"Let me tell you a secret--if you have a heart song, anything is possible. Even magic " Kaya is looking for her heart song--the song that happy hearts sing. Her search takes her on a journey deep into the jungle where a broken down carousel waits for a very special song to make it turn again.
Before she wrote the bestselling Brokeback Mountain, Annie Proulx was already producing some of the finest short fiction in the country. Here are her collected stories, including two new works never before anthologized. These stories reverberate with rural tradition, the rites of nature, and the rituals of small town life. The country is blue collar New England; the characters are native families and the dispossessed working class, whose heritage is challenged by the neorural bourgeoisie from the city; and the themes are as elemental as the landscape: revenge, malice, greed, passion. Told with skill and profundity and crafted by a master storyteller, these are lean, tough tales of an extraordinary place and its people.
From the publisher of the beloved Water Bugs and Dragonflies comes a new picture book to support grieving children: My Heart Sings a Sad Song. The heart-warming artwork holds the reader tenderly through the ache of grief, as a young rabbit remembers a loved one who has died. Hospice chaplain Jennifer Fargo Lathrop says of My Heart Sings a Sad Song: "The illustration of talking to 'my heart' is especially meaningful, offering children a model of how to engage their emotions and their memories."
Mattie Stepanek began writing poetry and short stories at the age of three. Some of his poetry explores the uncensored reality of living with a rare form of muscular dystrophy and with the grief associated with the loss of his three siblings to the same life-threatening condition. But most of his poems proclaim the innocent hope. profund wisdom, and delighful humor of childhood.
Have you ever had a song stuck in your head for days? Something abut its tune or lyrics impacts us and holds our attention. Why? How did the song come to be? Why was it written? And what does the song really mean? In Music for Your Heart, best-selling and award-winning author Ace Collins takes you behind the scenes of your favorite songs to show how the lyrics and music began. Through insider stories, artist bios, and inspiration from Scripture, Collins weaves stirring reflections on our adored and popular classics. Whether the featured song is a holiday carol, children’s worship tune, or love song, each short chapter will inspire curious music enthusiasts as well as those seeking a book for a devotional meditation. Digging deep into the words and history of the music, these uplifting and informative reflections will warm the heart—like the songs themselves. Songs include: - Jesus Loves Me - You Are My Sunshine - How Great Thou Art - White Christmas - Amazing Grace - Sweet, Sweet Spirit - Blue Moon - Jingle Bells - You Raise Me Up - Deep and Wide - I Will Always Love You - Moon River
In this extraordinary breakout novel—a rich, devastatingly humorous epic of one unforgettable family—award-winning author Eric Dupont illuminates the magic of stories, the bonds of family, and the twists of fate and fortune to transform our lives. Over the course of the twentieth century, three generations of the Lamontagnes will weather love, passion, jealousy, revenge, and death. Their complicated family dynamic—as dramatic as Puccini’s legendary opera, Tosca—will propel their rise, and fall, and take them around the world . . . until they finally confront the secrets of their complicated pasts. Born on Christmas, Louis Lamontagne, the family’s patriarch, is a larger-than-life lothario and raconteur who inherits his mother’s teal eyes and his father’s brutish good looks and whose charms travel beyond Quebec, across the state of New York where he wins at county fairs as a larger-than-life strongman, and even in Europe, where he is deployed for the US Army during World War II. We meet his daughter, Madeleine, who opens a successful chain of diners using the recipes from her grandmother, the original American Fiancée, and vows never to return to her hometown. And we end with her son Gabriel, another ladies’ man in the family, who falls in love with a woman he follows to Berlin and discovers unexpected connections there to the Lamontagne family that re-frame the entire course of the events in the book. An unholy marriage of John Irving and Gary Shteyngart with the irresistible whimsy of Elizabeth McCracken, The American Fiancée is a big, bold, wildly ambitious novel that introduces a dynamic new voice to contemporary literature. Translated from the French by Peter McCambridge.
Renowned Cree painter Allen Sapp's inspired and stunning artwork beautifully complements this sweet story of a young First Nations boy preparing for his first pow wow. The young boy's Nokum-his beloved grandmother-guides him through the exciting day and watches over him as events unfold. David Bouchard's rhythmic and informative text is based on remembrances from Allen Sapp's childhood.
Arriving in East Harlem, New York City h 1980 with her two young sons, soon after a painful divorce, Roberta Guaspari doesn't know what she will do to support her family and move forward with her life. All she does know is that she has managed to hold on to the 50 violins she bought with her family's savings as part of her dream to be a music teacher. But as the future will prove, these 50 violins, along with Guaspari's unrelenting passion for music and teaching, are the basis for what will become her triumphantly successful program to teach the children of her community the power of music and put hundreds of them on the pith toward personal success. In The Music of My Heart, Roberta Guaspari tells the story of how her ultimate success and that of the children she taught does not come without years of hard work to overcome personal and community adversity. In 1993, Guaspari and her students hold a concert at Carnegie Hall and are accompanied by the world famous violinists Itzhak Perlman and Isaac Stern. East Harlem is only three miles form Carnegie Hall, but the work required to make this journey takes years. In The Music of My Heart, Guaspari takes the reader back to relive her own personal journey, how it becomes entwined with the lives of many of her students, and how together they fight for a future full of hope end music.