2012 Christy Award finalist, Contemporary standalone category. From the bestselling author of Crossing Oceans comes a powerfully moving story that tests the limits of love’s forgiveness. Like many marriages, Eric and Kyra Yoshida’s has fallen apart slowly, one lost dream and misunderstanding at a time, until the ultimate betrayal finally pushes them beyond reconciliation. Just when it looks like forgive and forget is no longer an option, a car accident gives Eric the second chance of a lifetime. A concussion causes his wife to forget details of her life, including the chasm between them. No one knows when—or if—Kyra’s memory will return, but Eric seizes the opportunity to win back the woman he’s never stopped loving.
Abby and her parents have moved to Israel, where they've always dreamed of living. Abby's excited about her new home, but she misses her grandma. As they exchange letters and emails, Abby tells about her new life-learning Hebrew, eating falafel, and floating in the Dead Sea. And through the long dry summer, as she looks forward to the first rain of autumn, she misses how she and Grandma used to splash and play on rainy days. Finally, one morning, Abby hears the long-awaited ping ping ping on the roof. And then something even more wonderful happens. Kathryn Mitter's bright paintings perfectly complement Charlotte Herman's appealing story of the love between a grandma and a little girl.
A Good Morning America Book Club Pick and New York Times Bestseller! From debut author Asha Lemmie, “a lovely, heartrending story about love and loss, prejudice and pain, and the sometimes dangerous, always durable ties that link a family together.” —Kristin Hannah, #1 New York Times–bestselling author of The Nightingale Kyoto, Japan, 1948. “Do not question. Do not fight. Do not resist.” Such is eight-year-old Noriko “Nori” Kamiza’s first lesson. She will not question why her mother abandoned her with only these final words. She will not fight her confinement to the attic of her grandparents’ imperial estate. And she will not resist the scalding chemical baths she receives daily to lighten her skin. The child of a married Japanese aristocrat and her African American GI lover, Nori is an outsider from birth. Her grandparents take her in, only to conceal her, fearful of a stain on the royal pedigree that they are desperate to uphold in a changing Japan. Obedient to a fault, Nori accepts her solitary life, despite her natural intellect and curiosity. But when chance brings her older half-brother, Akira, to the estate that is his inheritance and destiny, Nori finds in him an unlikely ally with whom she forms a powerful bond—a bond their formidable grandparents cannot allow and that will irrevocably change the lives they were always meant to lead. Because now that Nori has glimpsed a world in which perhaps there is a place for her after all, she is ready to fight to be a part of it—a battle that just might cost her everything. Spanning decades and continents, Fifty Words for Rain is a dazzling epic about the ties that bind, the ties that give you strength, and what it means to be free.
A memorable collection of stories about family, love, fealty, commitment, and heroism, all set against the backdrop of the everyday people of the American West, ""Dry Rain" is a work of art" ("Men's Journal").
Newbery Medalist Karen Hesse recreates the body and soul-renewing experience of a summer downpour after a sweltering city heat wave. "Come on, rain!" Tess pleads to the sky as listless vines and parched plants droop in the endless heat. Up and down the block, cats pant while heat wavers off tar patches in the broiling alleyway. More than anything, Tess hopes for rain. And when it comes, she and her friends are ready for a surprising and joyous celebration....Through exquisite language and acute observation, Newberry medalist Karen Hesse recreates the glorious experience of a quenching rainstorm on a sweltering summer day. Jon J Muth's masterful and lyrical watercolors perfectly reflect the spirit of the text.
How do you keep an owl dry in the rain? Follow the journey of siblings Connor, Cailin, and Hannah as they use design thinking to solve a dreary problem for a little owl who does not like to get wet in the rain. A scuba suit, a pirate hat, and pop-up tent are just some of the solutions that the kids design. Do these solutions work? Find out from the owl!
Here is a new collection of twelve absorbing, deeply compassionate tales that reveal the subtle revenges of love and indifference, the deep wells of affection, and the strange, breathtaking tricks of chance that make up the texture of our lives. In the rain-washed Italian hills, a forgotten artist's Annunciation brings light to a heartbroken woman; insidiously, in her struggle for love, the second wife of a blind piano tuner distorts his memories of the first; two children, survivors of divorce, mimic their parents' dramas and passions; a mother, tied through love and fear to her son, watches with helpless dread as she realizes the monster he has become.
British police detective Tom Carver investigates what he believes to be a run-of-the-mill murder of a vagrant. As he works the case, however, he learns that the murdered man was a banker who was moonlighting as a black-mailer with ties to Maxamillion Snider, the head of a nefarious crime organization. The murder victim had stolen a top-secret disc for Snider with information about the government's attempts to manufacture a battlefield nerve gas agent. When he refuse to drop the murder case investigation, Carver is framed by members of his own force who are in league with Snider. Soon he's on the run from the police, security Services and Snider's hit men—and even his estranged family is threatened. Can Carver get Snider before the nerve agent is released throughout London?
Rain is elemental, mysterious, precious, destructive. It is the subject of countless poems and paintings; the top of the weather report; the source of the world's water. Yet this is the first book to tell the story of rain. Cynthia Barnett's Rain begins four billion years ago with the torrents that filled the oceans, and builds to the storms of climate change. It weaves together science—the true shape of a raindrop, the mysteries of frog and fish rains—with the human story of our ambition to control rain, from ancient rain dances to the 2,203 miles of levees that attempt to straitjacket the Mississippi River. It offers a glimpse of our "founding forecaster," Thomas Jefferson, who measured every drizzle long before modern meteorology. Two centuries later, rainy skies would help inspire Morrissey’s mopes and Kurt Cobain’s grunge. Rain is also a travelogue, taking readers to Scotland to tell the surprising story of the mackintosh raincoat, and to India, where villagers extract the scent of rain from the monsoon-drenched earth and turn it into perfume. Now, after thousands of years spent praying for rain or worshiping it; burning witches at the stake to stop rain or sacrificing small children to bring it; mocking rain with irrigated agriculture and cities built in floodplains; even trying to blast rain out of the sky with mortars meant for war, humanity has finally managed to change the rain. Only not in ways we intended. As climate change upends rainfall patterns and unleashes increasingly severe storms and drought, Barnett shows rain to be a unifying force in a fractured world. Too much and not nearly enough, rain is a conversation we share, and this is a book for everyone who has ever experienced it.
"Annie Bell can't escape the dust. It's in her hair, covering the windowsills, coating the animals in the barn, in the corners of her children's dry, cracked lips. It's 1934 and the Bell farm in Mulehead, Oklahoma is struggling as the earliest storms of The Dust Bowl descend. All around them the wheat harvests are drying out and people are packing up their belongings as storms lay waste to the Great Plains. As the Bells wait for the rains to come, Annie and each member of her family are pulled in different directions. Annie's fragile young son, Fred, suffers from dust pneumonia; her headstrong daughter, Birdie, flush with first love, is choosing a dangerous path out of Mulehead; and Samuel, her husband, is plagued by disturbing dreams of rain. As Annie, desperate for an escape of her own, flirts with the affections of an unlikely admirer, she must choose who she is going to become."--Syndetics
