” . . . I was careful to withhold the deep core of my being, my place in my mother that would have shattered if she had learned of my father’s betrayal. I didn’t realize—until this earthquake, until today—that my withholding was a worse kind of betrayal, a betrayal of the self. ” [218] In an

The 2010 Bancroft Prizes were announced yesterday by Columbia University, and I'm completely delighted that Woody Holton's Abigail Adams was one of the three books honored with the prize. The other titles are Linda Gordon's Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits and Margaret Jacobs' White Mother to a Dark Race. Congratulations!

by Jonathon Scott Fuqua Fiction, 2008 Bancroft Press, hardback, 305 p. From the front flap: Puttnam Douglas Steward isn’t having an identity crisis – he is one. To his father Carl, he’s a disappointment, and has been since the day he came home from the hospital. To his mother, he’s “Mama’s Boy,” and will forever be nothing less and nothing more. The Army thinks he’s a hero, having ...

It is New Year’s Eve, a time for fresh beginnings – but for each member of the fragmenting Haywood family, this night could mark the end. With mother Stella battling depression and father Philip determined to escape, eleven-year-old Zachary and his teenage sister Nicola have nowhere to turn when confronted by their own worst fears.

About the Book: A mother who cannot face her future. A daughter who cannot escape her past. Lady Elisabeth Kerr is a keeper of secrets. A Highlander by birth and a Lowlander by marriage, she honors the auld ways, even as doubts and fears stir deep within her. Her husband, Lord Donald, has secrets of his own, well hidden from the household, yet whispered among the town gossips. His mother, the dowa...

Bad Queen by Carolyn Meyer. 2010. [April 2010] Harcourt. 420 pages. The empress, my mother, studied me as if I were an unusual creature she'd thought of acquiring for the palace menagerie. I shivered under her critical gaze. It was like being bathed in snow. I was not disappointed in Carolyn Meyer's latest book. This historical novel is based on the rise and fall of Marie Antoinette. It ...

Melissa's father passed away when she was in seventh grade. They were close and his struggle with cancer and resulting death has left her with a lot to deal with. She doesn't relate as well to her mother and her sister is very different from her as well--popular and beautiful and interested in beauty pageants. Add to that, her lifelong best friend, Ryan, has sort of turned into someone s...

” We hardly spoke at all to each other about Mother. She was everyone’s secret. Even Tom rarely mentioned her and only occasionally cried for her now. I looked around the cellar for other signs, but there was nothing. [7; 98] Moleskine Guy is now officially weirded out, or spooked out by Ian McEwan. Unlike The

Fiction - hardcover; Harper Collins; 464 pages; 2009. Review copy courtesy of the publisher. Author Lionel Shriver never shies away from exploring big moral questions in her writing. In her Orange Prize-winning novel We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003) she examined the nature versus nurture debate and posed one of the most alarming questions it is possible to pose: should a mother be blamed if her ...

Synopsis Kyoto 1978. Fourteen-year-old Sarah Rexford feels like an outsider when she returns to Japan for the first time in five years, to stay with her mother's family. As Sarah begins to reacquaint herself with her relatives and learn more about the culture she came from, she discovers a secret that stretches across three generations, its presence looming over the family home. She quickly learns...