Wren has tried to shelter her only son from the tumult of the world. Now she's about to find sanctuary . . . in the last place she ever expected. In tiny Cottage Cover, on the coast of Maine, Wren Evans is raising her gifted son, Charlie. A single mom, she's fought hard to give Charlie a stable, secure home life. When a prestigious music academy in Boston expresses interest in Charlie's talent, Wren is willing to move them again to make his dreams come true. But Wren doesn't know that Charlie has been praying for her. And the answer to her son's prayers will change both of their lives. As Wren plans their move to Boston, life in Maine begins to fall apart. Her job is threatened with budget cuts, and Wren's grandmother, Ruth, arrives unannounced, with an outlandish request. Ruth wants the family gathered together one last time, at the summer home where, years before, an accident shattered Wren's peaceful childhood. In the tumult, Wren finds a friend in a handsome, kind-hearted local, Paul Callahan. When the family gathers in Cottage Cover, old wounds will be healed, new love will blossom, and the innocent prayers of a child will be answered in a most unexpected way.

Can love rise from the ashes...of murder? When Kate O’Donnell runs into her old college sweetheart, Ed Huntington at a U2 concert, the last thing she expects to be dealing with is murder. Ed’s date is found dead and not only is he the prime suspect, but he unwittingly gets Kate involved as a potential accessory. Kate’s always loved a good puzzle and she’s discovering she still has feelings for Ed. She can’t let him go to prison for something she knows he’s incapable of doing. Their love is rekindling as they try to find the real culprit...but will the killer find them first?

While war rages in Europe, Lydia Eldredge fights a different kind of battle, seeking safety for her young son, Nicky. A constant threat comes from Nicky's drug-addicted father, who wants the boy and seems willing to do whatever it takes to get him.

Before Wren was a mother humming lullabies, she was a lonely daughter aching for unconditional love. Wren Evans is an ordinary mother parenting an extraordinary child. Charlie and Wren share an incredible bond--forged in the fire of a single-parent home. Their intimacy insulates them from the outside world. And Wren will do anything for Charlie, even if it means uprooting their little family yet again to expose him to the best musical training. But Charlie has a deep desire of his own. With the earnest belief only found in children, Charlie goes to his heavenly Father with a request: "God, please make my mom happy again." The answer to his prayer comes soon and unexpectedly with the fulfillment of a promise made long, long ago.

Jeremiah Hatcher witnessed war's atrocities while serving as a missionary in Poland. No one knew of his secret missions to hide Jewish children on Red Cross ships, sending them to homes in New York. The childhood bout of polio that made Jeremiah a cripple and weakened his heart forced him to leave Poland earlier than he wanted, and now he's being sent to a small church in the hills of Arkansas to fill in for the minister while the man recovers from an operation.

Matthew knows that this summer is going to be the worst ever. His best friend Kyle is gone, his younger brother Mark has surpassed him in size and athletic ability, and his mother is pregnant for the fifth time. The eldest home-schooled son of a preacher, Matthew plans to bury himself in books about the speed of light and Einstein's Theory of Relativity to see if he can prove his own theory about the dilation of time. Instead, he befriends Dinah, a homeless teenager seeking refuge at the library. Although from very different backgrounds, Matthew and Dinah come to realize that they have a great deal in common--their love for music and for cans of olives and potato chips found in a supermarket dumpster that are just past the sell-by date... and maybe even for each other. Matthew struggles with his feelings for his own family as he helps Dinah avoid Child Welfare. And in the process, Dinah helps him discover that even the smallest acts of kindness can make a very big difference.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, and for decades thereafter, Oregon had the second largest Chinese population in the United States. In terms of geographical coverage, Portland�s two Chinatowns (one an urban area of brick commercial structures, one a vegetable-gardening community of shanty dwellings) were the largest in all of North America. Marie Rose Wong chronicles the history of Portland�s Chinatowns from their early beginnings in the 1850s until the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in the 1940s, drawing on exhaustive primary material from the National Archives, including more than six thousand individual immigration files, census manuscripts, letters, and newspaper accounts. She examines both the enforcement of Exclusion Laws in the United States and the means by which Chinese immigrants gained illegal entry into the country. The spatial and ethnic makeup of the combined "Old Chinatown" afforded much more contact and accommodation between Chinese and non-Chinese people than is usually assumed to have occurred in Portland, and than actually may have occurred elsewhere. Sweet Cakes, Long Journey explores the contributions that Oregon�s leaders and laws had on the development of Chinese American community life, and the role that the early Chinese immigrants played in determining their own community destiny and the development of their Chinatown in its urban form and vernacular architectural expression. Sweet Cakes, Long Journey is an original and notable addition to the history of Portland and to the field of Asian American studies.