A child development and relationship perspective on why traumatized children think, feel and act the way they do

This Someone I Call Stranger, by James Diaz, is absolutely transcendent. Diaz's evocative and courageous writing conjures up cinematic imagery with heartbreaking vulnerability and unpretentious strength. Reading his poetry, I could feel myself leaning in, yearning alongside him for such things as the affirmation of love, beauty, and release in the face of brokenness, loss, and pain. Diaz's poems will make you feel deeply. His poems will make you want to write, even if you're not a writer. His poems will make you look at your world through a new lens, see and feel things through a bigger, perhaps broken, yet wide-open heart. Kym Tuvim In our era of irony, disposability, and impatience, the poems of This Someone I Call Stranger, James Diaz's debut collection, reverberate with rare authenticity and lyrical pain. Threading through a past of blind forests and dark basements, empty cupboards, dirty needles, hospital floors, and bad men who won't die, this book is a necessary example of duende for the twenty-first century. These poems will arrest you. They have hungry souls, and they ache without breaking. They will hang in your brain and settle in your bones, and they will also move you forward, bravely, toward uncertain light. Jessie Janeshek Authentic, unafraid, and unassuming, James Diaz's This Someone I Call Stranger is a personal yet dynamic landscape of the darker parts of the soul, which somehow remains "impossibly alive" no matter how far from home one has strayed. The poems are equal parts vulnerable and strong, a breathing example of how those qualities are inextricable, how there is something about the darkness that cannot put out the light, how there is something about the light that gains its brightness from the shadows. Diaz writes as if no one outside is listening, which is to say, as if these poems are not poems at all but whispered murmurs from one aspect of the self to another, and we the readers just happen to be lucky enough to catch these glimpses of humanity in its most raw essence: determined yet mysterious, messy yet transcendent. Sarah Certa

THE PHONE RINGS...

From the beloved author of the #1 New York Times bestsellers Tuesdays with Morrie and The Five People You Meet in Heaven comes his most thrilling and magical novel yet—a page-turning mystery and a meditation on the power of human connection. One morning in the small town of Coldwater, Michigan, the phones start ringing. The voices say they are calling from heaven. Is it the greatest miracle ever? Or some cruel hoax? As news of these strange calls spreads, outsiders flock to Coldwater to be a part of it. At the same time, a disgraced pilot named Sully Harding returns to Coldwater from prison to discover his hometown gripped by "miracle fever." Even his young son carries a toy phone, hoping to hear from his mother in heaven. As the calls increase, and proof of an afterlife begins to surface, the town—and the world—transforms. Only Sully, convinced there is nothing beyond this sad life, digs into the phenomenon, determined to disprove it for his child and his own broken heart. Moving seamlessly between the invention of the telephone in 1876 and a world obsessed with the next level of communication, Mitch Albom takes readers on a breathtaking ride of frenzied hope. The First Phone Call from Heaven is Albom at his best—a virtuosic story of love, history, and belief.

An updated look for the classic YA thriller from genre heavyweight Richard Peck Sixteen-year-old Gail is living the upper-class suburban life when she begins receiving terrifying phone calls and notes in her locker. And the calls keep coming. When she's attacked by the town's golden boy everyone refuses to take action against him and his powerful family. A frightening drama that deals with heavy teen issues and the idea of justice (or lack thereof) from bestselling author Richard Peck.

Powerful novel about a young doctor who lives for medicine and sacrifices everything for his career. Describes his years at medical school, his practice in a small town and his devoted self-sacrificing wife who works to make their marriage a success.