For three hundred years the travelling actors of Litonya roamed the land entertaining crowds, but secretly leaving devastation in their wake. Is Mina the only person with the power to stop them? In the ethereal otherworld of Tarya, Mina begins to master the rare, inexplicable powers attached to her gift for storytelling. She discovers she can touch dreams, influence the real world, and perhaps find out who is manipulating Tarya for dark purposes. In the waking world Mina is on the run, beset by divided loyalties between the travellers, and caught between two men she could love and a brother who desperately needs her help.

This book is about the childhood experiences of a Native American girl from a small East Coast Community.

When fifteen-year-old Christina Eudora Von Scholl learns that her family will leave their German homeland to seek freedom in Texas, her greatest sorrow is leaving behind her beloved grandmother. And so, in a series of letters, she takes “Oma” on this great adventure with her family . . . and takes us as readers. Sometimes the letters are dark with discouragement, for the Von Scholls find, as did many German-Texas families, that the Society for the Protection of German Emigrants, known as the Adelsverein, was unable to fulfill its promises of land, housing, horses, and farm implements. But they are Germans, determined and willing to work hard. More often these letters—and the text woven in between them—are bright with adventure, for Tina finds Texas an exciting, if puzzling, place. There are new customs to learn, new foods to eat, even while the family preserves its traditional German ways. Tina’s adventures include a run-in with a mountain lion, an exciting trip across Texas with her father to Sisterdale, and a frightening encounter with Lipan Indians. Her lessons in being an American are helped by Jeff, a young man who becomes part of the family when he undertakes to teach them to farm in Texas. Tina, in return, teaches Jeff to read and learns a lesson in love that is without nationality. Letters to Oma is a charming, informative novel that sweeps the reader back to a very particular time and place. And Tina Von Scholl is irresistible as correspondent and as heroine.

Madam Nancy Mae Webster is a successful black nightclub and restaurant owner during the 50s and 60s Jim-Crow South. Due to her heroin addiction and a heroin overdose her lifes story becomes the body of the story as it is told by the conscious of her incarcerated son, while he waits to see her in the waiting room at the hospital. Her white-like skin and her sons very black complexion complicate everything. The great differences in their complexions are the results of her being raped and left for dead by two black men when she is an innocent young farm girl in West Tennessee. The son, Joel Webster, is the hopeful protagonist of his own story, while he is the despised antagonist in the story of his mothers trouble-ridden life. The two dramatic tales have him as a convict visiting the hospital to see his dying mother, while guarded by two sets of alternating prison guards one good and the other one bad. He tries to escape from his own impending death from jailhouse hit men because he witnesses two guards beating a black inmate to death in his jail cell and they want him dead where he can't testify against them. His and his mothers world are split in two black and white worlds that create tension and friction between family members. There are the two uncles Tom and Pete that add suspense to his every thought as he recalls his dying mothers life from her innocent childhood to her reprehensible demise at forty-one years old. Joel Webster is born into a life of rejection, hatred, and violence because of his black skin and being the son of one of the two black men that raped his mother and his uncles had killed for doing it. After much painful recalling a beautiful black woman that looks white, and his mothers double life as she passes for white in a bigoted society, and the rich white man that she loves and he loves her, he meets Bobby Lucky. He tells a different side of Nancys life and his own life and his wife is ready to kick him out and his mother threatens to disinherit him from the familys fortune if he doesnt dump his Negro mistress. He repents and begs Joel for forgiveness for separating him from his mother when he is younger. He befriends Joel and works to help him get out of jail. He tells Joel everything that has happened to Nancy in the white world where she lives in a fine mansion with her heroin addiction and her servants that she struggles to conceal her true identity from while he is in reform school and jail. Joel is arrested for a robbery that he doesnt commit. Joels life story is told in the present time of the early 70s when the civil-right struggles are in full-bloom and hes in the protests. Drugs and riotous living invade the black community like a wave of cold air and he sees the devastating effects of it in many of those around him. Nancys best friend, Helen Bond, sheds many tears while Bobby Lucky tells of Nancys heroin addiction and her betrayal. Nancy only wants to become a schoolteacher and have a family but life gives her everything but what she wants. She befriends the wrong person and it destroys her. Helen Bond serves her heroin when she is at her lowest point or what she thinks is her lowest point until the heroin hooks her. Her grandma Tina has long been dead but her pain goes deep into her grave. Her black son is a paradox in her life and he is the only link to her true identity in her white-world existence and she evades him at a great cost to both of their lives. She doesnt want to work as a five-dollar-per-day maid any longer and she takes a job in a house of prostitution as a recruiter. She is soon able to give her son everything he wants but her love and he goes to the reform school to escape his torment on the streets from everyone that knows him because of what his mother does for a living. She meets and old acquaintance who is rich and white and madly in love with her. He takes her out of the whorehouse and sets her up with a nightclub and restaurant. Still her jealous fr

THE STORY: Working on a project for his high-school science class, Junior Rodrigues scans the night sky with his telescope, searching for comets and shooting stars while his shy teenage neighbor, Olivia Pena, stands dutifully by, hoping that he wil

Tina Perry often wonders how she got to this place in life. The only child of dysfunctional Holocaust concentration camp survivors, Tina learned early to have low expectations. Feeling unworthy of love or acceptance, and although she excels at almost everything, she thinks she is nothing special. When Tina moves to Los Angeles for a new job, she meets Artie Diaz, a charismatic but narcissistic pianist, whose family fled the Argentine Dirty War. Artie showers her with love and affection, something no one had ever done for her, and Tina falls in love. A quarter century and three children later, Tina flees with their teenaged daughter Sarah and drives across the country to start a new life away from his abuse. Tina copes with life and through her Jewish roots, she uncovers hidden dark secrets about her family’s past. She also wonders if she and her daughter will ever feel secure again, but when she discovers that Artie knows their location, she fears for her life and for Sarah's safety. Artie's sociopathy makes him capable of anything without remorse, and Tina realizes she could lose everything to this man ... again.

For generations, migration moved in one direction at a time: migrants to host countries, and money to families left behind. The Labor of Care argues that globalization has changed all that. Valerie Francisco-Menchavez spent five years alongside a group of working migrant mothers. Drawing on interviews and up-close collaboration with these women, Francisco-Menchavez looks at the sacrifices, emotional and material consequences, and recasting of roles that emerge from family separation. She pays particular attention to how technologies like Facebook, Skype, and recorded video open up transformative ways of bridging distances while still supporting traditional family dynamics. As she shows, migrants also build communities of care in their host countries. These chosen families provide an essential form of mutual support. What emerges is a fascinating portrait of today's transnational family—sundered, yet inexorably linked over the distances by timeless emotions and new forms of intimacy.