What's a dedicated bachelor doing at a week-long society wedding celebration? Doug Llewellyn is being bored out of his skull…until a beautiful, unknown woman calls him "darling," then plants a big wet kiss on him. Suddenly boredom is no longer Doug's problem. Rosie Kilgannon, she of the big wet kiss, is also a guest at the wedding, and although she's used Doug as a way to escape an amorous admirer, that kiss was really something else! Why not enjoy each other for the week, no strings attached? Which might have worked, if not for the weeping bride, the suspiciously shifty groom, the neurotic wedding planner…and the fact that True Love often sneaks up on the unwary and belts them right in the chops!

Dear Diary, I’m surviving middle school and living in Singapore! Mom is still cooking up a storm, making delicious local food; Alex is still annoying, as usual; Dad is still busy making sure that we are all happy. I’ve decided to join the water polo class as my extra-curricular activity. That’s going to be real fun. Now all I have to do is grab my googles and swim gear and go. The next few months will be BLISSFUL, right? Tired of all the trouble Sharon has caused since Rosie arrived in Singapore, Rosie is determined to stay as far as possible away from her rival. So she signs up for water polo (yes, seriously, water polo). But Ben accidentally signs Rosie up for student council, and she finds herself running for president—against Sharon! Can middle school get any worse?

BOOK ONE IN THE TROUBLE WITH MEN SERIES. Two ex-lovers, Darcy and Cameron, are forced to co-inhabit the same pink house for one month to satisfy a relative’s last will. To complicate matters, the heroine’s now ghostly Uncle Horry is sticking around to watch the fun, as well as a secondary heir, a black cat named Lucky. With the inheritance tied up, true love will have a bumpy ride on its way to happily ever after.

"Spike Gillespie is beautiful, charming, and funny. She told me to write that. It's also true, especially the funny part. Some of us are just a lot more alive than others, and Spike is one of those people who lives at 90 m.p.h. while experiencing everything that happens to her with an intensity that is either painful or hilarious, but usually both. If you can imagine Anne Lamott as a working-class kid from Jersey with a penchant for losers, you have an idea of Spike. She's a woman grown now and signs of wisdom are setting in, not that many years but a lot of mileage on the woman. As a writer, what she brings to the mountains of baggage in her life is not only humor but incurable honesty. I think of her as a voice of the younger generation, even though she's approaching forty, because she has no protective layer on her nerve endings, no cynicism, no been there/done that, no ability to dismiss anything as too freaking strange to bother with. She experiences it all wide open and then reports back. —Molly Ivins, nationally syndicated political columnist and author of Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She? "Spike Gillespie's voice is highly idiosyncratic, extremely charming, and deeply personal. . . . She is such a winning heroine that you root for her, for her son. You want to smooth the way for them a bit through the hardships they endure with such great good humor." —Sarah Bird, author of The Yokota Officers Club, Virgin of the Rodeo, and The Mommy Club Spike Gillespie tells it like it is. Whether she's writing about men, mothering or money, she cuts to the chase, unabashedly recounting the exhilaration and uncertainty she is forever encountering along the odd path that is her life. Gillespie approaches her subjects with a keen eye for curious details and a readiness to ask hard questions and give honest, even brutal, answers. Her willingness to "put it all down—the painful, the funny, the mundane, the embarrassing" has won legions of readers for her print and online columns. Surrender (But Don't Give Yourself Away) collects forty-six essays, which initially appeared in such publications as the Washington Post, Austin Chronicle, Dallas Morning News, Bust, Gargoyle, and thecommonspace.org. As Gillespie describes them, "There are odes to my good days and bad, to trips I've taken—both real and metaphorical, to holiness found in unexpected places, to men I have not slept with, to learning to live sober. Too, there are miscellaneous ruminations on my alter-ego, my inner-teen, the floor mat in my car, a dead squirrel in the road." Binding these pieces is the thread of hope: there are moments the thread slips out of view only to resurface in some unexpected location. Sometimes it takes awhile, but Gillespie always relocates hope, discovering even in her darkest times that life is full of an embarrassment of riches.

When people hear the name "Clooney," they automatically think of George Clooney, one of Hollywood's biggest stars. But it was his aunt Rosemary who first catapulted the name into bright lights with a string of hit songs in the 1950s and a starring role alongside Bing Crosby in the immortal "White Christmas." Drawing on interviews with family members, managers, promoters, and the jazz musicians who worked with her, as well as contemporary newspaper articles and reviews, Late Life Jazz tells the unsung story of one of America's finest singers, Rosemary Clooney. Ken Crossland and Malcolm Macfarlane trace Rosemary's life from her hardscrabble beginnings in Maysville Kentucky, through her first performances singing with the Barney Rapp Band in Cincinnati, through her rise to pop stardom in the early 1950s when she topped the Hit Parade with songs such as "Come On-a My House," "Tenderly," and "Half As Much." By the time the 1960s arrived, however, personal turmoil, fueled by depression and an addiction to prescription medication, almost destroyed Clooney's career-and her life. She underwent years of therapy and recuperation before she was able to perform again in the early 1970s. Few expected her to be anything more than a baroness of nostalgia, but Rosemary had other ideas. Rejuvenated by a series of concerts alongside her friend and mentor, Bing Crosby, she found a new medium in the midst of America's finest jazz musicians, building a second career and with it a reputation as one of the finest interpreters of the Great American Songbook. Vividly written and painstakingly researched, Late Life Jazz explores the rise, fall, and final triumph of Clooney the First, Aunt Rosemary, jazz singer par excellence.

As the notorious Reva Shayne on the daytime television drama Guiding Light, Kim Zimmer portrayed a vixen, a manic-depressive, an Amish woman, a time traveler, a Civil War belle, a talk show host, a cancer survivor, a loving mother, and a devoted wife. In her more than two decades on the show, she earned eleven Daytime Emmy nominations and four wins, not to mention a legion of loving fans. Now, in this heartfelt memoir, Zimmer delves into her experiences as a daytime diva. Packed with on- and off-set photographs and behind-the-scenes information, blatantly honest and wildly indiscreet, I’m Just Sayin’ tells all in an insightful journey through the parallel lives of Reva Shayne and Kim Zimmer—and the true stories behind the longest-running drama in television and radio history.

The iconic bicep-flexing poster image of "Rosie the Riveter" has long conveyed the impression that women were welcomed into the World War II work force and admired for helping "free a man to fight." Donna Knaff, however, shows that "Rosie" only revealed part of the reality and that women depicted in other World War II visual art-both in the private sector and the military-reflected decidedly mixed feelings about the status of women within American society. Beyond Rosie the Riveter takes readers back to a time before television's dominance, to the golden age of print art and its singular power over public opinion. Focusing specifically on instances of "female masculinity" when women entered previously all-male fields, Knaff places these images within the context of popular discussions of gender roles and examines their historical, cultural, and textual contexts. As Knaff reveals, visual messages received by women through war posters, magazine cartoons, comic strips, and ads may have acknowledged their importance to the war effort but also cautioned them against taking too many liberties or losing their femininity. Her study examines the subtle and not-so subtle cultural battles that played out in these popular images, opening a new window on American women's experience. Some images implicitly argued that women should maintain their femininity despite adopting masculinity for the war effort; others dealt with society's deep-seated fear that masculinized women might feminize men; and many reflected the dilemma that a woman was both encouraged to express and suppress her sexuality so that she might be perceived as neither promiscuous nor lesbian. From these cases, Knaff draws a common theme: while being outwardly empowered or celebrated for their wartime contributions, women were kept in check by being held responsible for everything from distracting male co-workers to compromising machinery with their long hair and jewelry. Knaff also notes the subtle distinctions among the images: government war posters targeted blue-collar women, New Yorker content was aimed at socialites, Collier's addressed middle-class women, and Wonder Woman was geared to young girls. Especially through its focus on visual arts, Knaff's book gives us a new look at American society decades before the modern women's rights movement, torn between wartime needs and antiquated gender roles. It provides much-needed nuance to a glossed-over chapter in our history, charting the difficult negotiations that granted-and ultimately took back-American women's wartime freedoms.

First crush, first passion, first love. Trying to fill the empty places left by children going to college, Jean Davis decides to get out of the house and volunteer in the local mayoral campaign. It soon becomes obvious—though not to Jean—that she has a major crush on the candidate, Rosie Monroe. Thrilled by the excitement of politics and strangely flustered every time Rosie calls on her for help, Jean has never felt more alive. Rising to every challenge with newfound passion, she surprises everyone, including her husband, by flourishing under the stress of the hard-fought campaign. When dirty tricks by the other side damage Rosie's reputation at the worst possible moment, Jean finally realizes that her feelings are not entirely about the thrill of the job. Two decades of doing what was expected of her are abruptly turned upside down, and she realizes she may just be in love—for the first time in her life. Newcomer Robbi McCoy tells a passionate coming-of-age story about a mature woman whose life is only beginning. Full of surprises and difficult choices, Waltzing at Midnight is a heartfelt, endearing story about a woman we all know and the love that transforms her life. Winner, Golden Crown Literary Award.

The Routledge Companion to Jazz and Gender identifies, defines, and interrogates the construct of gender in all forms of jazz, jazz culture, and education, shaping and transforming the conversation in response to changing cultural and societal norms across the globe. Such interrogation requires consideration of gender from multiple viewpoints, from scholars and artists at various points in their careers. This edited collection of 38 essays gathers the diverse perspectives of contributors from four continents, exploring the nuanced (and at times controversial) construct of gender as it relates to jazz music, in the past and present, in four parts: Historical Perspectives Identity and Culture Society and Education Policy and Advocacy Acknowledging the art form’s troubled relationship with gender, contributors seek to define the construct to include all possible definitions—not only female and male—without binary limitations, contextualizing gender and jazz in both place and time. As gender identity becomes an increasingly important consideration in both education and scholarship, The Routledge Companion to Jazz and Gender provides a broad and inclusive resource of research for the academic community, addressing an urgent need to reconcile the construct of gender in jazz in all its forms.