Roxanne Henke's first book in the Coming Home to Brewster series, After Anne, received great reviews and enthusiastic sales, appearing on the Crossings Book Club bestseller list. The second book in the series, Finding Ruth, was also a huge success, as more readers fell in love with small-town Brewster and its people. In this third novel, Roxanne returns to the life of Olivia "Libby" Marsden, the main character in After Anne. Libby has the perfect life...good kids, a wonderful husband, and a strong Christian faith. Why then is she increasingly depressed? Libby discovers that sometimes God works through the most unexpected circumstances to help us become who we're meant to be, as readers will discover in this touching novel.
In this adorable story based on an episode, Olivia takes her "way with animals" to the next level and imagines what it would be like to become a veterinarian.
In her latest book, The Pie Life, work life balance expert, Harvard MBA and radio host Samantha Ettus offers women a powerful but simple framework for balancing a successful career with a fulfilling personal life. Having worked with thousands of women over the past two decades, Ettus knows what it takes to sustain thriving personal and professional lives at the same time. With its unique combination of inspiring stories, motivational messages and practical solutions, The Pie Life will turn everything you know about work-life balance on its head. Soon you'll be baking up a lifestyle that is more satisfying, rich, and delicious than you ever thought possible.
"Astute and consistently surprising critic" (NPR) Olivia Laing investigates the body and its discontents through the great freedom movements of the twentieth century. The body is a source of pleasure and of pain, at once hopelessly vulnerable and radiant with power. In her ambitious, brilliant sixth book, Olivia Laing charts an electrifying course through the long struggle for bodily freedom, using the life of the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich to explore gay rights and sexual liberation, feminism, and the civil rights movement. Drawing on her own experiences in protest and alternative medicine, and traveling from Weimar Berlin to the prisons of McCarthy-era America, Laing grapples with some of the most significant and complicated figures of the past century—among them Nina Simone, Christopher Isherwood, Andrea Dworkin, Sigmund Freud, Susan Sontag, and Malcolm X. Despite its many burdens, the body remains a source of power, even in an era as technologized and automated as our own. Arriving at a moment in which basic bodily rights are once again imperiled, Everybody is an investigation into the forces arranged against freedom and a celebration of how ordinary human bodies can resist oppression and reshape the world.
When Rachel Harris's mother runs off to Spain with the super of their New York City apartment building, Rachel's life takes a bizarre turn. Her eccentric father becomes obsessed with George Vasquez, the man who stole his wife: He wears George's clothes, he shaves with his razor, and, to top it off, he moves George's family into their apartment. The poignant and often funny journey Rachel and her father take to Madrid to hunt down her mother further cements her desire to shake her more than unusual family situation and find a new identity. And who has a more perfect life than Olivio and Edwin Butler? So gorgeous and popular, they don't really have friends, just hangers-on. And though Rachel doesn't remember ever having spoken a word to them, her resolve becomes clear. She must find a way into the Butlers' home and into their family. In this marvelously compassionate first novel, Penny Jackson deftly depicts a young girl's search for family - and her discovery that family is a state of mind.
For nineteen years, Olivia lived the shadowy life of stripper, streetwalker, and heroin addict on the fringes of society. Leaving a troubled home at age sixteen to land a seemingly glamorous job at a Chicago stripclub, she became trapped in a web of prostitution and drug addiction that eventually forced her onto the streets and into a world of hardship at the hands of abusive men. But Olivia, a resourceful, vibrant woman of color, ultimately escaped the prostitution lifestyle and is now director of addiction services at a community counseling program, working to support drug-dependent women. Listening to Olivia is the compelling account of her descent into poverty and abuse together with her hard fought recovery. By assimilating new research on the women and girls in prostitution - in addition to their male customers - Jody Raphael discovers that experiences like Olivia's are alarmingly common and argues that the sex trade as an institution promotes violence against women. Smashing both the common stereotype of the depraved streetwalker and abstract feminist arguments legitimizing prostitution as the sexual liberation of women, the author uncovers an emerging multimillion-dollar global trafficking industry that detains women in a violent cycle of exploitation and dependence. Olivia's own insights on her turbulent childhood, stripping in clubs, soliciting on the street, drug addiction, brutal pimps, her three pregnancies, and her extraordinary transformation highlight important new questions: who are the men who buy sex from such poor, strung out women; and why are so many of these men so violent? Olivia's story gives a human face to the overwhelmingly low-income, non-white, and unempowered young women in prostitution today. Combined with a wealth of new findings, this gripping and accessible study challenges the academy, the legal system, and society as a whole to wake up and listen to the women like Olivia.
A dazzling debut collection of raw and explosive poems about growing up in a sexist, sensationalized world, from a thrilling new feminist voice. i’m a good girl, bad girl, dream girl, sad girl girl next door sunbathing in the driveway i wanna be them all at once, i wanna be all the girls I’ve ever loved —from “Girl” Lauded for the power of her writing and having attracted an online fan base of millions for her extraordinary spoken-word performances, Olivia Gatwood now weaves together her own coming-of-age with an investigation into our culture’s romanticization of violence against women. At times blistering and riotous, at times soulful and exuberant, Life of the Party explores the boundary between what is real and what is imagined in a life saturated with fear. Gatwood asks, How does a girl grow into a woman in a world racked by violence? Where is the line between perpetrator and victim? In precise, searing language, she illustrates how what happens to our bodies can make us who we are. Praise for Life of the Party “Delicately devastating, this book will make us all ‘feel less alone in the dark.’ ”—Miel Bredouw, writer and comedian, Punch Up the Jam “Gatwood writes about the women who were forgotten and the men who got off too easy with an effortlessness and empathy and anger that yanked every emotion on the spectrum out of me. Imagine, we get to live in the age of Olivia Gatwood. Goddamn.”—Jamie Loftus, writer and comedian, Boss Whom Is Girl and The Bechdel Cast “I’ve read every poem in Life of the Party. I’ve read each of them more than once. In some parts of the book the spine is already breaking because I’ve spent so much time poring over it and losing hours in this world Olivia Gatwood has partly created, but partly just invited the reader to enter on their own, caution signs be damned. This book is enlightening, inspiring, igniting, and f***ing scary. I loved every word on every page with a ferocity that frightened me.”—Madeline Brewer, actress, The Handmaid’s Tale, Orange Is the New Black, and Cam
Convinced that her brother, Joshua, is innocent, lawyer Rachael Flynn begs him to let her represent him after he confesses to murder, but when he refuses, Rachael begins an investigation that leads her to suspect that Joshua knows the identity of the real killer. Original.