She never knew her biological father, and while her mother and stepfather were loving parents, the situation was sometimes chaotic. While still a teenager, she met the love of her life. They were wed at 20, and the first of three children followed shortly. Jetté Knox finally had the stability she craved--or so it seemed. Their middle child struggled with depression and avoided school. The author was unprepared when the child she knew as her son came out as transgender at the age of eleven. Jetté Knox became an ardent advocate for trans rights.For many years, the author had coped with her spouse's moodiness, but that chronic unhappiness was taking a toll on their marriage. A little over a year after their child came out, her partner also came out as transgender. Knowing better than most what would lie ahead, Jetté Knox searched for positive examples of marriages surviving transition. When she found no role models, she determined that her family would become one.The shift was challenging, but slowly the family members noticed that they were becoming happier and more united. Love Lives Here is a story of transition, frustration, support, acceptance, and, of course, love.

    The quints were very much part of their era -- the era of the soap opera and the movie with the happy ending, where people were convinced that money could solve all problems.This book is about the miracle that first turned into a melodrama and later into a tragedy. It is a book about well-meaning people -- politicians, medical experts, civil servants, and ordinary men and women -- who did all the wrong things for all the right reasons. It is also a book about media exploitation -- the manufacture by press and radio of Villains and Heroes.The birth of five identical baby girls to a young farm-wife in the backwoods of nothern Ontario in May 1934 was a genuine miracle -- only the third such recorded birth in history. Despite the fertility drugs of a later era, none have been recorded since. For these five children came from a single egg; it was almost impossible to tell them apart. Until that time no quintuplets, fraternal or identical, had lived for more than a few days. But the five Dionne girls -- Yvonne, Annette, Cecile, Emilie, and Marie -- grew to adulthood. For the first nine years of their lives, they lived a goldfish-bowl existence, separated from their parents and siblings and on exhibit daily to millions who came from the far corners of the earth to see them. At their peak they represented a five -hundred-million-dollar asset to the province of Ontario.In this book Pierre Burton tells the story of the Dionnes against the background of their time, providing much new information from government archives and from eyewitness accounts. He chronicles the struggle between Olivia Dionne, the babies' father, and Allan Roy Dafoe, the man who attended at their birth and became the best-known doctor in the world. They story moves from the schists and gneisses of the Canadian Shield to the new nightclubs of New York, where Dafoe was given a Lindbergh-like treatment, and to Chicago, where the Dionne parents thrust onto a vaudeville stage. In a final chapter, the author describes the breach that occurred within the family and looks at the three surviving quintuplets as they are today, hidden from the glare of publicity -- two separated from their husbands with almost all the money from the million-dollar trust fund gone, and the third a semi-recluse.Like the Terraplane and the Hupmobile, the dime chain-letter and the double-dip ice cream cone, the National Barn Dance and the Fred Allen Show, the soup kitchen and the relief camps, the quints belong to another era -- an era that lives again in this book, which the author fitting subtitles A Thirties Melodrama.

    Born in a small town in Nova Scotia to a mother who begins yelling at him the moment he is born and a father who keeps his own counsel, Buck imbibes fear and insecurity like other kids guzzle milk. Hobbled by his fears and demons, Buck almost disappears into the “evil in the woods” that lurks just beyond the town's border . . . until he is saved by three gifts: baseball, romantic love and music. His epic journey­­—full of diversions, coincidences, and larger-than-life characters—out of the darkness of his suicide-plagued childhood and into the bright wide world begins with a killer pitching arm (Buck almost makes it to the pros) and continues with his transformation into hip hop artist Buck 65. Along the way, Buck develops into a hopeless romantic and an obsessively creative, shape-shifting man who both fears life and dives into it with abandon. Wicked and Weird is a lively, sometimes shocking portrait of a life lived on the edge, by turns funny and heartbreaking.

    This first book by Rae (who uses "they" as a pronoun) is a candid, powerful story about a young person growing up queer in a strict Pentecostal family in rural Canada.The narrator attends church events and Billy Graham rallies faithfully with their family before discovering the music that becomes their salvation and means of escape. As their father's schizophrenia causes their parents' marriage to unravel, the narrator finds solace and safety in the company of their siblings, in their nascent feelings for a girl at school, and in their growing awareness that they are not the person their parents think they are. With a heart as big as the prairie sky, this is a quietly devastating, heart-wrenching coming-of-age book about escaping dogma, surviving abuse, finding love, and risking everything for acceptance.Rae Spoon lives in Montreal, Quebec.

    A series of minority governments, and endless Quebec referendums (designed to lose narrowly, to keep the money coming) have left Canada almost ungovernable. When the Governor General resigns in disgrace and the House of Windsor implodes in London, a media baron launches the idea of a Canadian king or queen elected by lottery.It starts as a joke — except that the lucky winner, King John, a bright and charismatic guy from Toronto, knows exactly what people want. Soon Quebec is gone, while Toronto’s surprise bid to leave Canada is averted by shifting his official residence, the new seat of power, to the Toronto waterfront. Many good things happen, and the politicians go along for the ride. And the blockades of Native lands are ended for good, after John is heroically wounded keeping the peace at risk to his life.His popularity soars and Canadian morale soars with it. Soon the rest of the world is taking notice of this model leader. In the United States, the blue states look enviously northward. Then Canada’s king, ignoring assassination threats, goes on a formal visit to Washington. . .From the Hardcover edition.