When unexpected grief brings two families together, how do they start their journey to healing? Join Michael and Gina Spehn--bestselling authors and founders of the New Day Foundation--as they tell their story of resilience, remembrance, and reliance on their shared faith. Matt Kell and Cathy Spehn had known each other since grade school. As adults, they each got married, lived in their hometown, and attended the same church. Their kids even attended school together. Matt died at home on Christmas Day after a three-year battle with cancer, leaving behind his wife, Gina, and two young boys. After attending Matt's inspirational funeral and reaching out to Gina with offers of support, Cathy was diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer. She died only 17 days later, leaving behind her husband, Michael, and three young children. In her final hours, Cathy instructed Michael to call Gina Kell. The Color of Rain illuminates the stepping stones of loss and healing that ultimately led to a joyful new life for Michael, Gina, and their five children. Their path to becoming a modern-day Brady Bunch was paved with grief, laughter, and the willingness to be restored to a new and even better life despite the inevitable resistance they faced. As you learn more about Michael and Gina's story, you'll learn: The importance of keeping God at the center of your marriage How they navigated becoming a blended family The life-changing power of faith, even on your darkest days As their dual first-person narrative reveals what it is like to walk through loss and love simultaneously, you'll have an intimate look at how Michael and Gina lived, lost, and ultimately persevered through extraordinary circumstances. Praise for The Color of Rain: "The Color of Rain is a testament to God's restoration and grace. Even in our suffering, there is beauty. It rarely makes sense, but it's always true: 'He makes all things beautiful, in His time.'" --Katie Davis, New York Times bestselling author of Kisses from Katie "Michael and Gina Spehn's The Color of Rain is not only an instant bestseller but also an instant classic, certain to be pressed into the hands of hundreds of thousands of grieving men and women by their closest friends, for it is a book that is painfully honest about the depths of sorrow but also full of the joy of the hard path back from near despair. It is another reminder that God is there, however dark the day, and that he will comfort those who call on him." --Hugh Hewitt, bestselling author and radio host

This historical middle grade novel written in free verse, set against the backdrop of the desegregation battles that took place in Houston, Texas, in 1972, is about a young boy and his family dealing with loss and the revelation of dark family secrets. Ten-year-old Paulie Sanders hates his name because it also belonged to his daddy—his daddy who killed a fellow white man and then crashed his car. With his mama unable to cope, Paulie and his sister, Charlie, move in with their Aunt Bee and attend a new elementary school. But it’s 1972, and this new school puts them right in the middle of the Houston School District’s war on desegregation. Paulie soon begins to question everything. He hears his daddy’s crime was a race-related one; he killed a white man defending a black man, and when Paulie starts picking fights with a black boy at school, he must face his reasons for doing so. When dark family secrets are revealed, the way forward for everyone will change the way Paulie thinks about family forever. The Colors of the Rain is an authentic, heartbreaking portrait of loss and human connection during an era fraught with racial tension set in verse from debut author R. L. Toalson.

If there is one thing that seventeen-year-old Rain knows and knows well, it is survival. Caring for her little brother, Walker, who is "Touched," and losing the rest of her family to the same disease, Rain has long had to fend for herself on the bleak, dangerous streets of Earth City. When she looks to the stars, Rain sees escape and the only possible cure for Walker. And when a darkly handsome and mysterious captain named Johnny offers her passage to the Edge, Rain immediately boards his spaceship. Her only price: her "willingness." The Void cloaks many secrets, and Rain quickly discovers that Johnny's ship serves as host for an underground slave trade for the Touched . . . and a prostitution ring for Johnny's girls. With hair as red as the bracelet that indicates her status on the ship, the feeling of being a marked target is not helpful in Rain's quest to escape. Even worse, Rain is unsure if she will be able to pay the costs of love, family, hope, and self-preservation. With intergalactic twists and turns, Cori McCarthy's debut space thriller exists in an orbit of its own.

With the sun baking their Kenyan village for months and no rain sight, Lila learns the trick for making the rains come from her wise grandfather and so heads out to confront the sky in the hopes of saving everyone and everything in the land she loves.

In the tradition of celebrated wartime storytellers Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene, Tan Twan Eng's debut novel casts a powerful spell. The recipient of extraordinary acclaim from critics and the bookselling community, Tan Twan Eng's debut novel casts a powerful spell and has garnered comparisons to celebrated wartime storytellers Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene. Set during the tumult of World War II, on the lush Malayan island of Penang, The Gift of Rain tells a riveting and poignant tale about a young man caught in the tangle of wartime loyalties and deceits. In 1939, sixteen-year-old Philip Hutton-the half-Chinese, half-English youngest child of the head of one of Penang's great trading families-feels alienated from both the Chinese and British communities. He at last discovers a sense of belonging in his unexpected friendship with Hayato Endo, a Japanese diplomat. Philip proudly shows his new friend around his adored island, and in return Endo teaches him about Japanese language and culture and trains him in the art and discipline of aikido. But such knowledge comes at a terrible price. When the Japanese savagely invade Malaya, Philip realizes that his mentor and sensei-to whom he owes absolute loyalty-is a Japanese spy. Young Philip has been an unwitting traitor, and must now work in secret to save as many lives as possible, even as his own family is brought to its knees.

A Good Morning America Book Club Pick and New York Times Bestseller! From debut author Asha Lemmie, “a lovely, heartrending story about love and loss, prejudice and pain, and the sometimes dangerous, always durable ties that link a family together.” —Kristin Hannah, #1 New York Times–bestselling author of The Nightingale Kyoto, Japan, 1948. “Do not question. Do not fight. Do not resist.” Such is eight-year-old Noriko “Nori” Kamiza’s first lesson. She will not question why her mother abandoned her with only these final words. She will not fight her confinement to the attic of her grandparents’ imperial estate. And she will not resist the scalding chemical baths she receives daily to lighten her skin. The child of a married Japanese aristocrat and her African American GI lover, Nori is an outsider from birth. Her grandparents take her in, only to conceal her, fearful of a stain on the royal pedigree that they are desperate to uphold in a changing Japan. Obedient to a fault, Nori accepts her solitary life, despite her natural intellect and curiosity. But when chance brings her older half-brother, Akira, to the estate that is his inheritance and destiny, Nori finds in him an unlikely ally with whom she forms a powerful bond—a bond their formidable grandparents cannot allow and that will irrevocably change the lives they were always meant to lead. Because now that Nori has glimpsed a world in which perhaps there is a place for her after all, she is ready to fight to be a part of it—a battle that just might cost her everything. Spanning decades and continents, Fifty Words for Rain is a dazzling epic about the ties that bind, the ties that give you strength, and what it means to be free.

Annotation Both humorous and poignant, Arrows of Rain dramatises the relationship between an individual and the modern African state.