When Abby has to choose between the best friend and the hot next-door-neighbor to accompany her to the debutante ball, unexpected feelings get in the way.

Pearl's Secret is a remarkable autobiography and family story that combines elements of history, investigative reporting, and personal narrative in a riveting, true-to-life mystery. In it, Neil Henry—a black professor of journalism and former award-winning correspondent for the Washington Post—sets out to piece together the murky details of his family's past. His search for the white branch of his family becomes a deeply personal odyssey, one in which Henry deploys all of his journalistic skills to uncover the paper trail that leads to blood relations who have lived for more than a century on the opposite side of the color line. At the same time Henry gives a powerful and vivid account of his black family's rise to success over the twentieth century. Throughout the course of this gripping story the author reflects on the part that racism and racial ignorance have played in his daily life—from his boyhood in largely white Seattle to his current role as a parent and educator in California. The contemporary debate over the significance of Thomas Jefferson's longtime romantic relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings, and recent DNA evidence that points to his role as the father of black descendants, have revealed the importance and volatility of the issue of dual-race legacies in American society. As Henry uncovers the dramatic history of his great-great-grandfather—a white English immigrant who fought as a Confederate officer in the Civil War, found success during Reconstruction as a Louisiana plantation owner, and enjoyed a long love affair with Henry's great-great-grandmother, a freed black slave—he grapples with an unsettling ambivalence about what he is trying to do. His straightforward, honest voice conveys both the pain and the exhilaration that his revelations bring him about himself, his family, and our society. In the book's stunning climax, the author finally meets his white kin, hears their own remarkable story of survival in America, and discovers a great deal about both the sting of racial prejudice as it is woven into the fabric of the nation, and his own proud identity as a teacher, father, and black American.

A modern day Beauty and the Beast tale about a white skinned pearl in a world of dark skinned coals.

One of the most popular storytellers of all time, V.C. Andrews (Flowers in the Attic, My Sweet Audrina) continues an engrossing saga of psychological suspense with this second book of the Landry Family series—soon to be a Lifetime movie! Fate has whisked Ruby away from a simple life in the Louisiana Bayou but her new riches bring more treachery than happiness in this unputdownable and darkly evocative novel. Even a year removed from living in the bayou, Ruby still wonders at the splendor of her family’s New Orleans mansion. She rejoices in the love of the father she had never known, even as true happiness remains as elusive as swamp mist. Her stepmother sneers at her backwater upbringing, and while discovering she has a twin sister should be a cause for joy, Gisselle has greeted Ruby with nothing but a bitter heart. When Ruby’s father chooses an idyllic boarding school for his daughters’ senior years, a fresh start with Gisselle seems possible. But Ruby’s kind isn’t welcome at Greenwood, and the legendarily strict headmistress plots with her stepmother to make life miserable. Worse, with her twin on a mission to break every school rule, Ruby is left to suffer the humiliating punishments. So when a terrible tragedy leaves Ruby alone in a world that never really wanted her, only her Cajun strength can give her daring escape plan any hope of success. The weather on the bayou was nothing compared to the storm about to tear through her family.

In June 1939, shortly before her eleventh birthday, Vera Gissing escaped from occupied Czechoslovakia, leaving behind her parents, family and friends, to spend six years in Britain.Throughout the war years Vera kept a diary, recording her day-to-day experiences, her longing for her parents, her hopes and prayers for the freedom of her country. By the time she returned to Prague to set up home with her aunt in 1945, she knew that both her parents had died - her mother in Belsen, her father on a death march. She came back to England in 1949 and has lived here ever since.The memories and emotions rekindled by a reunion of the Czech school in Wales where she was educated, encouraged Vera to go back to the diaries and letters from her parents that she had not touched for forty years, and in 'Pearls of Childhood' 'she provides a powerful and moving account of the life of one child growing up in extraordinary circumstances.

Enjoy a new treasury of New York Times Best-Selling Pearls Before Swine. In this treasury collection of Unsportsmanlike Conduct and Rat's Wars, the eclectic Pearls Before Swine cast play out their respective roles. Rat is the arrogant know-it-all, taking constant advantage of the naive and simple Pig, with wise and pedantic Goat looking on in detached disapproval. The incredibly inept Crocs still hold hopes of eating their Zeeba neighbors. Throw in cameo appearances by Guard Duck and Snuffles the Cat and you get the full tableau of Pearls comedy. Stephan's personal annotations lend insight and more humor to this Pearls Before Swine rendition.

In this fifth volume of the Yesterday's Faces series, Robert Sampson has selected a host of series characters who adventured throughout the world in the 1903-1930 pulps. Sparkling brightly among these characters are Terence O'Rourke, Captain Blood, and the ferocious Hurricane Williams. More characters include Peter the Brazen, in China, Sanders of the River, in Africa--and much, much more.