Maxine has pledged her heart and ring finger to Theodore Charles, the man she'll promise to love, honor, and obey in front of God and everybody. At least that's what she's telling anybody who will listen. The only folks buying it are the dog and the readers of her column, however. Her best friend and family aren't having it. As her wedding day marches ever closer, Maxine confronts what it means to be really known and loved by examining what's buried in her own heart and exposing truth that has never seen the light of day.
“Pearson’s excellent characters and plotting capture the complexity and beauty of family. . . . Pearson rises to another level with this excellent story.” —Publishers Weekly starred review When the man she loved years ago returns to town, one young woman’s complicated past rises again, threatening to expose her well-kept secrets. If Maxine could put her finger on the moment when her life went into a tailspin, she would point back twenty years to the day her daddy died. She tells herself he’s the only person who ever really knew and loved her, and if he hadn’t left her behind, her future would’ve taken a different path. No absentee mother, no stepfather, no rebellious ripping and running during her teenage years. And no JD, who gave her wandering young heart a home, at least for a time. But that’s over and done with. All grown-up now, Maxine has pledged her heart and ring finger to Theodore Charles, the man she’ll promise to love, honor, and obey in front of God and everybody. At least that’s what she’s telling anybody who will listen. The only folks buying it are the dog and the readers of her column, however. Her best friend and family aren’t having it—not even Celeste, the double bass–playing thirteen-year-old the community of Mount Laurel, North Carolina, believes is Maxine’s adopted sister. And apparently, neither is the newly returned JD, who seems intent on toppling Maxine’s reconstructed life. As her wedding day marches ever closer, Maxine confronts what it means to be really known and loved by examining what’s buried in her own heart and exposing truth that has never seen the light of day. A Christian fiction novel with a poignant story of romance, a search for truth, and a journey to redemption. For fans of Chris Fabry, Lauren Denton, and Charles Martin.
New York Times Bestseller “Organizing is both science and art. It is thinking through a vision, a strategy, and then figuring out who your targets are, always being concerned about power, always being concerned about how you’re going to actually build power in order to be able to push your issues, in order to be able to get the target to actually move in the way that you want to.” What if social transformation and liberation isn’t about waiting for someone else to come along and save us? What if ordinary people have the power to collectively free ourselves? In this timely collection of essays and interviews, Mariame Kaba reflects on the deep work of abolition and transformative political struggle. With a foreword by Naomi Murakawa and chapters on seeking justice beyond the punishment system, transforming how we deal with harm and accountability, and finding hope in collective struggle for abolition, Kaba’s work is deeply rooted in the relentless belief that we can fundamentally change the world. As Kaba writes, “Nothing that we do that is worthwhile is done alone.”
When three women receive an unexpected phone call that leaves them reeling, they have no other choice but to reckon with a lifetime of memories they’ve long tried to bury. Only in facing the past will they find their path forward. Frances Mae Livingston’s firm grip of her family’s destructive history makes her hold her husband and four children even closer. But she’s losing bits of herself while proving to everybody and her mama that she’s enough. There’s no way she’ll repeat her mama’s mistakes, even if it kills her. Annabelle McMillan didn’t have trouble kicking the Eastern North Carolina dust off her feet. The tough part was replanting herself in familiar soil. Now she’s blending her old life with her new husband, stepson, and unborn child. And battling old memories of abandonment and new fears of rejection. Dr. Charlotte Winters has built a career around helping others sort through their emotional baggage. She’s also spent a lifetime refusing to unpack her own. So what if Charlotte doesn’t recall all that her mama did to her and what her daddy didn't do for her? Her only mission is to help others help themselves…until the women from her past and the man in her future undo her well-sewn life. At the junction of healed and hurting, broken and whole, and past and present, three women wrestle with their inability to forgive and forget in this riveting Southern family drama about sisterhood from award-winning author Robin W. Pearson. Southern family saga Discussion questions for book groups For fans of Black authors like Patricia Raybon, Toni Shiloh, and Brit Bennett
Twelve-year-old Molly and her ten-year-old brother, Michael, have never liked their seven-year-old stepsister, Heather. Ever since their parents got married, she's made Molly and Michael's life miserable. Now their parents have moved them all to the country to live in a house that used to be a church, with a cemetery in the backyard. If that's not bad enough, Heather starts talking to a ghost named Helen and warning Molly and Michael that Helen is coming for them. Molly feels certain Heather is in some kind of danger, but every time she tries to help, Heather twists things around to get her into trouble. It seems as if things can't get any worse. But they do—when Helen comes.
Paulette and Fred Baldwin are in a new season of life in Hickory Grove, North Carolina. Their son, McKinley, has moved away to live his own life, and the couple is struggling to connect with one another. In addition, Paulette suspects Fred and McKinley are hiding something that could change the whole family. As they face a coming storm, faith may be the only thing to get them through.
In this follow-up work to his earlier In the Land of the Living: Prayers Personal and Public, Kenneth L. Sehested sustains his evocative poetic imagination and capacity "for finding the right text at the right time," as Walter Brueggemann notes in his foreword. Sehested, an award-winning author and activist as well as a poet, pastor, and sometime stonemason, knows that serious thinking about Jesus is transacted on the road and then translated in liturgy to provoke the kind of praise that rankles the world (as it is) with a foretaste of what it might be. Most of the pieces in this work have been used first in worship in his own Circle of Mercy Congregation. "This book is a great gift," Brueggemann writes, and "it issues in a calling that befits the coming rule of God." Or, as Sehested writes in his meditation on John the Baptizer, "There's no getting right with God. There's only getting soaked."
This path-breaking study of the standardisation of English goes well beyond the traditional prescriptivism versus descriptivism debate. It argues that the way norms are established and enforced is the result of a complex network of social factors and cannot be explained simply by appeals to power and hegemony. It brings together insights from leading researchers to re-centre the discussion on linguistic communities and language users. It examines the philosophy underlying the urge to standardise language, and takes a closer look at both well-known and lesser-known historical dictionaries, grammars and usage guides, demonstrating that they cannot be simply labelled as 'prescriptivist'. Drawing on rich empirical data and case studies, it shows how the norm continues to function in society, influencing and affecting language users even today.
