A Crooked Crown Day is about an African-American girl who is just having a bad day. She is teased at school, forgets her homework, and is laughed at by the kids at school. By the time she arrives home, her invisible crown, representing her inner strength, is about to fall to the ground! Fortunately, her grandmother is there to fix her crown with her hands and wise words.
When the mischievous Catra tricks Glimmer into falling under the spell of the Crooked Crown, only She-Ra and her magic powers can save the land from ruin.
Goodness Gracious Golly Gee, I forgot my Christmas tree! Goodness Gracious Golly Gee, what will Santa think of me? With Christmas right around the corner, a stay-at-home dad scrambles at the last minute to get everything ready for the holidays. Like many parents who experience holiday-related anxiety, the father is overwhelmed by the many expectations that come with Christmas. From putting up the tree, decorating the house, and baking Christmas cookies, the father worries he won't be able to get it all done in time for Santa's arrival. Will his family, not to mention jolly old St. Nick, be disappointed if there's no Christmas tree? In this whimsical rhyming Christmas tale, the pressures to buy the perfect present and maintain holiday traditions take a backseat as the father is reminded of the true spirit of Christmas (with a little help from a mysterious, magical Christmas figure who comes to save the day)!
When Noel Bostock - aged ten, no family - is evacuated from London to escape the Blitz, he winds up in St Albans with Vera Sedge - thiry-six, drowning in debts. Always desperate for money, she's unscrupulous about how she gets it. The war's thrown up all manner of new opportunities but what Vee needs is a cool head and the ability to make a plan. On her own, she's a disaster. With Noel, she's a team. Together they cook up an idea. But there are plenty of other people making money out of the war and some of them are dangerous. Noel may have been moved to safety, but he isn't actually safe at all . . . Longlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, 2015
Into the Crooked Place begins a gritty two-book YA fantasy series from Alexandra Christo, the author of To Kill a Kingdom. The streets of Creije are for the deadly and the dreamers, and four crooks in particular know just how much magic they need up their sleeve to survive. Tavia, a busker ready to pack up her dark-magic wares and turn her back on Creije for good. She’ll do anything to put her crimes behind her. Wesley, the closest thing Creije has to a gangster. After growing up on streets hungry enough to swallow the weak whole, he won’t stop until he has brought the entire realm to kneel before him. Karam, a warrior who spends her days watching over the city’s worst criminals and her nights in the fighting rings, making a deadly name for herself. And Saxony, a resistance fighter hiding from the very people who destroyed her family, and willing to do whatever it takes to get her revenge. Everything in their lives is going to plan, until Tavia makes a crucial mistake: she delivers a vial of dark magic—a weapon she didn’t know she had—to someone she cares about, sparking the greatest conflict in decades. Now these four magical outsiders must come together to save their home and the world, before it’s too late. But with enemies at all sides, they can trust nobody. Least of all each other.
This book is a compilation of thoughts put down on paper in an effort to encourage the pilgrim to push forward on his/her journey Home. It is a combination of personal experiences, conversations, and observations of this pilgrim, who has been bent and broken, but carries on because-- "I can do all things through Christ Who strengthens me." Patricia Fitzpatrick is a woman who loves her God and her family. Being afflicted with Rheumatoid Arthritis since age 3, Patricia has learned to overcome many obstacles in life, physical and spiritual. Being disabled, sometimes frustration would come over Patricia when there was a work to be done, yet physical limitations keep her from participating. Some years ago Patricia began to write down some thoughts as a form of meditation and study. These written pieces were shared with friends and family. Now, Patricia hopes to share her deep love for God with others through this book.
Sometimes a city can be like a bird. Just as the magpie is an inveterate collector, hoarding beautiful eclectic bits to line its nest, so Prague retains fragments from bygone regimes and centuries past to create a city of juxtaposition that is alternately exquisite and bizarre. Prague’s personality is expressed as much by its obvious beauty as by its overlooked details. This unforgettable place is brought to life by acclaimed author Myla Goldberg, a former Prague expat, whose first novel, Bee Season, captivated so many with its unique voice and exhilarating prose. Myla Goldberg lived in Prague in 1993, just as the process of Westernization was getting under way, the city straddling a past it wished to shed and a future it was eager to embrace. In 2003, she returned to see what the pursuit of capitalism had wrought and to observe the integral ways in which Prague’s character had endured. In Time’s Magpie, Goldberg explores a city where centuries-old buildings have become receptacles for Western values and a generation defined by the Communist regime coexists with a generation for whom Communism is a rapidly fading memory. Wander through the narrow alleyways and cobblestone streets to places most tourists never see—to a neighborhood eerily transformed by the devastating flood of 2002; to an anachronistic amusement park that is home to a discomfiting array of Technicolor confections; and to the cabinets of curiosity in the Strahov Monastery, where hidden among deceptively modest displays of butterfly specimens and ladies’ fans are creatures that defy the laws of taxidermy. This imaginative, individualistic journey will show you the odd and unique corners of a city often seeking to erase what its very stones will not allow it to forget.
Lorna Goodison is a poet alive to places, from the loved and lived-in world of Jamaica where she began and started a family, to the United States and Canada where she has made her teaching career, but always re-connecting with her Caribbean roots. She travels with an ear alert to histories and voices. How differently English sounds in the tropi and in colder lands, at seaside in sunlight and on prairies, mountains and in cities. The same words say quite different things, depending on who speaks them and who's listening, obeying or resisting. She covers a wide range of subjects and themes, too. Her instinct is to celebrate being alive in a world that is rich but in peril. 'And what is the rare quality that has gone out of poetry that these marvellous poems restore?' asks Derek Walcott. 'Joy.' The 'mango of poetry', eaten straight from the tree, Goodison somehow finds growing in Wordsworth country and in Sligo, in Russia and Norway, in Spain and Portugal which spilled their empires into the Caribbean, in Hungary and Far Rockaway. // 'The publication of Lorna Goodison's Collected Poems – with their extraordinary music, sensuous texture, and powerful historical imagination – is a major event. These are poems stunningly alive to the nuances of language, beautifully pitched and tuned, rich with feeling and insight.' Jahan Ramazani // 'Lorna Goodison brings herself into the presence of every poem, and so into the presence of her readers. Like the ideal teacher, she enables us to hear history sing its joy and shout its rage in her own personal tones of voice, and to feel the folds and textures of her various homelands like a display of rich cloths. She excels in both the emblematic and descriptive powers of popular poetry, and introduces us to an array of characters sharply but generously perceived, and often as deliciously audible after death as in life. This is an inspiring collection for a time when hopes for transnational unity are profoundly challenged. Goodison's poems frequently acknowledge the complex unhealed scars of imperial greed and violence, but the impulse is towards hope, and our imaginations are enchanted by a potential global spring of warmth, nourishment, camaraderie and sheer fun. In the poet's own words of gratitude to "Miss Mirry African bush healing woman", we should "turn thanks now" to Lorna Goodison for addressing us across so many years on her unique world-service of human truth – and stay tuned.' Carol Rumens
