I’m a romance writer who moved around often as a child. Whenever I started a new school, I’d bring a book with me. Even now, I always run errands with a print book and my Kindle as I’m a writer, wife, and mother of four. Two of my children have medical conditions, and I’ve spent time in various doctor and hospital waiting rooms. I’ve taken books into MRI booths where I’d read while my daughter underwent an MRI. I gravitate toward emotional romances that keep me entertained while possessing a thread of humor or something unique about them so I can lose myself in their world anytime, anywhere.
I’m fortunate that I can read as a passenger on car trips or on an airplane, but I gravitate to shorter romances that I can read in one sitting while I’m traveling. For me, Tina Radcliffe is my go-to writer for these type of journeys.
I loved Lucy and Jackson’s story in Claiming Her Cowboy as Lucy is the director of Big Heart Ranch for orphans and Jackson is the attorney sent to evaluate the funding. Can he stay objective or will he fall for the beautiful woman who gives her all to the orphans on the ranch? I found myself reading at gas stops and caught up in the story as I got closer to my vacation destination. This was the perfect book while traveling: short, emotional, and thought-provoking.
Attorney Jackson Harris regularly goes toe-to-toe with the world’s toughest lawyers—but none of them compare to Lucy Maxwell. The feisty director of Oklahoma’s Big Heart Ranch for orphans is as stubborn as she is pretty. But Jack must stay focused; he’s only there to evaluate the ranch’s funding. Falling for Lucy and the sweet children she protects is out of the question. Though Lucy is determined to keep the ranch, she’s not about to give control to a city slicker—even a devastatingly good-looking one. But as they bump heads, Jack…
Having
just gone through the pandemic, I thought I was prepared to read a fictional
account of the 1918 Spanish influenza epidemic.
The author made this so much
more real and terrifying than what we went through this century. This is a
story that made me shudder, cry, hope, and go through myriad emotions. Well
worth the read!
In the fall of 1918, thirteen-year-old German immigrant Pia Lange longs to be far from Philadelphia's overcrowded slums and the anti-immigrant sentiment that compelled her father to enlist in the U.S. Army. But as her city celebrates the end of war, an even more urgent threat arrives: the Spanish flu. Funeral crepe and quarantine signs appear on doors as victims drop dead in the streets and desperate survivors wear white masks to ward off illness. When food runs out in the cramped tenement she calls home, Pia must venture alone into the quarantined city in search of supplies, leaving her…
I’m an author and human rights lawyer passionate about making reproductive rights accessible in law and in real life. My written work translates my legal cases into stories to engage readers in the fight to expand rights for all. My legal work leading the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine seeks to make medication abortion legally available in all 50 states, regardless of a person’s ability to pay for it. I have 2 daughters and am always looking to learn from their experience in an ever-changing world and from a diverse range of other women making decisions about whether, when, and whom to have and raise children.
A doctor colleague of mine said that this story made her decide to become an abortion provider.
This lively novel provides a wonderful time spent with an engaging and flawed doctor who is caring for children in an orphanage while also providing illegal abortion services for women in need. John Irving writes such engaging characters with humor about the heavy issues that play out in a bucolic New England town.
Today, as abortion is banned in so many parts of the US, and as we are having more honest conversations about the challenges of adoption, the book resonates even more. This book was made into a wonderful movie too–but the rule in our house is that you always have to read the book before you see the movie, no cheating.
'The reason Homer Wells kept his name was that he came back to St Cloud's so many times, after so many failed foster homes, that the orphanage was forced to acknowledge Homer's intention to make St Cloud's his home.'
Homer Wells' odyssey begins among the apple orchards of rural Maine. As the oldest unadopted child at St Cloud's orphanage, he strikes up a profound and unusual friendship with Wilbur Larch, the orphanage's founder - a man of rare compassion and an addiction to ether. What he learns from Wilbur takes him from his early apprenticeship in the orphanage surgery, to…
I tell stories for the page and the screen (and sometimes to bribe my kid to brush her teeth). The stories I tell have one thing in common – they transport the reader to another world. For me, building a new world starts with building a new character – a narrator with strong opinions and a complicated past that will shape how the reader experiences their world. We don't experience the real world objectively – no matter how hard we try, our past, our feelings, and even our bodies affect how we experience the world. That's why the worlds I build and the stories I tell are all filtered through the particular truth of a bold narrator.
Fireborne is the first book of a YA crossover fantasy series called The Aurelian Cycle trilogy.
The primary narrators – dragon riders Annie and Lee – are best friends born on opposite sides of a class uprising and civil war that ripped their lives apart. Annie and Lee’s world is complicated. There are no easy choices or untarnished heroes – including Annie and Lee.
By telling this story through two very different points of view, Munda forces us to draw our own conclusions about right and wrong. She doesn’t make it easy. I can’t promise you won’t throw the book across the room in outrage at least once, but you will chase after it and keep reading until the (not that bitter, I promise) end.
"Fireborne is everything I want in fantasy." -Rachel Hartman, New York Times bestselling author of Seraphina
Game of Thrones meets Red Rising in a debut young adult fantasy that's full of rivalry, romance . . . and dragons.
Annie and Lee were just children when a brutal revolution changed their world, giving everyone-even the lowborn-a chance to test into the governing class of dragonriders.
Now they are both rising stars in the new regime, despite backgrounds that couldn't be more different. Annie's lowborn family was executed by dragonfire, while Lee's aristocratic family was murdered by revolutionaries. Growing up in the…
I love reading crime but oh, it does annoy me when an otherwise competent sensible female detective insists on going into the lonely house to tackle the murderer without backup, and needs to be rescued by her male sidekick. Cass is the cool-in-a-crisis heroine we’d all like to be. Like her, I’m a solo sailor (I’ve lent her my yacht for the series) and I’d love to say I’ve learned to be quick-thinking, self-reliant, and prudent—the sea doesn’t forgive stupidity. I also live in a village where everyone sees the lifeboat going out, and having to be rescued would be the ultimate embarrassment.
Through Covid I revisited childhood favourites, and found I still loved this series. Cathy has grown up in a Birmingham orphanage, and the only clues to her identity are a locket with a portrait of a Highland lady and a torn luggage label. She escapes north, where she meets Ian and Sovra. They spend their time messing about in their boat on the loch or camping in a remote bothy. Their determination to help Cathy gets them all into trouble, but it’s Cathy’s own character that gives her the chance of a happy ending.
In this, the third Ian and Sovra story, the pair discover that life in Edinburgh can be as thrilling as life in their own Western Highlands. For there they meet Cathie, who's escaped from an orphanage. They smuggle her out to a secret hut on the coast, where, after her rides in lorries and rolls of carpet, she's only too delighted to enjoy the free outdoor life of her new friends, while Ian and Sovra do a spot of detection for her. How they solved the mystery and found that this land of mountains, lochs and white sand really was…
This is a real page-turner of a thriller. Think Mission Impossible meets The Equalizer, with the principal character using his deadly training to help people in trouble.
Well told and fast paced, this is the first in a series of excellent thrillers. Suspend your disbelief and hold on for a gripping ride.
'The page turned of the season' The Times ____________
'Do you need my help?' It was the first question he asked. They called him when they had nowhere else to turn.
As a boy Evan Smoak was taken from an orphanage. Raised and trained in a top secret programme, he was sent to bad places to do things the government denied ever happened.
Then he broke with the programme, using what he'd learned to vanish. Now he helps the desperate and deserving.
I’ve been a stay-at-home mom and author for the past decade, and during that time, I went through the stillbirth of my second baby. Grief taught me a lot about compassion, including the importance of being able to see the nuance of difficult subject matters. I learned it’s easy to theorize what to do in a situation until you're in that situation. For that reason, I love books in all sorts of genres that are layered with characters’ past griefs, impossible scenarios, and tensions regarding the choices they make. I picked five of my favorite books with a heart-ripping plot that sparks interesting discussion and leaves readers pondering, "What would I have done?"
This book is a split-time masterpiece, and I was equally invested in both timelines. It also taught me about historical, harrowing events surrounding the adoption industry in the United States that I didn’t know about before.
While the characters in this story face impossible scenarios, it’s also a lesson on the kind of grief that comes from horrific choices being made for a person that can’t be undone.
THE BLOCKBUSTER HIT—Over two million copies sold! A New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and Publishers Weekly Bestseller
“Poignant, engrossing.”—People • “Lisa Wingate takes an almost unthinkable chapter in our nation’s history and weaves a tale of enduring power.”—Paula McLain
Memphis, 1939. Twelve-year-old Rill Foss and her four younger siblings live a magical life aboard their family’s Mississippi River shantyboat. But when their father must rush their mother to the hospital one stormy night, Rill is left in charge—until strangers arrive in force. Wrenched from all that is familiar and thrown into a Tennessee Children’s Home Society orphanage,…
Currently a journalist, author, and adventure traveller, I am a former inner-city educator from Vancouver, BC, Canada with a Masters of Environmental Education degree, a Wilderness Leadership certificate, and a post-graduate certificate in Journalism. Solo and with my husband I have completed several major treks in Europe, Tibet, and Nepal including Mount Kailash kora, Everest Base Camp north (Tibet), The Annapurna Circuit and Base Camp, Everest Base Camp south (Nepal), Upper Mustang, the Manaslu Circuit and Tsum Valley for a total of about 800 km. I am currently training to complete Nepal’s Great Himalayan Trail (low route), 1,500 km from one end of Nepal to the other.
When Conor Grennan embarked on a journey around the globe, beginning with a three-month stint volunteering at an orphanage in civil war-torn Nepal, he never imagined the children were not actually orphans but had been taken from their families by child traffickers. He became attached to the rambunctious children and decided to reunite them with their parents. Little Princes illustrates how one person can make a huge difference in the lives of others. I noticed a percentage of book profits goes to Next Generation Nepal, the non-profit he founded to assist the children. I was hooked. That cemented my resolve to tell my story of solo travel and the village that asked for my help. I founded the non-profit Nepal One Day at a Time Society, wrote my first book (noted above), dedicated profits back to the children, and created a partnership with Kathmandu-based NGO Sambhav Nepal. Thanks, Connor!
The riveting story of Conor Grennan's year in Nepal reads like a cross between Into Thin Air and Three Cups of Tea. While volunteering at an orphanage, Conor discovers that the children are not orphans: they are trafficked. Despite the danger, Conor treks up dirt paths with photographs of the children, miraculously reuniting dozens of families.
It's 2006 and Nepal is a country torn apart by war, greed and corruption. Caught in the middle are the Nepalese children, snatched and sold into slavery, the kidnappers promising their families that they will be taken to a safe haven from where they…
A former special assistant to Maryland’s attorney general, I reluctantly gave up my three-decade legal career to tell two remarkable stories I was uniquely qualified to tell. Orphaned at age 11, I grew up in New Orleans as a foster care client of the Jewish Children’s Regional Service, the agency that formerly ran the orphanage in which my mentor, legal trailblazer Bessie Margolin, was raised. It was also the orphanage in which I would've been raised had it not closed in 1946. During the time I spent with Bessie Margolin she inspired me to both become her future biographerand go on to write the first comprehensive history of the nation’s earliest purpose-built Jewish orphanage.
Newberry Honor book winner Gail Carson Levine beautifully captures the life of eleven-year-old Dave, a troublemaking orphan in 1926, and his time in New York’s Hebrew Home for Boys.
When I years ago read this book to my son, who was abut Dave’s age, both of us became enthralled with not only the vivid description of the sometimes tough and rigid orphanage in the Lower East Side, but also Dave’s late-night adventures into the beautiful music and among the kind strangers and leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance.
Loosely based on her father’s time in New York’s Hebrew Orphan Asylum, Levine opens a window and lets us hear the Yiddish sounds and lets us peak into the early twentieth-century world of Jewish orphanages, while also celebrating the boisterous joys of friendship with unlikely partners.
If nobody wants him, that's fine.He'll just take care of himself.
When his father dies, Dave knows nothing will ever be thesame. And then it happens. Dave lands in an orphanage—the cold and strict Hebrew Home for Boys in Harlem—far from the life he knew on the Lower East Side. But he's not so worried. He knows he'll be okay. He always is. If it doesn't work out, he'll just leave, find a better place to stay. But it's not that simple.
Outside the gates of the orphanage, the nighttime streets of Harlem buzz with jazz musicians and swindlers; exclusive…
I was a late reader. I was, in fact, forcefully against reading. You’d have had to drag me by my ear to get me anywhere near a book. I was dyslexic, suffered with Irlen syndrome, and detested the embarrassing fact that I found reading too difficult. I thought my mother had invented some kind of cruel torture when she insisted I read to her every day. It never worked. And then… it did. I read my first book at the age of 12, and it was written in the form of letters. It was Animorphs Book 1 by KA Applegate, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Thornhill tells the story of two girls—Ella, recently moved into a new house, which has a perfect view of the abandoned Thornhill Institute next door, and Mary, the mysteriously evasive girl who seems to live in the dilapidated building. Ella’s narrative is told in a graphic novel style with blackwork drawings, heavy and bold, while Mary’s narrative is told via diary entries. Each narrative informs the other until they eventually meet to reveal the truth on both sides. Thornhill was one of those rare gems that pull me firmly into the story by use of the unusual format—and keeps me there until the end.
Parallel stories set in different times, one told in prose and one in pictures, converge as a girl unravels the mystery of the abandoned Thornhill Institute next door.
1982: Mary is a lonely orphan at the Thornhill Institute For Children at the very moment that it's shutting its doors. When her few friends are all adopted or re-homed and she’s left to face a volatile bully alone, her revenge will have a lasting effect on the bully, on Mary, and on Thornhill itself.
2017: Ella has just moved to a new town where she knows no one. From her room…
