When the Bride finally learns to say No… Outing her cheating fiancé in the middle of her marriage ceremony was not how Deanne Harrison planned to spend her day as a bride. Worse, when the evening ends with Deanne sharing a perfect kiss with the handsome stranger, Sean. Since that fateful day, Deanne’s life has become a disaster. When all she wants is to ride out her Honeymoon of Hurt and hide in her cotton-wool-world of sameness, free from men forever. That is until Sean tracks her down…

Where witty complications and comedic chaos occurs ... "A fun weekend read." Goodreads. After shattering her fairytale romance in the middle of her own wedding ceremony, Deanne Harrison wants to hide from the world. Yet, Deanne is forced to deal with a bad boy issue; her big brother, the bridesmaids, and a freakish family intervention. Just when she thinks she's got it all together, Sean, a handsome stranger she'd deliciously kissed once, re-enters her world. More dating disasters are the last thing Deanne needs, until Sean discovers a secret saboteur is threatening to destroy Deanne. Can Deanne save the family business, break a family-curse, all while trying to avoid Sean, along with her big brother and the rest of the backyard botherers? If you enjoy quirky characters and witty complications that tests the routines of daily life, you'll love AVOIDING THE PITY PARTY, where surviving the break-up blues in suburbia is filled with inspirational heartfelt fun!

When liberals don't have reason, authority, or the American people on their side, they turn to the one thing they never run out of: Pity. For decades, conservatives have chafed at being called "heartless" and "uncaring" by liberals who maintain that our essential choice as a nation is between the politics of kindness and the politics of cruelty. In The Pity Party, political scientist William Voegeli turns the tables on this argument, making the case that "compassion" is neither the essence of personal virtue nor the ultimate purpose of government. Over the years, liberals have built a remarkable edifice of government programs that are justified by appeals to compassion: Head Start, immigration reform, gun control, affirmative action, and entitlements, to name only some. As Voegeli amply demonstrates, the liberals who promote these massive programs are weirdly indifferent as to whether they succeed. Instead, when the problems they are intended to solve fail to disappear, liberals double down, calling for yet more programs and ever greater expenditures in the name of "compassion." Meanwhile, conservatives who challenge the effectiveness of these programs are slandered as "heartless right-wingers." Yet rather than challenge this tendentious liberal argument, the many conservatives it intimidates feel it necessary to insist that they really do "care." However, liberal compassion's good intentions consistently fail to translate into good results. Voegeli walks the reader through a plethora of programs that have become battlefields between conservatives fighting for more efficiency and liberals fighting for more budget-busting federal programs to address an ever-expanding catalog of social ills. Along the way, he explains the underpinnings of the liberal philosophy that reinforce this misapplied ideal and shows why today's self-described compassionate liberals are ultimately unfit to govern.

This acclaimed graphic memoir that Kirkus calls “cathartic and uplifting” is the tale of losing a parent and what it feels like to grieve and to move forward. “I can’t recommend this kind, funny, and poignant memoir enough. It’s an intimate, life-affirming story of resilience that feels like a good friend.” —Mari Andrew, author of Am I There Yet? Tyler Feder had just white-knuckled her way through her first year of college when her super cool mom was diagnosed with late-stage cancer. Now, with a decade of grief and nervous laughter under her belt, Tyler shares the story of that gut-wrenching, heart-pounding, extremely awkward time in her life—from her mom’s first oncology appointment to her funeral through the beginning of facing reality as a motherless daughter. She shares the sting of loss that never goes away, the uncomfortable post-death firsts, and the deep-down, hard-to-talk-about feelings of the grieving process. Dancing at the Pity Party is a frank and refreshingly funny look at what it’s like to grieve—for anyone struggling with loss who just wants someone to get it.

Packed with research, insights, and illuminating (and often funny) examples from Paris’s own divorce experience, this book is a “practical and reassuring guide to parting well.” —Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project Engaging and revolutionary, filled with wit, searing honesty, and intimate interviews, Splitopia is a call for a saner, more civil kind of divorce. As Paris reveals, divorce has improved dramatically in recent decades due to changes in laws and family structures, advances in psychology and child development, and a new understanding of the importance of the father. Positive psychology expert and author of Happier, Tal Ben-Shahar, writes that Paris’s “personal insights, stories, and research” create “a smart and interesting guide that can be extremely helpful for those going through divorce.” Reading this book can be the difference between an expensive, ugly battle and a decent divorce, between children sucked under by conflict or happy, healthy kids. This is “a compelling case that it’s high time for a new definition of Happily Ever After—for everyone” (Brigid Schulte, author of Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time).

Christine Whitman offers an insider’s view of the corrosive effects—on the party and the country as a whole—of the rise of zealous conservatism. She tells many stories from the front lines of her battles with conservatives, as well as those of other moderate Republicans, and argues that the rise of this bullying faction—as opposed to being the voting juggernaut party leaders have considered it—has kept the Republican party from building a true voting majority. It has also, she argues, pushed the polarization of the electorate to an appalling extreme. Each chapter focuses on the key hot-button issues that were the most contentious battlegrounds between moderates and conservatives in 2005, and the areas where she thinks the conservatives took the party in the wrong direction: race relations, abortion rights, the environment, taxes, and international affairs. In each of these areas, Whitman tells stories about how in her own career she has been able to make great progress by taking a moderate approach—by finding what she calls “the productive middle,” such as in her unprecedented admission that racial profiling was indeed happening on New Jersey’s highways. This is a fascinating insider’s account of how politics happens on the ground and behind the closed doors, with a message that will speak powerfully to an all too silent moderate Republican majority.