Stacey doesn’t want to merely fit in. She is seeking a special place under the sun. Eighteen-year old Stacey is deeply shaken when her father passes away. Struggling to come to terms with this loss and her mother’s remarriage, she writes heart touching letters to her dear daddy, recounting everyday happenings and wishing he was by her side through all the good and the bad times. Stacey’s candid and emotional reflections bring to light the insecurities of adolescents, the expectations of society, the adventures with her friends, the close bond she shares with her little sister and elder stepbrother, and her awkward relationship with her stepdad. Written in an epistolary format, Finding My Special Place is a poignant revelation of the mind of a teenager who stands her ground in an opinionated world.

DOES FITTING IN HAVE TO MEAN SELLING OUT? In October 1975, while most teens are worried about their Happy Days Halloween costumes, Tiphanie Jayne Baker has bigger problems. Her parents have just decided to uproot the family to the ritzy suburb of Brent Hills, Colorado, and now she's the only Black girl at a high school full of Barbies. But the longer Tiphanie stays in her new neighborhood, the more her ties to her old community start to fray. Now that nowhere feels like home, exactly where does she belong?

My Special Place Today is a continuation of “My Special Place.” From a small girl growing up in a family where there is no unity between parents, and children or between sisters and brothers. This young girl learns many of life’s lessons that take her from the innocence of a child into her adult years where she struggles to make her life in to something that matters. Does she deem herself unfit to be a loving daughter, mother, and wife. Yet throughout her life she struggles to understand the spirituality of her faith. Through her faith in God she reaches out to people of all kinds, the sick, the healthy, the intelligent, and also the happy and the sad. We come to know Deanne as a woman who has been exposed to mental illness and through all her trials we read her story of how she learns to open up herself to those who can learn from her experiences. Her journeys are heart wrenching and truthful with the subtlety of human emotion.

From acclaimed, New York Times best-selling author Mary Roach comes the complete collection of her “My Planet” articles published in Reader’s Digest. She was a hit columnist in the magazine, and this book features the articles she wrote in that time. Insightful and hilarious, Mary explores the ins and outs of the modern world: marriage, friends, family, food, technology, customer service, dental floss, and ants—she leaves no element of the American experience unchecked for its inherent paradoxes, pleasures, and foibles. On Cleanliness: Ed has crud vision, and I don’t. I don’t notice filth. Ed sees it everywhere. I am reasonably convinced that Ed can actually see bacteria. . . . He confessed he didn’t like me using his bathrobe because I’d wear it while sitting on the toilet. “It’s not like it goes in the water,” I protested, though if you counted the sash as part of the robe, this wasn’t strictly true. On the Internet: The Internet is a boon for hypochondriacs like me. Right now, for instance, I’m feeling a shooting pain on the side of my neck. A Web search produces five matches, the first three for a condition called Arnold-Chiari Malformation. While my husband, Ed, reads over my shoulder, I recite symptoms from the list. “‘General clumsiness’ and ‘general imbalance,’” I say, as though announcing arrivals at the Marine Corps Ball. “‘Difficulty driving,’ ‘lack of taste,’ ‘difficulty feeling feet on ground.’” “Those aren’t symptoms,” says Ed. “Those are your character flaws.” On Fashion: My husband recently made me try on a bikini. A bikini is not so much a garment as a cloth-based reminder that your parts have been migrating all these years. My waist, I realized that day in the dressing room, has completely disappeared beneath my rib cage, which now rests directly on my hips. I’m exhibiting continental drift in reverse. On Eating Healthy: So Ed and I were eating a lot of vegetables. Vegetables on pasta, vegetables on rice. This was extremely healthy, until you got to the part where Ed and I are found in the kitchen at 10 p.m., feeding on Froot Loops and tubes of cookie dough.

“My Special Place” is a story of a young girl living in a world of naivety in a deeply dysfunctional family from Massachusetts. As she grows she does not understand the realities of life and soon she finds these realities shattering her unawareness of what life has to offer. The story takes you through her younger years to her developmental years as a teenager and into adulthood searching her life for the meaning of family love. This young girl is a story told about my life as I remember it to be. I share myself with the reader in hopes that they may see a piece of themselves at a time in their own life when these unseen factors made them the person they are today.

New Yorker writer and author of The Library Book takes readers on a series of remarkable journeys in this uniquely witty, sophisticated, and far-flung travel book. In this irresistible collection of adventures far and near, Orlean conducts a tour of the world via its subcultures, from the heart of the African music scene in Paris to the World Taxidermy Championships in Springfield, Illinois—and even into her own apartment, where she imagines a very famous houseguest taking advantage of her hospitality. With Orlean as guide, lucky readers partake in all manner of armchair activity. They will climb Mt. Fuji and experience a hike most intrepid Japanese have never attempted; play ball with Cuba’s Little Leaguers, promising young athletes born in a country where baseball and politics are inextricably intertwined; trawl Icelandic waters with Keiko, everyone’s favorite whale as he tries to make it on his own; stay awhile in Midland, Texas, hometown of George W. Bush, a place where oil time is the only time that matters; explore the halls of a New York City school so troubled it’s known as “Horror High”; and stalk caged tigers in Jackson, New Jersey, a suburban town with one of the highest concentrations of tigers per square mile anywhere in the world. Vivid, humorous, unconventional, and incomparably entertaining, Susan Orlean’s writings for The New Yorker have delighted readers for over a decade. My Kind of Place is an inimitable treat by one of America’s premier literary journalists.

She’s been described by many as a rising star in the Conservative movement, but how did she get here? And more importantly, did she ever plan to? In Finding My Place, Elizabeth takes us back to the beginning. As the daughter of immigrants and a proud religious Jew, Elizabeth dives into the core of what drives her: the sacrifices of her parents and grandparents and all that they had to endure to make sure that she had the opportunity to live the American dream. With an emphasis on her faith and her upbringing, where she pinpoints the lessons and moments that she knew would dictate her future, Elizabeth takes us on a journey that started long before she was even born. From heartbreak and injury, to triumph and recognition, to her start as a figure skater, a writer, a model, and eventually a political activist, Elizabeth takes us along on her journey of finding her place in the world of sports, fashion, Judaism, politics, and so much more. Finding My Place is the behind-the-scenes look at everything she has yet to tell the world.