Vee and Sanaa are the best of friends. Under a full mango tree, they play, dream, and plan for a future spent together, always. However, life can change quickly, and the girls must face the challenge of separation when Vee moves away. Join Vee and Sanaa as they learn how powerful friendship can be and how far it can reach.
After two heartbreaking losses, Luna wants adventure. Something and somewhere very different from the affluent, sheltered home in California and Hawaii where she grew up. An adventure in which she can also make some difference. She ends up in place where she gets more than she bargained for.Lucien, a worldly, well-traveled young architect, finds a stranger's journal at a café. He has qualms and pangs of guilt about reading it. But they don't stop him. His decision to go on reading changes his life.Months later, Luna and Lucien meet at a bookstore where Luna works and which Lucien frequents. Fascinated by his stories and adventurous spirit, Luna goes to a rural rice-growing village in a country steeped in an ancient culture and a deadly history. What she finds there defies anything she could have imagined. Will she leave this world unscathed?An epistolary tale of courage, resilience of the human spirit, and the bonds that bring diverse people together.
The enchanting autobiography of the seven-time James Beard Award-winning cookbook author and acclaimed actress who taught America how to cook Indian food. “Wistful, funny and tremendously satisfying.... Jaffrey's taste memories sparkle with enthusiasm, and her talent for conveying them makes the book relentlessly appetizing." —The New York Times Book Review Whether climbing the mango trees in her grandparents' orchard in Delhi or picnicking in the Himalayan foothills on meatballs stuffed with raisins and mint, tucked into freshly baked spiced pooris, Madhur Jaffrey’s life has been marked by food, and today these childhood pleasures evoke for her the tastes and textures of growing up. Following Jaffrey from India to Britain, this memoir is both an enormously appealing account of an unusual childhood and a testament to the power of food to prompt memory, vividly bringing to life a lost time and place. Also included here are recipes for more than thirty delicious dishes from Jaffrey’s childhood.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A coming-of-age classic about a young girl growing up in Chicago • Acclaimed by critics, beloved by readers of all ages, taught in schools and universities alike, and translated around the world—from the winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. “Cisneros draws on her rich [Latino] heritage...and seduces with precise, spare prose, creat[ing] unforgettable characters we want to lift off the page. She is not only a gifted writer, but an absolutely essential one.” —The New York Times Book Review The House on Mango Street is one of the most cherished novels of the last fifty years. Readers from all walks of life have fallen for the voice of Esperanza Cordero, growing up in Chicago and inventing for herself who and what she will become. “In English my name means hope,” she says. “In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting." Told in a series of vignettes—sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes joyous—Cisneros’s masterpiece is a classic story of childhood and self-discovery and one of the greatest neighborhood novels of all time. Like Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street or Toni Morrison’s Sula, it makes a world through people and their voices, and it does so in language that is poetic and direct. This gorgeous coming-of-age novel is a celebration of the power of telling one’s story and of being proud of where you're from.
From Pamela Binnings Ewen, bestselling author of The Queen of Paris and Émilienne, The Moon in the Mango Tree is a lush historical novel set in the 1920s. It is a dazzling decade, and Barbara Bond is a beautiful young singer torn between her fierce desire for independence and her deep, abiding love for her husband, a brilliant doctor. She has trained for years to sing grand opera, but soon after her marriage to Harvey Perkins, she learns that he has accepted an assignment as a medical missionary in the country of Siam. Suddenly Barbara is forced into the duty of a “good wife"—to support her husband’s career, not her own. As resentment slowly grows, she travels with Harvey first to the jungles of Siam, then to the capital city of Bangkok, where he is now physician to the royal court. As she struggles with the secrets straining their marriage, Barbara wonders if she has made the right choice. At last, leaving her husband in Bangkok, she flees to Paris, then Rome, where she can finally sing on stage. If Harvey loves her, the risk is worth it for a chance to have it all—her husband and her career. Why should she be forced to choose? And, if she chooses, must the other be lost forever?
This particular book was inspired by my father. He was born and raised in Hilo, Hawaii. As a child, I really did spend many summers going to Hawaii with my grandmother to visit family there. My uncle had a huge mango tree in his backyard, and he would let me pick them just as the girl in the story does. I wanted a children's book that brought out fantasy and imagination for children, as well as taught them something. I have a love for animals and nature, and so I decided to combine trees and animals. My intention is to create a series that will always relate to personal experiences with a different kind of tree and the animals that inhabit them. I was raised in the central coast of California, and so my next book will be about oak trees as our property had many of them as did the surrounding area. I am still contemplating which animal I will choose. Lani's character is inspired by me as a child hanging out in Hawaii. She is a dreamer with a great imagination as I hope all children have. She is also very curious and has a thirst for knowledge, again a hope I want to inspire in children. The bat family characters all have very different character traits, but as a family unit, I think children will find them fun and easy to relate to. The message is simple. Use your imagination, dreaming is a good thing, be curious, and go learn from it, and it is OK that things in life are not always permanent. It just might mean there is something better around the corner, so don't stop looking. Mahalo.
I am here, in the rain, tied to the mango tree. The water leve rises, above my naked feet, past my ankles. I wait ... It has been this way since Sarina's family moved to Liberia from Boston eight months ago. Her mother ties her to the mango tree in their front yard, terrified of losing her. It's never for long, and Sarina knows her mother doesn't mean to hurt her. But things just seem to get harder the longer her family stays in this country so far from home. On good days, when Sarina's mother is feeling better, she sets her daughter free. On bad days, Sarina dangles her feet in the puddles and mud until dusk, waiting for someone to rescue her, wishing for the one thing her mother fears most: a friend. Then one day Sarina meets Boima, a Liberian boy, and he becomes Sarina's cherished secret. He takes her to places outside her dirty yard, and shows her the ocean, the trees, and the people of Liberia. Together they discover what friendship really means ... and that there is a world of joy, hunger, and hope waiting just beyond the mango tree. 2000-2001 Georgia's Picture Storybook Award & Georgia's Children's Book Award Masterlist
Tea, Scones, and Malaria is the phenomenal true account of one girl's extraordinary upbringing in the rough and feral bushveld of 1950s and 60s Rhodesia. Moving from one makeshift camp to the next, the family follows Dad, a bridge builder for the government, deep into the heart of elephant and cheetah country."We ran barefoot in the bush, and swam in crocodile-infested rivers. We shared our camps with snakes, scorpions, and jerrymunglums. There was no electricity, no hospitals, and no schools in the bush. How I survived it all, I will never know."Hilarious, touching, raw, and deeply honest, this memoir records the journey from child to teenager to woman against the backdrop of a vanishing world, as Rhodesia begins its long and tumultuous transition into the independent country of Zimbabwe.