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Penobscot Indian Molly Ayer is close to "aging out" out of the foster care system. A community-service position helping an elderly woman clean out her home is the only thing keeping Molly out of juvie and worse.... As she helps Vivian sort through her possessions and memories, Molly learns that she and Vivian aren’t as different as they seem to be. A young Irish immigrant orphaned in New York City, Vivian was put on a train to the Midwest with hundreds of other children whose destinies would be determined by luck and chance.
Ernt Allbright, a former POW, comes home from the Vietnam war a changed and volatile man. When he loses yet another job, he makes an impulsive decision: He will move his family north, to Alaska, where they will live off the grid in America’s last true frontier.
Set in Appalachia in the years before World War II, Velva Jean Learns to Drive is a poignant story of a spirited young girl growing up in the gold-mining and moonshining South. Before she dies, Velva Jean's mother urges her to "live out there in the great wide world." Velva Jean dreams of becoming a big-time singer in Nashville until she falls in love with Harley Bright, a handsome juvenile delinquent turned revival preacher.
Profoundly moving and gracefully told, Pachinko follows one Korean family through the generations, beginning in early 1900s Korea with Sunja, the prized daughter of a poor yet proud family, whose unplanned pregnancy threatens to shame them. Betrayed by her wealthy lover, Sunja finds unexpected salvation when a young tubercular minister offers to marry her and bring her to Japan to start a new life.
The thrilling new novel from number-one New York Times best-selling author Lisa See explores the lives of a Chinese mother and her daughter who has been abandoned and adopted by an American couple.
Cassie Simon is a struggling artist living in New York City. When she receives a call from a magistrate telling her she has inherited 60 acres of land in Sweetwater, Tennessee, from her grandfather, whom she never knew, she takes it as a sign: it's time for a change. She moves to the small Southern town where her mother, Ellen, grew up - and where she died tragically when Cassie was three.
Penobscot Indian Molly Ayer is close to "aging out" out of the foster care system. A community-service position helping an elderly woman clean out her home is the only thing keeping Molly out of juvie and worse.... As she helps Vivian sort through her possessions and memories, Molly learns that she and Vivian aren’t as different as they seem to be. A young Irish immigrant orphaned in New York City, Vivian was put on a train to the Midwest with hundreds of other children whose destinies would be determined by luck and chance.
Ernt Allbright, a former POW, comes home from the Vietnam war a changed and volatile man. When he loses yet another job, he makes an impulsive decision: He will move his family north, to Alaska, where they will live off the grid in America’s last true frontier.
Set in Appalachia in the years before World War II, Velva Jean Learns to Drive is a poignant story of a spirited young girl growing up in the gold-mining and moonshining South. Before she dies, Velva Jean's mother urges her to "live out there in the great wide world." Velva Jean dreams of becoming a big-time singer in Nashville until she falls in love with Harley Bright, a handsome juvenile delinquent turned revival preacher.
Profoundly moving and gracefully told, Pachinko follows one Korean family through the generations, beginning in early 1900s Korea with Sunja, the prized daughter of a poor yet proud family, whose unplanned pregnancy threatens to shame them. Betrayed by her wealthy lover, Sunja finds unexpected salvation when a young tubercular minister offers to marry her and bring her to Japan to start a new life.
The thrilling new novel from number-one New York Times best-selling author Lisa See explores the lives of a Chinese mother and her daughter who has been abandoned and adopted by an American couple.
Cassie Simon is a struggling artist living in New York City. When she receives a call from a magistrate telling her she has inherited 60 acres of land in Sweetwater, Tennessee, from her grandfather, whom she never knew, she takes it as a sign: it's time for a change. She moves to the small Southern town where her mother, Ellen, grew up - and where she died tragically when Cassie was three.
Memphis, 1939. Twelve-year-old Rill Foss and her four younger siblings live a magical life aboard their family's Mississippi River shantyboat. But when their father must rush their mother to the hospital one stormy night, Rill is left in charge - until strangers arrive in force. Wrenched from all that is familiar and thrown into a Tennessee Children's Home Society orphanage, the Foss children are assured that they will soon be returned to their parents - but they quickly realize the dark truth.
Set at the end of World War II, in a crumbling Bavarian castle that once played host to all of German high society, a powerful and propulsive story of three widows whose lives and fates become intertwined - an affecting, shocking, and ultimately redemptive novel from the author of the New York Times notable book The Hazards of Good Breeding.
In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is planned - from the layout of the winding roads to the colors of the houses to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principle is playing by the rules. Enter Mia Warren - an enigmatic artist and single mother - who arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenage daughter, Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardsons.
On a dim winter afternoon, a young Irish immigrant opens the gas taps in his Brooklyn tenement. He is determined to prove - to the subway bosses who have recently fired him, to his badgering, pregnant wife - "that the hours of his life belong to himself alone". In the aftermath of the fire that follows, Sister St. Savior, an aging nun, appears unbidden to direct the way forward for his widow and his unborn child.
In the chaotic aftermath of World War II, American college girl Charlie St. Clair is pregnant, unmarried, and on the verge of being thrown out of her very proper family. She's also nursing a desperate hope that her beloved cousin Rose, who disappeared in Nazi-occupied France during the war, might still be alive.
Angela can feel the clock ticking. She is single in New York City, stuck in a job she doesn't want and a life that seems to have somehow just happened. She inherited a flair for Italian cooking from her grandmother, but she never seems to have the time for it - these days, her oven holds only sweaters. Tacked to her office bulletin board is a photo from a magazine of a tidy cottage on the coast of Maine - a charming reminder of a life that could be hers if she could only muster the courage to go after it.
Dellarobia Turnbow is a restless farm wife who gave up her own plans when she accidentally became pregnant at 17. Now, after a decade of domestic disharmony on a failing farm, she encounters a shocking sight: a silent, forested valley filled with what looks like a lake of fire. She can only understand it as a cautionary miracle, but it sparks a raft of other explanations from scientists, religious leaders, and the media.
After a political scandal, fledgling lobbyist Dempsey Jo Killebrew is left almost broke, unemployed, and homeless. She reluctantly accepts to refurbish Birdsong, the old family place in Guthrie, Georgia. But, oh, is Dempsey in for a surprise. "Bird Droppings" would more aptly describe the moldering Pepto Bismol - pink dump. There's also a murderously grumpy old lady who has claimed squatter's rights and isn't moving out. Ever.
Reclusive literary legend M. M. "Mimi" Banning has been holed up in her Bel Air mansion for years. But after falling prey to a Bernie Madoff-style Ponzi scheme, she's flat broke. Now Mimi must write a new book for the first time in decades, and to ensure the timely delivery of her manuscript, her New York publisher sends an assistant to monitor her progress. The prickly Mimi reluctantly complies - with a few stipulations: no Ivy Leaguers or English majors. Must drive, cook, tidy. Computer whiz. Good with kids.
One evening in 1951, an itinerant storyteller arrives unannounced at a house in the Irish countryside. In exchange for a bed and a warm meal, he invites his hosts and their neighbors to join him by the wintry fireside, and begins to tell formative stories of Ireland's history. Ronan, a 9-year-old boy, grows so entranced by the storytelling that, when the old man leaves abruptly under mysterious circumstances, the boy devotes himself to finding him again.
Jeannette Walls's memoir The Glass Castle was "nothing short of spectacular" ( Entertainment Weekly). Now, in Half Broke Horses, she brings us the story of her grandmother, told in a first-person voice that is authentic, irresistible, and triumphant.
One morning, Deming Guo's mother, an undocumented Chinese immigrant named Polly, goes to her job at the nail salon and never comes home. No one can find any trace of her. With his mother gone, 11-year-old Deming is left with no one to care for him. He is eventually adopted by two white college professors who move him from the Bronx to a small town upstate. They rename him Daniel Wilkinson in their efforts to make him over into their version of an "all-American boy".
From the New York Times best-selling author of the smash best seller Orphan Train, a stunning and atmospheric novel of friendship, passion, and art, inspired by Andrew Wyeth's mysterious and iconic painting Christina's World.
"Later he told me that he'd been afraid to show me the painting. He thought I wouldn't like the way he portrayed me: dragging myself across the field, fingers clutching dirt, my legs twisted behind. The arid moonscape of wheatgrass and timothy. That dilapidated house in the distance, looming up like a secret that won't stay hidden."
To Christina Olson, the entire world was her family's remote farm in the small coastal town of Cushing, Maine. Born in the home her family had lived in for generations, and increasingly incapacitated by illness, Christina seemed destined for a small life. Instead, for more than 20 years, she was host to and inspiration for the artist Andrew Wyeth and became the subject of one of the best known American paintings of the 20th century.
As she did in her beloved smash best seller Orphan Train, Christina Baker Kline interweaves fact and fiction in a powerful novel that illuminates a little-known part of America's history. Bringing into focus the flesh-and-blood woman behind the portrait, she vividly imagines the life of a woman with a complicated relationship to her family and her past and a special bond with one of our greatest modern artists.
Told in evocative and lucid prose, A Piece of the World is a story about the burdens and blessings of family history and how artist and muse can come together to forge a new and timeless legacy.
I've admired A Wyeth's work since I can remember. Often, I have gazed on "Christina's World" and been drawn into the house upon the hill, but inside I can't make out anything in the shadows.
This novel, although partially fictitious, has cleared some of the shadows, and my mind's eye can make out faint glimpses of what Christina in this painting might be seeing. The painting has always left me with the feeling that she sees much more than what is readily apparent in the image.
This book is well written, the story impeccably and intricately woven scenes that connect the past to the future, connect one life to another, connect Christina Olsen to Andrew Wyeth.
10 of 10 people found this review helpful
I was completely mesmerized listening to this creative story told by a talented narrator. Being actively involved in researching my ancestry I felt like his could have been the story of one of my relatives born in the same area and time as this charming character portrayed in Andrew Wyeth's painting. I honestly don't think I can look at a painting again without imagining it's rich back-story . Sigh.
7 of 8 people found this review helpful
...and I almost quit listening because I found the main character so flat--both from the outside and her inner thoughts, which seem devoid of any emotion for the first couple of hours.
Gradually, the main characters in the novel seem to become much better developed and Christina finally has emotion and depth. And the story, which had not interested me before, began to interest me. Though, frankly, I really didn't care about the Wyeth part of the story and would have liked to.
Ten years ago I probably would have really liked this novel, but the story is rather sad. Nothing very good or positive happens to the characters. In the end, it is a story of perseverance, however, which was enough for "3 stars--I liked it."
7 of 9 people found this review helpful
I have always been fascinated by this painting. My Mother told me about it and I found an article about Christina in Readers Digest. This book I know was both fact and fiction, but it was not that far from the truth. It is on the wall in my living room. Something so special about it that really touched me. A lot of people find it disturbing, but life isn't a great place for everyone. A good read!
4 of 5 people found this review helpful
I listened for hours on end. Thank you Christina Baker kline, for painting a picture as did Andy.
7 of 10 people found this review helpful
I found Christina to be stubborn willful selfpitying and selfish especially in regard to expectations from her brother Alvaro. That's how I came to see her character.
6 of 10 people found this review helpful
This book was boring and not like her other books . Very disappointing . I would not recommend this book to anyone.
6 of 10 people found this review helpful
This book was awful, I couldn't relate to any of the characters. The protagonist is this miserable bitter old cat lady who gave up on life long ago and seems to want everyone else to be as lonely and as miserable as she is. If you took out all of the "noontime meal" and "Al packing his pipe" descriptions this book would have been 100 pages shorter. Truly awful book, waste of time reading it. Don't bother if you haven't read it yet. Very disappointed
4 of 7 people found this review helpful
I thought this book was great I love Christina's books they're amazing and I learned a few things
While I appreciate the author’s attempt to give life to the real life Anna Christina Olson/Andrew Wyeth painting, I found the narration the biggest obstacle. Monotonous, plodding, deadpan. Perhaps the uneventful, predictable storyline was exactly the point. Either way, I found the entire work disengaging.