The story of the author's Grandmother, her life, her character and her times in tribute to a most remarkable woman.

[If only] Bran would stop acting weird....Probably he had a perfectly reasonable explanation for everything. I just couldn't imagine what it would be. When Britt's older brother, Bran, lands a summer job house-sitting for the Marquises, an elderly couple, it seems like a great opportunity. Britt and Bran have moved to Florida so their mother can finish college, and the house-sitting income will allow their mom to quit her job and take classes full-time. Having never lived in a real house before, Britt is thrilled. There's only one problem: Britt starts to suspect her family isn't supposed to be there. She's been noticing that Bran is acting weird and defensive -- he hides the Marquises' mail, won't let anyone touch the thermostat, and discourages Britt from meeting any of the neighbors. Determined to get to the bottom of things, Britt starts investigating and makes a startling discovery -- the Marquises aren't who Bran has led her and their mom to believe. So whose house are they staying in, and why has Bran brought them there? With unexpected twists and turns, award winner Margaret Peterson Haddix has again crafted a thriller that will grip readers until its stunning conclusion.

From managing her own finances as a single woman to transacting billions for her clients as a bond broker, author Sharon Durling knows money--what to do with it and how to multiply it. Better yet, she shares the 411 so we can easily understand it and get control of our pocket books and bank accounts. Engagingly written and highly interactive, A Girl and Her Money will change the way women everywhere think and feel about money. Never has money-talk been so enjoyable and empowering! Topics include: Identifying Your Spending Personality Choosing a Money Lifestyle Chemo for Chronic Bad Debt "If Men Are from Home Depot, Women Are from Macy's" Coming Soon: A Girl and Her Brilliant Investments A Girl and Her Luminous Retirement A Girl and Her Fabulous Home Business

This meticulously researched book provides a timely and absolutely indispensable guide to the nations of the Persian Gulf on which the West's security and oil supplies critically depend- their political regimes and policies, their economies and the mind-sets of their leaders. But it does more than that. Dr. Kelly, one of the world's leading authorities on the modern history of Arabia and the Gulf, for the first time tells the full story of how the West's supine policies deliberately pulled us out of the region and thus led inevitably to the dangerous power vacuum that now exists in the world's most important strategic area. The author also shows that one cannot fully understand the dangerous situation in which the West now stands with regard to its oil supplies without understanding the nature of the regimes in power in the Arabian peninsula. -- from Book Jacket.

Award-winning filmmaker and writer Sophia Al-Maria’s The Girl Who Fell to Earth is a funny and wry coming-of-age memoir about growing up in between American and Gulf Arab cultures. Part family saga and part personal quest, The Girl Who Fell to Earth traces Al-Maria’s journey to make a place for herself in two different worlds. When Sophia Al-Maria's mother sends her away from rainy Washington State to stay with her husband's desert-dwelling Bedouin family in Qatar, she intends it to be a sort of teenage cultural boot camp. What her mother doesn't know is that there are some things about growing up that are universal. In Qatar, Sophia is faced with a new world she'd only imagined as a child. She sets out to find her freedom, even in the most unlikely of places. The Girl Who Fell to Earth takes readers from the green valleys of the Pacific Northwest to the dunes of the Arabian Gulf and on to the sprawling chaos of Cairo. Struggling to adapt to her nomadic lifestyle, Sophia is haunted by the feeling that she is perpetually in exile: hovering somewhere between two families, two cultures, and two worlds. She must make a place for herself—a complex journey that includes finding young love in the Arabian Gulf, rebellion in Cairo, and, finally, self-discovery in the mountains of Sinai. The Girl Who Fell to Earth heralds the arrival of an electric new talent and takes us on the most personal of quests: the voyage home.

The lines between what constitutes migration and what constitutes human trafficking are messy at best. State policies rarely acknowledge the lived experiences of migrants, and too often the laws and policies meant to protect individuals ultimately increase the challenges faced by migrants and their kin. In some cases, the laws themselves lead to illegality or statelessness, particularly for migrant mothers and their children. Crossing the Gulf tells the stories of the intimate lives of migrants in the Gulf cities of Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Kuwait City. Pardis Mahdavi reveals the interconnections between migration and emotion, between family and state policy, and shows how migrants can be both mobilized and immobilized by their family relationships and the bonds of love they share across borders. The result is an absorbing and literally moving ethnography that illuminates the mutually reinforcing and constitutive forces that impact the lives of migrants and their loved ones—and how profoundly migrants are underserved by policies that more often lead to their illegality, statelessness, deportation, detention, and abuse than to their aid.

"A powerful, gripping, and disturbing story of passion and betrayal, survival and vengeance, compulsion and resilience, told in arresting images and fragmented, dreamlike narrative."--Teresa de Lauretis, professor of History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz "This amalgam of life history, creative non-fiction, psychoanalytic treatise and fictionalized memoirs is a welcome addition to queer literature."--Gloria Anzaldúa, author of Borderlands Gulf Dreams is the story of a Chicana who comes of age in a racist, rural Texas town. Through memory, the protagonist reexamines her unresolved obsessive love for a young woman, her best friend since childhood.