When Marian DeCaro, aged 40, checked into the hospital to have a melon-sized tumor removed from her uterus, the doctors found behind it little Frank, desperate for attention. And thus begins the saga of a boy named Phyllis. This humorous, witty, often touching memoir about the trials and tribulations of growing up an only child, a little pudgy and gay from the get-go, in the aluminum-sided walls of Little Falls, New Jersey, offers an antidote to the angst-ridden gay memoir.

An Esquire Best Cookbooks of 2020 and a Washington Post Best Food Books of 2020 “In epigrammatic, nearly poetic diction, Grant . . . reminds us of how transformative the junctures where food and life collide can be.” —The New York Times Book Review “What a beautiful, rich, and poetic memoir this is . . . Like the best chefs, Phyllis Grant knows how to make a masterpiece from a few simple ingredients: truth, taste, poignancy, and love.” —Elizabeth Gilbert, author of City of Girls and Eat, Pray, Love Phyllis Grant’s Everything Is Under Control is a memoir about appetite as it comes, goes, and refocuses its object of desire. Grant’s story follows the sometimes smooth, sometimes jagged, always revealing contours of her life: from her days as a dancer struggling to find her place at Julliard, to her experiences in and out of four-star kitchens in New York City, to falling in love with her future husband and leaving the city after 9/11 for California, where her children are born. All the while, a sense of longing pulses in each stage as she moves through the headspace of a young woman longing to be sustained by a city into that of a mother now sustaining a family herself. Written with the transparency of a diarist, Everything Is Under Control is an unputdownable series of vignettes followed by tried-and-true recipes from Grant’s table—a heartrending yet unsentimental portrait of the highs and lows of young adulthood, motherhood, and a life in the kitchen.

Although she can predict the weather much better than the boys in her family, no one thinks that Phyllis the groundhog has a chance of replacing the aging Punxsutawney Phil when Groundhog Day's official groundhog retires.

Wally Hatford dreams of long lazy days far away from school and Caroline Malloy. But Wally, the best speller among the Hatford brothers, gets roped into helping them with a summer newspaper project that will earn the twins school credit. What does that get Wally? When he hears scratching noises coming from Oldakers’ bookstore cellar, Mr. Oldaker trusts him to keep a secret that could turn into a scoop for their newspaper. Wally worries that the secret may be too scary to keep to himself. What’s worse, the Malloy girls have horned in on the newspaper. If there’s one person Wally won’t spill his secret to, it’s nutty Caroline Malloy. No matter what it is!

Eleven-year-old Marty Preston loves to spend time up in the hills behind his home near Friendly, West Virginia. Sometimes he takes his .22 rifle to see what he can shoot, like some cans lined up on a rail fence. Other times he goes up early in the morning just to sit and watch the fox and deer. But one summer Sunday, Marty comes across something different on the road just past the old Shiloh schoolhouses -- a young beagle -- and the trouble begins. What do you do when a dog you suspect is being mistreated runs away and comes to you? When it is someone else's dog? When the man who owns him has a gun? This is Marty's problem, and he finds it is one he has to face alone. When his solution gets too big for him to handle, things become more frightening still. Marty puts his courage on the line, and discovers in the process that it is not always easy to separate right from wrong. Sometimes, however, you do almost anything to save a dog.

It isn't Alice and Patrick anymore; it's simply Alice, and much to her surprise, Alice is finding that's okay. In fact, working on the school play and becoming increasingly involved in the newspaper have Alice so busy she doesn't have much time for her best friends Pamela and Elizabeth—and they resent it. And if Alice ever needed friends, she needs them now. She's got a secret e-mail admirer she's not sure how to handle. Her brother, Lester, is plunging headlong into a risky romance with a professor. And her new friend, Faith, seems unable to break free of an abusive relationship with her boyfriend. It's not simple being simply Alice.

Chronicling the life of a broken child, we begin before her birth, looking at the circumstances of her parent's marriage, and an insight into why and how a child could be so horribly abused without intervention from Social Services or the Montreal police - a force that consisted of her family members, one of which became Chief of the Montreal Police Force. Throughout childhood, an endless cycle of sexual abuse from multiple abusers-included her mother, a devout Christian. Using God as a weapon, she would terrify Phyllis, and her siblings into submission. Food and heating were often scarce in the family house, and the children would improvise to survive. Phyllis's mother was diagnosed with severe schizophrenia and was routinely institutionalised, leaving the children to be placed into the foster care system. That did not end the abuse, and often the foster homes were more hellish than their home life. Phyllis recounts her perilous path through life to present day in this gripping true story of her undying courage. From a helpless child to a troubled teen, Phyllis was not given the life skills to make good decisions and ended up seeking love in all the wrong places. But a casual trip and her path to God would change her life - forever.