There are so many fun things to do in Mr. Walter's classroom, but Esteban still misses his mama while she's at work. One day, after giving Esteban two kisses and a hug (mwah-mwah-mmmm), Mama heads out the door—and forgets to take her gloves with her. As Esteban keeps the gloves safe, they help him remember something important: it can be hard to be apart from his mama, but she always comes back . . . with two kisses and a hug! The book contains a page of information to help adults connect the story to children's experiences.

By the time Sylvia Richardson is eighteen, she has buried her parents; given birth to a daughter; and become a widow. It is 1942, and World War II has destroyed Sylvias dream of dancing in red heels through life to the melody of a Hank Snow record. Instead, she is raising her daughter, Sassy, alone in the coal mining town she vowed to leave behind. By 1955, thirteen-year-old Sassy has been brought up on a stiff dose of Mamas lessons on how to be a ladyeven though Mama drinks, smokes, and dates a myriad of men. But everything changes the day a woman accuses Sylvia of trying to steal her husband, forcing Sassy to come to terms with her Mamas harsh teen years. For Sylvia, only the support of kith and kin can rescue her from her mistakes. Spanning twenty years, Mamas Shoes is a haunting saga of love, despair, and forgiveness as a cadence of female voices weaves a spell of mountain lore and secrets, defines family as more than blood kin, and proves second chances can bring happiness. An absolutely wonderful novel, its setting a beautifully realized small Appalachian coal town, its characters so vivid theyre practically jumping off the page. Lee Smith, author of Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger and The Last Girls

In 1950s California, grieving Mildred Clausen tries to have her son, who was killed in World War II, cloned but instead, a Japanese man emerges and her niece, Ella Mae, befriends him, in spite of the town's intense prejudice and her aunt's conviction that he is her son's killer.

Gypsum LaZelle had nearly given up. She’d already watched her two older siblings experience the transition—the sudden, debilitating process that turned them from ordinary children into mages, gifted spellcasters like their beautiful mother. Perhaps she was a late bloomer, she thought until her younger siblings came into their powers as well. Now, at twenty, Gypsum fears that she must accept her fate: a mundane life without magic. She can live with being ordinary, an outsider. After all, someone in the family had to take after her father…But one day, alone at home wither family away, Gypsum falls terribly ill. And when the symptoms pass, something has changed. Something she’s dreamed of for such a long time—and suddenly, isn’t ready for at all. “One of the most original and important writers of fantasy working in America today.”—The New York Review of Science Fiction

A faithful mother, Thelma Jackson, prays regularly for her grown son, William, though unaware of difficulties he is facing. William then experiences tangible and divine answers to his mother's prayers.

AIDS and South Africa. Khosi, a 14-year-old girl, yearns for this thing called the future. Does she want too much?

An egotistic and perverse English lad who was taught to see his "coloured" views from a different perspective with the assistance of an old patient and humble Chinese lady who came to live with his family. His "white" ideas and views eventually came to a coloured ending.

Finalist for the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction For fans of Maggie Nelson and Eileen Myles, the lyrical and deeply moving story of a young queer woman’s journey across Russia to inter her mother’s ashes and to understand her sexuality, femininity, and grief From one of Russia’s most exciting new voices, Wound follows a young lesbian poet on a journey from Moscow to her hometown in Siberia, where she has promised to bury her mother’s ashes. Woven throughout this fascinating travel narrative are harrowing and at times sublime memories of her childhood and her sexual and artistic awakening. As she carefully documents her grief and interrogates her past, the narrator of Oksana Vasyakina’s autobiographical novel meditates on queerness, death, and love and finds new words for understanding her relationship with her mother, her country, her sexuality, and her identity as an artist. A sensual, whip-smart account of the complicated dynamics of queer life in present-day Siberia and Moscow, Wound is also in conversation with feminist thinkers and artists, including Susan Sontag, Louise Bourgeois, and Monique Wittig, locating Vasyakina’s work in a rich and exciting international literary tradition.

alleywow brings you yet another book that will be talked about for years. "the difference between my books and a lot of other authors I am giving it to real from the heart, I'm giving you it to you the way it is out here in these streets and not from a Hollywood movie script ya Digg.