This enlightening guide uses meaningful text, extensive illustrations and imaginative graphics to make this novel clearer, livelier, and more easily understood than ordinary literature plot summaries. An unusual feature, "Mind Map" is a diagram that summarizes and interrelates the most important details about the book that students need to understand. Appropriate for middle and high school students.

    But the serene beauty of Lake Ophelia cannot heal Caroline's heart, which is still broken by the loss of her younger brother, who died when she was seventeen. And the tension between her and her mother still simmers. Only their neighbors, the husband and daughter of one of Caroline's childhood friends, seem able to penetrate her cool reserve, giving Caroline the courage to face her biggest fears-and dive headfirst into life.

    In 1972, windswept DeClare, Oklahoma, was consumed by the murder of a young mother, Gaylene Harjo, and the disappearance of her baby, Nicky Jack. When the child's pajama bottoms were discovered on the banks of Willow Creek, everyone feared that he, too, had been killed, although his body was never found.Nearly thirty years later, Nicky Jack mysteriously returns to DeClare, shocking the town and stirring up long-buried memories. But what he discovers about the night he vanished is more astonishing than he or anyone could have imagine. Piece by piece, what emerges is a story of dashed hopes, desperate love, and a secret that still cries out for justice...and redemption.

    . . Isabella McCoy, from the banks of the Chattahoochee River in Georgia, was as naïve as she was beautiful. Jacqueline Rousseau, the exotic New Orleans prostitute, was known for cruelly breaking men’s hearts while she emptied their pockets. Both with dark secrets of their own, running away from their pasts, to an uncertain future. Fate brought them together, and into the arms of the notorious cotton broker Jules McGinnis, who became both a husband and lover to them. Jealousy. Passion. Love. Murder. Now both women must overcome the truth of their tormented pasts and their unknown futures, as they face one of the most scandalous murder trials Georgia had ever seen.

    Young Jake Conner gets on a bus to visit his cousins in the Mississippi Delta. But when the body of an unknown man is found in the Mississippi River, Jake's summer vacation gets a little more adventurous as he and his cousins snoop around in a mystery that is better left to the grown-ups. "Jake Conner, protagonist and narrator of this coming of age novel, reminds me of Mattie in True Grit and Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird. Sharp eyes tempered with childhood simplicity." Delta Magazine "First time novelist, Paul H. Yarbrough, masterfully transports readers deep into the world of Mississippi Cotton, where life is not as simple as it seems." Julie Cantrell, editor, Southern Literary Review; author, Into the Free "Paul H. Yarbrough has painted wonderful images with his words. His writing brings back so many memories. Even if you didn't grow up in Mississippi, you will enjoy Mississippi Cotton." Mary Ann Mobley Collins Former Miss America, Miss Mississippi

    Sights Unseen shows the author at her most passionate and heartfelt best -- an unforgettable tale of unconditional love, and of a family's desperate search for normalcy in the midst of mental illness. It is a novel of rare poignancy, wit, and evocative power -- the story of the relationship between Hattie Barnes and her emotionally elusive mother, Maggie, known by their neighbors as "that Barnes woman with all the problems."This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

    They're on every artistic board and deeply involved in the community. She owns and operates a letterpress studio specializing in the handmade; he runs a digital magazine featuring all things southern gentlemen. The perfect juxtaposition of the old and the new, Eve and Cooper are the beautiful people. The lucky ones. And they have the wealth and name that comes from being part of an old Georgia family. But things may not be as good as they seem. Eve's sister, Willa, is staying with the family until she gets "back on her feet." Their daughter, Gwen, is all adolescent rebellion. And Cooper thinks Eve works too much. Still, the Morrison marriage is strong. After twenty-one years together, Eve and Cooper know each other. They count on each other. They know what to expect. But when Cooper and Willa are involved in a car accident, the questions surrounding the event bring the family close to breaking point. Sifting between the stories—what Cooper says, what Willa remembers, what the evidence indicates—Eve has to find out what really happened. And what she's going to do about it.A riveting story about the power of truth, The Stories we Tell will open your eyes and rearrange your heart.

    A woman returns to her West Virginia roots to resolve the ghosts of her childhood. In the tradition of Rebecca Wells, Sue Monk Kidd, Olive Ann Burns, and Dorothy Allison. TENDER GRACES by Kathryn Magendie is strong literary women s fiction written with exquisite style. The death of her troubled mother and memories of her abused grandmother lure a young woman back to the Appalachian hollow where she was born. Virginia Kate, the daughter of a beautiful mountain wild-child and a slick, Shakespeare-quoting salesman, relives her turbulent childhood and the pain of her mother s betrayals. Haunted by ghosts and buried family secrets, Virginia Kate struggles to reconcile three generations of her family s lost innocence.

    Fannie’s New Orleans house is like no place Ibby has ever been—and Fannie, who has a tendency to end up in the local asylum—is like no one she has ever met. Fortunately, Fannie’s black cook, Queenie, and her smart-mouthed daughter, Dollbaby, take it upon themselves to initiate Ibby into the ways of the South, both its grand traditions and its darkest secrets. For Fannie’s own family history is fraught with tragedy, hidden behind the closed rooms in her ornate Uptown mansion. It will take Ibby’s arrival to begin to unlock the mysteries there. And it will take Queenie and Dollbaby’s hard-won wisdom to show Ibby that family can sometimes be found in the least expected places. For fans of Saving CeeCee Honeycutt and The Help, Dollbaby brings to life the charm and unrest of 1960s New Orleans through the eyes of a young girl learning to understand race for the first time. By turns uplifting and funny, poignant and full of verve, Dollbaby is a novel readers will take to their hearts.A Top Ten Finalist for Best Historical Novel, Goodreads Choice Awards, and a LibraryReads and Okra PickA big-hearted coming-of-age debut set in civil rights-era New Orleans—a novel of Southern eccentricity and secrets

    Hungering to make a new kind of life for herself, she marries John Bayley, a man twice widowed, and begins a family amid a difficult and fiery union. Set in the fictional hamlet of Faith, North Carolina, Salt weaves together the lives of Anna's family and friends in a remarkably moving novel of exultation and despair, of grief and ghosts.

    Murder comes from those same dark places.One of Memphis' most seductive and notorious socialites has disappeared. She's either off on another of her drunken escapades or the disappearance is something much more frightening. What begins as an ordinary day's work for Detective Billy Able of the Memphis P.D. quickly grows into a high-level spider's web of tragedy, mystery, suspicion, passion, and sordid secrets--including a few of Billy's own.Along with Mercy Snow, the estranged sister of the missing socialite, Billy follows a twisted path of human frailty and corruption to disturbing truths that undermine everything he thought he knew about himself and the people he loves.

    Just ask Clare, who has willingly assumed the mantle while her career as a divorce coach thrives. Now she's preparing to open a permanent home for the retreats she leads, on a slice of breathtaking property on the Alabama coast owned by her mother-in-law. Make that former mother-in-law, a colorful eccentric who teaches Clare much about love and sacrifice and living freely. When Clare's marriage ends in tragedy, her work becomes the sole focus of her life. While Clare has no problem helping the hundreds of men and women who seek her advice to mend their broken hearts, healing her own is another matter entirely. Falling in love again is the last thing she wants.So when Lex -- a charismatic, charming, burly sea captain -- moves to town to run the marina, Clare insists they remain friends and nothing more. But even though she fights it, she begins to fall for him -- and then finds she has a rival, his estranged wife Annalee.A story infused with all the flavors, textures, and intrigues of a small Southern town, with a rich, resonant center, Queen of Broken Hearts is a bold step forward for Cassandra King.

    So when her husband gets the idea to uproot the family to run a quaint Vermont inn, Leelee is devastated…and her three best friends are outraged. But she's loved Baker Satterfield since the tenth grade, how can she not indulge his dream? Plus, the glossy photos of bright autumn trees and smiling children in ski suits push her over the edge…after all, how much trouble can it really be?But Leelee discovers pretty fast that there's a truckload of things nobody tells you about Vermont until you live there: such as mud season, vampire flies, and the danger of ice sheets careening off roofs. Not to mention when her beloved Yorkie decides to pick New Year's Eve to go to doggie heaven-she encounters one more New England oddity: frozen ground means you can't bury your dead in the winter. And that Yankee idiosyncrasy just won't do.The inn they've bought also has its host of problems: an odor that no amount of potpourri can erase, tacky décor, and a staff of peculiar Vermonters whose personalities are as unique as the hippopotamus collection gracing the fireplace mantle. The whole operation is managed by Helga, a stern German woman who takes special delight in bullying Leelee for her southern gentility. Needless to say, it doesn't take long for Leelee to start wondering when to drag out the moving boxes again.But when an unexpected hardship takes Leelee by surprise, she finds herself left alone with an inn to run, a mortgage to pay, and two daughters to raise. But this Southern belle won't be run out of town so easily. Drawing on the Southern grit and inner strength she didn't know she had, Leelee decides to turn around the Inn, her attitude and her life. In doing so, she makes friends with her neighbors, finds a little romance, and realizes there's a lot more in common with Vermont than she first thought.In this moving and comedic debut, Lisa Patton paints a hilarious portrait of life in Vermont as seen through the eyes of a southern belle readers won't soon forget. A charming fish-out-of-water tale of one woman who learns to stand up for herself-in sandals and snow boots-against the odds.

    Tate's parlor. Even now, summers and summers since, I can remember everything. I remember the day summer started.So begins Lee Smith's disarming first novel, written while she was an undergraduate at Hollins College and a winner in 1968 of the Book-of-the-Month Club Writing Fellowship Contest. The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed, set in a small southern town at midcentury, tells the story of nine-year-old Susan, for whom the first bright, carefree, promise-filled days of summer slowly evolve into a time of innocence lost and childhood illusions shattered. Susan's mother is vain and frivolous, her father loving but distracted, and her sister, several years her senior, is coping with the first stirrings of serious love. Susan's circle of young friends is joined for the summer by Eugene, the frail, strange nephew of a neighbor. As the months pass, Susan witnesses the disintegration of her parents' marriage and learns from Eugene the cruelty people sometimes resort to.Lyrical and fanciful in spite of its dark moments, The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed puts on ample display the remarkable talent that has made Lee Smith one of our most popular writers of fiction.

     (NOTE! THIS SERIES IS SWEET INSPIRATIONAL WITH A BIT HIGHER LEVEL OF ROMANTIC AND SPIRITUAL PASSION.) BOOK 1 — ISLE OF HOPE: UNFAILING LOVE (Award-winning novel named on Family Fiction magazine's list for "Top 15 Novels of 2015") She stole his heart. He stole her peace. Can hope steal their pain? At the age of eighteen, Lacey Carmichael was a wild girl bent on fun, promised to Jack O'Bryen, a straight-and-narrow pastor’s kid bent on the seminary. When her father kicks her out of the house, she runs away from Isle of Hope, turning her back on everything she loves. Now, eight years later, she’s back as a woman of faith, hoping to make amends to the father she defied, the boyfriend she deserted, and the best friend she denied. Only the bridges she’s burned are still smoldering, kindled by an adulterous affair by Jack’s pastor father that damaged his son’s faith. But can a turning of tables—and hearts—lead the way back to “hope” for them all? BOOK 2 — LOVE EVERLASTING He sets hearts on fire. She’s been burned by love. Can hope survive the flames of the past? School teacher by day, ghostwriter by night, sweet and shy Shannon O’Bryen doesn’t mind writing romance on the sly, but to live it? No, thank you, not since the man she loved turned out to be a player who broke both her heart and her spirit. Now focused more on her faith and her fiction, she vows the next time she falls in love, it will be safely—through the pages of a book. Dr. Sam Cunningham is a charismatic player who breaks hearts as regularly as he washes his pearl-white Corvette. Abandoned as a baby, Sam was an orphan shuffled through the foster-care system, bitterly driven to prove he is worthy of love—the kind that lasts forever. Once he learns Shannon is a romance writer, he enlists her help in winning back his ex-girlfriend. She teaches him about faith and the true definition of love, and he soon discovers he’s been seeking it in the wrong place all along—and with the wrong girl. But can he convince a woman who's been burned by love to open her eyes—and her heart—to a love everlasting? BOOK 3 — HIS STEADFAST LOVE She’s bent on fun. He’s bent on faith. Till true love bridges the gap. Cat O’Bryen is the prodigal daughter unhappy with God. First, the father with whom she reconciled dies of cancer and now her twin sister and best friend marries, leaving Cat at home with a newlywed mother, her new husband, and a little brother. But when Cat moves in with a roommate of questionable morals, her family is worried, certain she’s on a path that could damage her faith forever. Reluctant to get involved with a woman like the one who destroyed his life, ex-Navy SEAL Pastor Chase Griffin steers clear of the attraction he feels for Cat O’Bryen. Until her family begs him to take her under his wing, hoping he can draw her back into the fold. But when the draw she has on him proves too strong to resist, he must rely on the strength of God to offer a friendship as steady and strong as the God whose love is wooing her home.