JANEY BURKE despises her life at St. Jerome's Orphanage in 1902 Sturgis, South Dakota. She harbors a messy stew of hurt, anger and confusion after having been deposited there at the age of eight by her own mother. She compensates by carrying out elaborate pranks and fiercely defending the younger children against bullies. Though these actions endear her to her peers, she is a thorn-in-the-side to the home's authority figures. Only her friendship with the shy half-Shoshone girl, EMMA TWO-SHOES makes life tolerable. Then on her fifteenth birthday a dapper stranger waltzes into St. Jerome's. Janey learns that this Englishman, SEBASTIAN KENT, has come to take her to Deadwood to be reunited with her mother. She is further shocked when he reveals her mother is the Wild West icon, CALAMITY JANE. Keywords: Historical, Teen, Coming-Of-Age, Orphans, South Dakota, Women's Issues, Bullying, Friendship, Action-Packed, Suspenseful

This exhaustive bibliographical reference will be the first stop for anyone looking for Calamity Jane in print, film, or photograph—and wanting to know how reliable those sources may be. Richard W. Etulain, renowned western-U.S. historian and the author of a recent biography of this charismatic figure, enumerates and assesses the most valuable sources on Calamity Jane’s life and legend in newspapers, magazines, journals, books, and movies, as well as historical and government archives. Etulain begins with a brief biography of Martha Canary, aka Calamity Jane (1856–1903), then analyzes the origins and growth of her legends. The sources, Etulain shows, reveal three versions of Calamity Jane. In the most popular one, she was a Wild Woman of the Old West who helped push a roaring frontier through its final stages. This is the Calamity Jane who fought Indians, marched with the military, and took on the bad guys. Early in her life she also hoped to embody the pioneer woman, seeking marriage and a stable family and home. A third, later version made of Calamity an angel of mercy who reached out to the poor and nursed smallpox victims no one else would help. The hyperbolic journalism of the Old West, as well as dime novels and the stretchers Calamity herself told in her interviews and autobiography, shaped her legends through much of the twentieth century. Many of the sensational early accounts of Calamity’s life, Etulain notes, were based on rumor and hearsay. In illuminating the role of the Deadwood Dick dime novel series and other pulp fiction in shaping what we know—or think we know—of the American West, Etulain underscores one of his fascinating themes: the power of popular culture. The product of twenty years’ labor sifting fact from falsehood or distortion, this bibliography and reader’s guide includes brief discussions of nearly every item’s contents, along with a terse, entertaining evaluation of its reliability.

Genres collide in this dark and atmospheric reimagining of 1930s Shanghai for fans of Nghi Vo and S. A. Chakraborty. Jingwen spends her nights as a showgirl at the Paramount, one of the most lavish clubs in Shanghai, competing ruthlessly to charm wealthy patrons. To cap off her shifts, she runs money for her grandmother, the exclusive surgeon to the most powerful gang in the city. A position her grandmother is pressuring her to inherit... When a series of dancers are targeted—the attacker stealing their faces—Jingwen fears she could be next. And as the faces of the dancers start appearing on wealthy foreign socialites, she realizes Shanghai's glittering mirage of carefree luxury comes at a terrible price. Fighting not just for her own safety but that of the other dancers—women who have simultaneously been her bitterest rivals and only friends—Jingwen has no choice but to delve into the city's underworld. In this treacherous realm of tangled alliances and ancient grudges, silver-armed gangsters haunt every alley, foreign playboys broker deals in exclusive back rooms, and the power of gods is wielded and traded like yuan. Jingwen will have to become something far stranger and more dangerous than her grandmother ever imagined if she hopes to survive the forces waiting to sell Shanghai's bones.

To fufill her adoptive father's dying wish, Miette sets out to meet her mother, the notorious Calamity Jane, and crosses the badlands of the North American West in her quest to find the woman who had forsaken her for a life of danger and adventure.

The mesmerizing bestseller that combines the storytelling gifts of Donna Tartt and the suspense of Alfred Hitchcock—A New York Times Ten Best Book of the Year Special Topics in Calamity Physics is a darkly hilarious coming-of-age tale and a richly plotted suspense story, told with dazzling intelligence and wit. At the center of the novel is clever, deadpan Blue van Meer, who has a head full of literary, philosophical, scientific, and cinematic knowledge. But she could use some friends. Upon entering the elite St. Gallway School, she finds some—a clique of eccentrics known as the Bluebloods. One drowning and one hanging later, Blue finds herself puzzling out a byzantine murder mystery. Nabokov meets Donna Tartt (then invites the rest of the Western Canon to the party) in this novel—with visual aids drawn by the author—that has won over readers of all ages.