part of the popular crowd is attainable to someone like her. She can't believe her luck and how different her days as an 8th-grader compare to her miserable days as a 6th-grader. With her unusual year being a 7th-grader at Samson High School over, she is free to explore in a completely different group of friends than what she has ever known. Her new group of friends includes Jax Garrett as an upstanding member in their midst. DeLaine's crush from 6th-grade seems to confound her as much as Kevin Strong. Freshman, Kevin, is no longer in the same school with DeLaine and she feels his absence even with the attention she's receiving from cute cowboy, Jax! Her home life continues to be a roller coaster ride of insanity with occasional peeks of hope sprinkled throughout. Her step-mother, Clarice, seems to be happy with the caliber of friends DeLaine now has, which makes life a bit more bearable. She had hopes that since she would no longer be in the high school, her step-brother, Geoffrey would calm down as much as his mother has towards DeLaine, but he continues to run hot and cold no matter what she does in regards to his best friend Kevin Strong. DeLaine's life takes an unexpected twist half-way through her school year and she learns what true heartbreak is after receiving devastating news! How will she survive the huge changes coming into her life?