Sometimes it takes a little magic to mend a broken heart. Thomas Fenelli used to be a winner. Then he hit bottom and kept digging. His best friend’s a fish. His brother’s a philandering bully. And he’s haunted by a girl who ghosted him. He’s lost his career, his self-respect, and all hope of maintaining his sanity. He’s about to give up on life when he meets Noelia, a Spanish beauty who exists only within the walls of the Thomas Paine Cottage Museum in New Rochelle, New York. She leaps from the paintings and into his heart, restoring his self-confidence and teaching him how to move forward. When Noelia’s museum is marked for demolition, her existence is threatened. Now Thomas must struggle to rebuild his life while rescuing the spirit who saved him from himself.

A moving, poetic story about a whale in captivity who longs for the ocean . . . because whales don't belong in fishbowls, do they? Wednesday is a whale who lives in a fishbowl smack dab in the middle of a city--it's the only home she's ever known. Cars whizz around her and people hurry past; even the sun and moon circle above. But if she leaps high enough out of her bowl, Wednesday can see it: a calm bit of blue off in the distance. When a girl in a paisley dress tells Wednesday "You belong in the sea," the whale starts to wonder, what is the sea? Readers will cheer--and get all choked up-- when, one day, Wednesday leaps higher than ever before and sets in motion a breathtaking chain of events that will carry her to her rightful home. Touching, and ultimately uplifting, here is a story about a lonely creature longing to be free--and longing to find someone just like her. A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2018! A New York Public Library Best Book of 2018!

Pastors’ kids have it hard, feeling the weight of undue expectations and the observing world around them. In Surviving the Fishbowl, Catherine J. Stewart assembles an experienced group of authors to give advice for those feeling the pressure of life lived in the scrutinized house of a minister. With contributions from pastors and their wives, as well as from former pastors’ kids, this book gives sage advice for those navigating difficult waters. Whether you are pastor’s kid struggling to understanding your identity, dealing with troubling social pressures, or just wishing you could escape it all, read this book and see that these trying days are survivable and even attended with blessings you may not have considered before. Table of Contents: Foreword by David Strain Part 1: Laying the Foundation 1. Identity Crisis: PK or Child of the King?—Jasmine Holmes 2. Expectations: Who Sets the Standard?—Megan Hill 3. Count Your Blessings: Enjoying the Benefits of Being a PK—Joel and Mary Beeke 4. Friendships: The Glorious Gift of Extended Family—Terry and Emily Johnson 5. Loving the Church: Pressing on Through Family Highs and Lows—Tom and Donna Ascol Part 2: Sharks in the Bowl 6. Criticism: The Godly Response—Mike and Mae Milton 7. Loneliness: Choice or Inevitability?—Amanda Martin 8. Cultural Change: Adapting to New Surroundings—Carl and Catriona Trueman 9. Depression: The Dark Night of the Soul—Neil and Catherine Stewart 10. Rebel PK: The One that Got Away (Almost)—Ike Reeder 11. Financial Crisis: High Calling with a High Price—Daniel Wakefield

THE STORY: This is a fresh and heartfelt play about love, time and the infinite directions in which two lives can travel. Hope and Charles are a pair of lonely twenty-somethings about to end a supremely uninteresting first date. But just as they sa

A happily married woman's perfect life shatters when her husband turns up dead hundreds of miles away from where he should have been, and she suddenly discovers that there was a part of him she knew nothing about. Alice Dupont’s perfect marriage was a perfect lie. When her husband, Chris, dies in a car accident, far from where he should have been, Alice’s life falls apart. After the police close the case, she is left with more questions than answers. While learning to cope with her loss and her new identity as a single mother of two, Alice becomes obsessed with unraveling the mystery surrounding her husband’s death and decides to start her own investigation. Retracing her husband's last known whereabouts, she soon discovers clues that lead her to a small island near Nantucket. As she insinuates herself into the lives of the island’s inhabitants in an effort to discover what they knew about her husband, Alice finds herself increasingly involved in their private lives and comes to a disturbing realization: she has been transformed into a person she no longer recognizes. In seeking an answer to what her husband was doing before he died, Alice discovers not only a side of him she never knew, but sides of her own character she has never explored. Part mystery, part moving family drama, part psychological page-turner, Alice’s Island is a novel whose vivid characters hold the reader rapt right up until the final page.

When Maria Flook's fourteen-year-old sister Karen disappeared from their suburban home, the author was changed forever. My Sister Life maps the story of two castaways from American suburbia who, while apart from each other, live mysteriously parallel lives. With unrelenting realism and beguiling wit, Flook gives us an intimate account of her sister's life as a child prostitute, and of their coming of age in the 1960s--that surreal and wrenching moment of baby-boomer disenfranchisement, when the sexual revolution collided with the domestic fallout from the Vietnam War. From the ocean liners and Paris vacations of their refined upbringing to the gritty peepshows and adult theaters where they find jobs, the girls flee from a beautiful and tormented matriarch with secrets of her own. Her missing sister becomes Flook's secret heroine--the sole example to follow in her journey into womanhood. The sisters live in trailer parks. They are faced with sexual assault, car thefts, and petty crimes with unpredictable men. Escaping from an abusive Vietnam vet, Karen takes her toddler to join her sister, who is herself raising a baby on her own; it is the first time they are under the same roof since their childhood. Their unorthodox reunion allows the sisters to forge a life-saving bond. My Sister Life moves beyond biography or memoir to give us an astonishing vision of an American family--an authentic testimony to the defiant, undaunted faith between two sisters who connect after years apart.