Life in small-town America during World War II springs vividly to life as schoolteacher Miss Dimple and her fellow townspeople battle valiantly against worry, rationing, and crime at home as well as abroad in Miss Dimple Rallies to the Cause, Mignon F. Ballard's charming second novel in the Miss Dimple Series It's September 1943, and the town of Elderberry, Georgia, including their beloved first-grade teacher, Miss Dimple Kilpatrick, has exciting plans for the Bond Rally to support the troops fighting the war abroad. Miss Dimple's friend, Virginia Balliew, has agreed to chair the big event, with the help of Buddy Oglesby. But when children discover a skeleton at the edge of a field, and Buddy disappears along with the war bond money, it's clear that something is amiss in the little town; and Miss Dimple, along with her fellow teachers, is soon on the case.
It's 1942, almost a year since the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and the residents of the small town of Elderberry, Georgia, have been rattled down to their worn, rationed shoes. For young teacher Charlie Carr, life and love aren't going exactly as planned—her head dictates loyalty to the handsome corpsman, Hugh, but whenever she thinks of her best friend's beau, Will, her heart does the Jersey Bounce. Charlie is doubly troubled by the disappearance of beloved schoolmistress Miss Dimple Kilpatrick one frosty November morning just before Thanksgiving. Miss Dimple, who has taught the town's first graders—including Charlie—for almost forty years, would never just skip town in the middle of the school year, and Charlie and her best friend, Annie, are determined to prove it.
A Black mother bumps up against the limits of everything she thought she believed—about science and medicine, about motherhood, and about her faith—in search of the truth about her son. "The memoir dedicates important space to the numbing bureaucracy that often accompanies medical visits, particularly as seen through the eyes of a Black woman in the South. Having moved often within White neighborhoods and educational institutions around her home in Charlottesville, Harris is unflinching about her periodic unease in those quarters. . . Harris also brings humor to bear in moments of great adversity."—Karen Iris Tucker, Washington Post One morning, Tophs, Taylor Harris’s round-cheeked, lively twenty-two-month-old, wakes up listless, only lifting his head to gulp down water. She rushes Tophs to the doctor, ignoring the part of herself, trained by years of therapy for generalized anxiety disorder, that tries to whisper that she’s overreacting. But at the hospital, her maternal instincts are confirmed: something is wrong with her boy, and Taylor’s life will never be the same. With every question the doctors answer about Tophs’s increasingly troubling symptoms, more arise, and Taylor dives into the search for a diagnosis. She spends countless hours trying to navigate health and education systems that can be hostile to Black mothers and children; at night she googles, prays, and interrogates her every action. Some days, her sweet, charismatic boy seems just fine; others, he struggles to answer simple questions. A long-awaited appointment with a geneticist ultimately reveals nothing about what’s causing Tophs’s drops in blood sugar, his processing delays—but it does reveal something unexpected about Taylor’s own health. What if her son’s challenges have saved her life? This Boy We Made is a stirring and radiantly written examination of the bond between mother and child, full of hard-won insights about fighting for and finding meaning when nothing goes as expected.
"October, 1944 ... When Dimple's librarian friend Virginia finds a young woman, Dora, on the library porch looking for a place to spend the night, soft-hearted Dimple brings her back to Phoebe's and offers her food and a warm coat. But when Dimple is trying to find her a place to sleep, the young girl disappears. The next morning, Miss Dimple answers a knock on the door expecting it to be the girl. Instead, she is greeted by a somewhat disheveled young woman ... who claims she has been assigned to fill in at the house. Augusta Goodnight, a guardian angel who has been summoned from a well-deserved rest after a series of troublesome earthly duties, has taken up at Phoebe's. When Dora is discovered dead--murdered--the real reason for Augusta's 'assignment' becomes clear"--
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year • A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • Winner of the Alex Award and the Massachusetts Book Award • Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, San Francisco Chronicle, Entertainment Weekly, The Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, Grantland Booklist, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Shelf Awareness, Book Riot, School Library Journal, Bustle, and Time Our New York The acclaimed debut novel by the author of Little Fires Everywhere and Our Missing Hearts “A taut tale of ever deepening and quickening suspense.” —O, the Oprah Magazine “Explosive . . . Both a propulsive mystery and a profound examination of a mixed-race family.” —Entertainment Weekly “Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.” So begins this exquisite novel about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee, and her parents are determined that she will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue. But when Lydia’s body is found in the local lake, the delicate balancing act that has been keeping the Lee family together is destroyed, tumbling them into chaos. A profoundly moving story of family, secrets, and longing, Everything I Never Told You is both a gripping page-turner and a sensitive family portrait, uncovering the ways in which mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and husbands and wives struggle, all their lives, to understand one another.
This authorized biography of World War II hero John Basilone--who held off 3,000 Japanese troops after his unit was reduced to three men--is being published to coincide with Steven Spielberg's HBO miniseries, "The Pacific." Illustrations throughout.
A foundling of mysterious parentage brought up by Mr. Allworthy on his country estate, Tom Jones is deeply in love with the seemingly unattainable Sophia Western, the beautiful daughter of the neighboring squireathough he sometimes succumbs to the charms of the local girls. When Tom is banished to make his own fortune and Sophia follows him to London to escape an arranged marriage, the adventure begins. A vivid Hogarthian panorama of eighteenth-century life, spiced with danger and intrigue, bawdy exuberance and good-natured authorial interjections, "Tom Jones" is one of the greatest and most ambitious comic novels in English literature.
An account of the Tulsa race riot of 1921 with a collection of shorter witness testimonials and a partial list of property and financial losses of its victims.
When the opening of her craft store results in murder, recently widowed Jo McAllister becomes the prime suspect and must find a way to clear her name without attracting the attention of a clever killer. Original.
With the country in the midst of World War II, the small town of Elderberry pulls together to find a missing child. First-grade teacher, Miss Dimple Kilpatrick, is in the search party--especially since the missing child is one of her students. Miss Dimple carves out a search path all her own and once again, the sharp-as-a-tack teacher is right on point.
