Abandoned. Jennie L Hansen. 2002. 262p. Covenant Communications, Inc. The book opens by introducing the reader to a brother and sister trying to survive in a home of abuse, neglect and drugs. The only bright spot in their lives is their drug-addicted mother’s sister, Josie, who occasionally brings them something to eat or an item of clothing. Aunt Josie discovers the battered young girl and rescues her from the horrible situation only to abandon her by the roadside as she and her boyfriend carry out their own illegal activities. Jumping to the present we see the young girl, now a grown woman, facing the challenges of committing to a serious relationship and finding a fulfilling career. She’s just broken off her sixth engagement and turns to her step-brother, Peter, for support. Both adopted, Peter and Tisa, forged a deep bond as young children, closer than most biological siblings, because, like Tisa, he also came from an abusive home, surrounded by neglect, violence and drugs. Peter, a former Drug Enforcement Administration officer, is nowa lieutenant with the Salt Lake City police department, with an uncanny knack for sniffing out drugs. When McCabe Evans, an undercover FBI agent posing as a private investigator, arrives in town, it’s Peter he requests for a partner. “Cabe’s” objective is to shut down the Dempsky crime syndicate at all costs and Lewis’ background makes him the best partner possible. Together, Cabe and Peter forge a relationship with one goal in mind, to destroy the Dempsky empire. Understandably reluctant with love, Tisa finds herself as attracted to Cabe as he is to her, but she isn’t about to get involved with a man so soon after breaking off her last engagement. Still, she can’t ignore the attraction to Cabe nor his admirable strength and convictions for his own beliefs in the LDS church. — Michele Ashman Bell

Across the Border. Arleta Richardson. 1996. 144p. (Orphans Journey #4). Chariot Victor Publishing. God has just the right place for us all. The four Cooper children—Ethan, Alice, Simon, and Will—seem to have found the place the Lord had for them. They’ve lived with the Rushes for four years now and they are all settled into their new family and home in South Dakota. Then Chad Rush makes another sudden, unexpected announcement. The family is moving again—to Mexico! Why he wants to move them all to a foreign country that is in the midst of political turmoil, none of the family can quite understand, but Chad Rush is a determined man. They have many adventures while discovering their new home—some good, others not so good—but through it all, Ethan comes to realize that no matter where he goes, no matter what he does, no matter what troubles he finds, God is with him always. Other titles in the Orphans’ Journey series: Looking for Home; Whistle-stop West; and Prairie Homestead.

Addie Pray: A Novel. Joe David Brown. 1971. 240p. Simon & Schuster. Meet Addie Pray, an eleven-year-old orphan (“My mama, Miss Essie Mae Loggins, was the wildest girl in Marengo County, Alabama”) of monumental shrewdness and one of the world’s youngest con artists; Addie and Long Boy, her con-man companion, a man who may or may not be her daddy (“To this day I don’t know whether Long Boy was my Daddy or not”), travel the back roads of the South in the darkest days of the Depression “doing business.” Basis for the memorable Peter Bogdanovich film Paper Moon (1973), for which the young Tatum O’Neal, making her film debut, won the Supporting Actress Oscar.

Adopted, The: A Novel. William McFee. 1952. 223p. Faber & Faber (UK).

Adopted Husband, An (Sono Omokage). Futabatei. Translated by Buhachiro Mitsui and Gregg M. Sinclair. 1919. Alfred A Knopf. Futabatei Shimei (February 28, 1864-May 10, 1909) was a Japanese author, translator, and literary critic. Born Hasegawa Tatsunosuke in Edo (now Tokyo), Futabatei’s works are in the realist style popular in the mid- to late-19th century. This is the first modern Japanese novel to appear in English. A beautifully written, absorbing and poignant work, it is based on the ancient Japanese tradition of the “adopted husband”; to prevent the family name becoming extinct, the father of an only daughter adopts needy young man to marry daughter and continue family name.

Adopted Son. Christopher Dominic Peloso. 2006. 336p. Invisible College Press. The invasion has begun. An invasion not from the stars but from within our wombs. All over the world children are being born...different. Their features are alien, their DNA isn’t human, their loyalties are unknown. As scientists, spies, and regular citizens race to make sense of this new disease, they find themselves asking the same question: Is this the first wave of an alien assault on Earth? Celebrated fiction author and bioterrorism expert Dominic Peloso weaves a complex tale of alien invasion, environmental catastrophe, and societal upheaval, in a world not too removed from our own. Adopted Son perfectly blends hard sci-fi with biting political and social commentary to create a truly modern literary masterpiece that transcends genres.

Adopted Son of the Princess, The. Rev Erasmus W Jones. 1873. 168p. N Tibbals & Son. The life of Moses written in the form of a story.

Adoption, The. Dave Hill. 2006. 320p. Headline Review (UK). Jane Ransome, mother of three children, is married to a man who adores her and she knows she has every reason to be happy. But she longs for another child. When nature fails her, Jane and her husband decide to adopt. Three-year-old Jody arrives at the household, nervous and withdrawn, but the family also find themselves exposed to a new world of uncertainty. How do you care for someone who has been abandoned by the people who should have loved her most? Or uncover love in the dark reaches of neglect? And is Jane in danger of forgetting her own family in her desire to repair this damaged child? Dave Hill has written a deeply moving, perceptive, sometimes funny novel about the bitter-sweetness of childhood, growing up and the family ties that make us who we are.

Adoption Time Bomb. Mark Tyler. 2008. 80p. Xulon Press. The sound of far off sleigh bells drifted into her consciousness, and as Marne tried to remember where she was, she realized that a dark form was hovering above her. Marne struggled to scream as she saw the jagged edge of an unbent hanger as it descended toward her heart. Ken and Marne had been delighted to open their home to a beautiful baby boy in need of a loving family; little did they know that their adopted son had come with a hidden time bomb. Mark Tyler has known the heartbreaking loss of two members of his own family. Life with a child of severe behavior disorders was one of extreme challenges, but nothing could have prepared him for the way his own family story would tragically end. Study lessons of life from this grieving father; learn his most important truth and the family motto forged in pain that continues to give him strength to go on. Mark is hopeful that those who read this book will have a better understanding of hurting children and their families, providing a safe place where their fears are heard and their tears are understood.

Afternoon of a Faun. Shelby Hearon. 1983. 209p. Atheneum. The seventh book by this Southern-born novelist is the story of Jeanetta Mayfield, a gawky and appealing girl of fifteen, whose life is turned inside out by her discovery that she is adopted. Harry James is a young man whose pretensions cannot hide his good qualities, who changes his life by “adopting” a new set of parents—who happen to be Jeanetta’s biological ones.

Against My Will. Robyn Heirtzler. 2006. 256p. Cedar Fort. One rainy morning. One selfish man. One evil act. In just a few terrifying moments, Carina’s life changed forever. It had been Carina’s goal to keep herself pure for marriage. The man who raped her took away her virginity, her dignity, her security, her choices, her life. Carina wishes she had died that morning on the mountain, but fate cruelly let her live. She didn’t know a person could feel so lost, so violated, or so worthless. Day after day, she cowers in her boyfriend’s home, unable to find the courage to even go back to her apartment. Only her best friend, Jennifer, and her boyfriend, Jove, reach through the thick curtain of emotions to try to bring her back out into the light. Yet in spite of their efforts, Carina is unsure that she will ever be able to live life again. How can she return to a normal life? How can she face a world of so much darkness? Just when she begins to feel hope that perhaps life might go on, fate deals her the most cruel blow of all. Now, it is up to Carina to reach past her fears and find the strength to overcome her circumstances. In Against My Will, author Robyn Heirtzler creates an intimate and emotional look into the life of a rape victim. Readers will follow Carina’s journey as she deals with the emotional and physical effects of the rape, faces her attacker on the street and in court, and finds the courage and the will to fight back the overwhelming tide of despair and feel peace and happiness again in her world. A must-read for family and friends of rape victims, Against My Will is a book that will help the reader to better understand the pain and frustration - the devastating torment - the victims endure, enabling the reader to better reach out and help rape victims heal. For more information on helping rape victims, please visit Robyn’s website. About the Author: A native of Highland, UT, Robyn Heirtzler grew up with a rich heritage of pioneer ancestry. That heritage has had a strong influence on the values and beliefs instilled on her throughout her life. That same heritage inspired her to begin writing in the historical genre. Robyn has served in the Primary, Young Women, and scouting organizations in her various wards and currently serves as the Webelos den leader. In addition to writing historical fiction, Robyn enjoys teaching others how to preserve their own heritage in books of their own. She also enjoys history, photography, fishing, hiking, and boating with her family and friends. She has worked as a managing editor and staff writer for two weekly newspapers and has had articles published in various other publications. Robyn resides in southern Utah with her husband, Dwayne, and their five children.

Alburquerque. Rudolfo Anaya. 1992. 307p. Warner Books. From Publishers Weekly: Chicano novelist Anaya’s explosive study of political patronage and the search for ethnic roots takes its title from a New Mexican legend. In 1880, an Anglo stationmaster reportedly took the first R out of Albuquerque’s name, a move that symbolized the emasculation of the Mexican way of life. Set in the present, this absorbing novel focuses on a young boxer, fair-skinned Abran Gonzales, who is shattered by the revelation that his parents adopted him. He meets his real Anglo mother, dying of cancer, on her deathbed, then sets out on a quest for his Mexican father—who, the reader quickly learns, is Abran’s acquaintance, the writer/professor Ben Chavez. Unscrupulous, rich lawyer Frank Dominic becomes Abran’s manager, promising that he will hire a detective to locate Abran’s father and reveal his identity to the slugger during the big comeback fight of his career. Dominic, a con artist who wants to turn Albuquerque into a Venice-like tourist trap, complete with casino-lined canals, is running for mayor against Marisa Martinez, an independent maverick. Dominic acquires nude photos of Martinez in compromising positions, which threatens to derail Abran’s true romance and the city’s future. Anaya spins a touching love story woven into a tale of treachery, a microcosm of the social and economic dislocations squeezing the American Southwest. Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

All That Matters. Wayson Choy. 2004. 432p. Doubleday (Canada). In All That Matters, the eagerly anticipated sequel to Wayson Choy’s bestselling first novel, The Jade Peony, the author takes us once again to the Vancouver of the 1930s and 1940s to follow the lives of the Chen family, this time through the experiences of First Son, Kiam-Kim, whose childhood and adolescence in a strict but caring Chinatown family is at once strange and familiar to us. Kiam-Kim is three years old when he arrives by ship at Gold Mountain with his father and his grandmother, Poh-Poh, the Old One. It is 1926, and because of famine and civil war in China, they have left their village in Toishan province to become the new family of Third Uncle, a wealthy businessman whose own wife and son are dead. The place known as Gold Mountain is Vancouver, Canada, and Third Uncle needs help in his large Chinatown warehouse. Canada’s 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act forces them, and many others, to use false documents, or ghost papers, to get past the “immigration demons” and become Third Uncle’s Gold Mountain family. Like many families around them, they must survive in unsavoury surroundings. Since the closing down of the railroad work camps, Chinatown is filled with unemployed labourers who live in poor rooming-houses. Sea winds fill the rooms with acrid smoke from the mills and refineries of False Creek, and freight trains shake their windows at night with noises the Old One says are dragons playing. Yet this is a land where the Chen family will not starve; where they will be able to keep a girl baby, and not sell her into servitude as was the Old One, whose back is scarred from whippings. In their new life, however, there is a constant struggle to balance the new Gold Mountain ideas with the old traditions and knowledge of China. Old One doesn’t like Kiam-Kim to speak English, and Kiam-Kim knows that to be without manners, without a sense of correct social ritual, is to bring dishonour to one’s family. Children who lose their “Chinese brains” are called “bamboo stumps” by the elders because of the hollow emptiness within, so Kiam-Kim must study hard at Chinese school as well as English school. He must help Poh-Poh to cook for her mahjong ladies, and her hard knuckles rap his head when he misbehaves. Although Poh-Poh urges him to stick with his own kind and not let non-Chinese “barbarians” into the house, Kiam-Kim forges a lasting friendship with Jack O’Connor, the Irish boy next door. He also has a girlfriend, Jenny, daughter of one of the mahjong ladies who owns a corner grocery shop. Meanwhile, China is suffering during the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, and soon the whole world is at war. Boys at school are enlisting, and many Chinese have gone back to fight for the old country. Kiam-Kim wonders, “What world would we fight for?” Canada is his home, yet he knows that the new country does not want Chinese soldiers. By the Same Author: Paper Shadows: A Chinatown Childhood (1999) and The Jade Peony (1995).

All That Remains. Robert L Wise. 1995. 288p. Thomas Nelson. After 43 years of separation, David Richards is reunited with his birth mother, who tells him for the first time of his Jewish heritage. The news astonishes David, who was raised a Christian, and prompts a journey that takes him into the crossfire of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict—and to a new understanding of himself, his heritage, and his future.

Amalie’s Story. Julie McDonald. 1970. 249p. Simon & Schuster. Here is the epic saga of the Jorgen clan—of young pretty Amalie, of her husband, Peter, and their daughter, Laura—all of them swept into the great tide of Danish immigration. The first volume in a trilogy consisting of Amalie’s Story, Petra, and The Sailing Out.

America By Land. Robert Olmstead. 1993. 239p. Random House. Raymond Redfield rides his Harley west toward New Mexico and his cousin Juliet, who has just given up her baby for adoption. Together they set out on an odyssey to locate and reclaim the child. Robert Olmstead’s road novel unwinds its compelling story of love and discovery through the streets and canyons, plains and deserts of interstate America. (1997 Henry Holt & Co. edition pictured here).

American Smile: Could You Love a Soldier?. Cody Young. 2009. 212p. Golden Bay Press. A D-Day love story is uncovered, and a present day romance unfolds, when a young woman finds out that her family tree is a work of fiction. Emma Rowland searches for the truth about her ancestry, with the help of a shy American aircraft mechanic who already knows more than he is willing to say. A secret kept hidden since World War II is revealed, and a DNA test comes back with surprising results. Together, Tyler and Emma follow the trail blazed by a reckless young soldier and his blonde bombshell, determined to know if love survives in wartime, and what it really means to be brave. Ultimately their questions are answered in Paris, where they find sweet echoes of the past, but what does the future hold for them both? A heart-warming and romantic tale that blends the wit and humour of a contemporary novel with the nostalgia of the 1940s. About the Author: Cody Young was inspired to write her first novel, American Smile, when she discovered that her grandfather was American. Cody was born in England, and had no idea that she had any connection with America, but now that she has made the link she is very proud of it. Cody lives in Auckland, New Zealand, with her husband and her children. She loves writing romantic fiction because of her fascination with how and why people fall in love.

Ancient Child, The. N Scott Momaday. 1989. 315p. Doubleday. In ancient times, when the Kiowas roamed free across a land of innumerable long distances, the Indians first told the story of the boy who turned into a bear. Now, in his first novel since the Pulitzer prize-winning House Made of Dawn, N. Scott Momaday shapes the Kiowas’ age-old tale into a timeless American myth. The Ancient Child juxtaposes Indian lore and Wild West legend in a hypnotic, often lyrical contemporary novel in which time is seamless, imagination unbounded. Locke Setman (Set), a Native American, is raised far from the reservation by his adopted father. Set feels a strange aching in his soul and, returning to the tribal lands for the funeral of his grandmother, meets a stunning young medicine woman with a gift of astonishing visions—who turns his world upside down.

...And Baby Makes Two: A Novel. Judy Sheehan. 2005. 320p. Ballentine Books. At thirty-seven, Jane Howe is pretty sure she has attained the perfect life: a well-paying job, fantastic friends, family close by (but not too close), and a Greenwich Village apartment that makes visitors drool with envy. But that’s before she sees the perfect child. There he sits in his stroller, angelic and beautiful, magnetic and serene—and he makes Jane question everything she has and everything she thought she wanted. Suddenly all she can see are babies and pregnant woman everywhere. Were there always so many of them? And while there was once a man in her life—her one true love, Sam, gone from this world too soon—there is no man now. Jane must make a choice: possibly become a bitter and childless old lady, letting her biological clock tick on ’til menopause, or tend the ache in her heart now, by becoming a single mother. As Jane struggles to make the most important decision of her life, friends and family offer no shortage of opinions. There’s Ray, her “hubstitute” and gay best friend who would be jealous of any kid who got Jane as a mom; Sheila, her sister, who went from zero to sixty when she eloped with Raoul—who had two young twin sons—and has mixed feelings about being a new mommy; her strict, Catholic father who can’t imagine what level of hell Jane would banish herself to if she becomes a single mother; and the women of Families with Children from China who are preparing to adopt orphan daughters—without a man in sight. Just as she thinks she’s made up her mind, Jane discovers one small wrench in her plans: handsome, charming, funny Peter, who just happens to be (unhappily) married. ...And Baby Makes Two is a heartbreakingly honest, wonderfully addictive, and funny novel about love and loss, family and friendship. Judy Sheehan, co-creator of the smash hit Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding, has perfectly captured the delights and dilemmas of the scariest job in the world: motherhood. About the Author: Judy Sheehan started her career as one of the original cast members and creators of the long-running stage hit Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding. Currently Sheehan is the playwright-in-residence at New York City’s prestigious Looking Glass Theatre, which produces her work every season. Excerpts from her plays have appeared in the popular anthologies Monologues for Women by Women and Even More Monologues for Women by Women. In 2000, Sheehan joined the growing ranks of adoptive parents when she traveled to China to adopt a ten-month-old girl. Judy and her daughter, Annie, live in New York City.

Anglo, The. Jo Moore. 2009. 282p. CreateSpace. The Anglo is the stirring story of loss and renewal, deeply rooted in the windswept landscape of the High Desert Mesa of Northern New Mexico. A random act of violence has a rippling effect on a family and a community. “When I set out to write The Anglo, my intention was to create a story of the effects of random injustice. The two dominant characters, who are certainly flawed, but certainly not depraved, and whose only real sin was that they loved each other (too much), become witnesses—witnesses to events that would change their lives forever. Events from which it would be impossible to recover. But in the end, when the circle is complete, redemption is inevitable.” About the Author: Jo Moore holds BAs in both Literature and Journalism from the University of New Mexico. She is author of two novels, two short story collections and seven illustrated works for children. She is currently working on her third novel. She lives in the mountains of New Mexico where she works as a sculptor and a writer. About the Cover: “Hunting Partners,” is an original Serigraph, hand-pulled by the author, in a limited edition rum of 50. To purchase a copy, go to http://jomooreserigraphs.home.att.net. Also visit her Bronze sculpture website at http://janandjo.moore.home.att.net. By the same Author: Adobe Dreams.

Annie. Leonore Fleischer. 1982. Based upon a Screenplay by Carol Sobieski. Illustrated with color photos from the motion picture. 151p. Ballantine. “The unforgettable story of the most famous, most lovable orphan of all time” [Back Cover Blurb]. In 1924, Harold Gray created “Little Orphan Annie” for the Chicago Tribune. Annie moved from the printed page to the airwaves in 1931, with a famous radio serial [contemporary readers may recall Ralphie’s obsession with the Little Orphan Annie secret decoder pin in the Jean Shepherd book/screenplay, A Christmas Story, the movie of which has become an annual television tradition]. Martin Charnin successfully adapted the story for the Broadway stage in 1977. The inevitable movie version followed in 1982. This book is an adaptation of the film screenplay (which differred significantly from the stage version), and was published to coincide with the release of the movie. Ms. Fleischer has written many other novelizations of screenplays, including, among others, Rain Man, and the Warren Beatty remake of Heaven Can Wait, for example.

Annie’s New Life. Maureen Martella. 2000. 368p. Random House of Canada, Ltd. Annie is only thirty when her parents die tragically and she discovers that they were not, in fact, her real parents. She hires Gerry, a private detective, to trace her birth mother, Mrs. Clare Beecham. He locates her but she denies all knowledge of Annie. Against Gerry’s advice Annie decides to confront her. But when she arrives at the imposing Beecham house she is mistaken for a job applicant, and to Gerry’s horror she takes the position of companion to Mrs. Beecham.

Annunciation, The. Ellen Gilchrist. 1983. 353p. Little Brown. A rich, bored, middle-aged would-be writer is working feverishly in Arkansas to translate the work of a French poetess. Midway she engages in an affair with a younger man and her life begins to parallel that of her subject, including a surprise pregnancy. She gives up her baby for adoption. Through the years she follows her son’s career, but never meets him.

Another Mother. Ruthann Robson. 1995. 272p. St Martin’s Press. Angie (Evangelina) Evans—prominent attorney specializing in lesbian legal issues, partner in a committed relationship, mother to an adopted daughter—seems to many to have the best of all worlds. To herself, however, she is caught amid the contradictions that make up her life. Devoted to her own daughter, passionately involved in her legal work, and committed to her lover, Angie, nevertheless, has a difficult relationship with her own mother, must constantly struggle for support within her law group to continue her work, and is involved in a seemingly pointless affair with a legal intern. As she fights to make sense of the labels that have been applied to her—mother, daughter, lover, lesbian—Angie finds her crisis of identity boiling over.

Answer Is Yes, The: A Novel of Everyday Miracles. Sara Lewis. 1998. 272p. Harcourt Brace. Set in suburban San Diego, The Answer Is Yes takes the typical problems of a youngish, married woman—a distracted husband, a lackluster job—and straightforwardly shows the ways in which they undermine a happy life. Better yet, Sara Lewis’s third novel manages to get from those problems to a satisfying life, a trip that takes lots of luck and hard work. Lewis’s narrator, Jenny, has just moved to Southern California from Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her scientist husband, Todd, who seems more married to his lab than to her. In contrast to Todd’s preoccupation with his research, Jenny hates her bank job and when she loses it, cannot motivate to find another. On top of these things, she feels incomplete because she was adopted as a child and has yet to locate her birth mother.

Antonio’s Wife. Jacqueline DeJohn. 2004. 448p. Regan Books. By 1908 Francesca Frascatti has reached the pinnacle of success in the opera world. A fiery-haired Neapolitan diva with an infamously volatile temperament, Francesca secretly aches with regret for having given up her daughter, Maria Grazia, on the road to stardom, and she has come to America to find her and make amends. By night Francesca appears as Tosca, alternately delighting and tyrannizing the Manhattan Opera House; by day, she and Dante Romano, a detective posing as her lover, search for her daughter, who has reportedly moved to America to find a better life. Francesca and Dante must brave a sordid maze of Black Hand spies, corrupt Tammany Hall police officers, and greedy hooligans to reach Maria Grazia before her cunning and haughty grandfather can spirit her away to Italy and out of her scandalous mother’s reach forever. At the opera house, Mina DiGianni, a gentle Italian lace maker from the Lower East Side tenements, becomes Francesca’s costume dresser and confidante. Like Francesca, Mina is haunted by her past, and by a secret she’s been keeping. Caught between the joyful hope of a new child growing inside her and the painful reality of her husband’s abuse and philandering, Mina discovers new possibilities while working for Francesca ... and is bewildered to find herself falling in love with Dante. When Mina’s husband and his mistress betray her, Mina realizes the terrible price her choices have exacted. As Mina and Francesca’s worlds intertwine, and then collide in a shocking turn of events, both women face the greatest challenges of their lives: to finally lay their pasts to rest and to embrace the present.

Are You Mine?: A Novel. Abby Frucht. 1993. 293p. Grove Press. Cara and Douglas, a young married couple in the Midwest, are on a reproductive adventure, a journey through love, physical intimacy, childbirth, abortion, and birth control. “A body’s all you have to get through life in,” declares the impulsive, loving Cara, finding herself pregnant for a third time. Not at all sure she wants another child, she’s already in love with this child, and her relationship with her unborn baby takes on the dimensions of an affair; their rapport, in the intimate space of her own body, begins to exclude her husband and her other children. Cara finds herself questioning abortion with a startling lack of bias—social, political, or religious. She must decide between disrupting the balance of her established family and her own life, and saying goodbye to a person who will never sit at her dinner table or play with her other children. Cara’s spirited grappling with these problems counterpoints Douglas’s compassionate analysis as they alternate between being the couple that is their marriage, and being two separate people in two separate bodies and sexes. At once a romance and a comedy of passion, Are You Mine? is an intimate map of the obstacle course of life’s choices, a set of hurdles and predicaments so fraught with complication that every woman must negotiate it according to her own needs, circumstances, and desires. By the end of the book, Cara and Douglas, parents and lovers in the middle of America, have achieved an understanding that is at once amusing and troubling, but that is based above all on an affirmation of their own integrity.

Arms of Nemesis: A Novel of Ancient Rome. Steven Saylor. 1992. 305p. St Martin’s Press. Set in 72 B.C., during the slave revolt led by Spartacus, Saylor’s second historical mystery follows Roman PI Gordianus the Finder to the resort of Baiae on the Bay of Naples. The cousin and factotum of Marcus Licinius Crassus, the wealthiest man in Rome, has been bludgeoned to death, apparently by two slaves who have run away. An ancient Roman law decrees that when a master is killed by a slave, the remainder of the household’s slaves must be slaughtered. Gordianus and his adopted son Eco have three days to find the real murderer and save the villa’s other 99 slaves. A convoluted plot reveals fraud, embezzlement and arms smuggling (spears and swords traded for silver and jewels); sensuously written subplots hinge on arcanic poisons and clandestine love affairs among a cast that includes a Crassus’s second-rate philosopher-in-residence and a retired actor who doubles as a female impersonator. Richly detailed bacchanalian feasts and mesmerizing visits to the Sybil at Cumae lead to the spellbinding conclusion, reached during fierce gladiatorial combat.

Around Again. Suzanne Strempek Shea. 2001. 352p. Pocket Books. When Robyn Panek is summoned by her ailing Uncle Pal to operate his pony ring for one final season and then close down his beloved Massachusetts farm, her twenty-two years away from the vacation spot of her youth seem an unbridgeable gap. But she is pulled by forces stronger than her memories to try to piece together the events of that last childhood summer—when a dark mystery and chilling rumors swirled about her former friend, Lucy Dragon. They called her crazy...and Robyn must at last uncover the truth about Lucy’s strange and sudden vanishing—and make peace with her first love, Frankie. Now, the future of Pal’s six ponies, who pace the ring five times for a dollar a ride, is as uncertain as Robyn’s own, as she confronts the past she ran from so long ago and comes to terms with the life she has made for herself.

As Though They Had Never Been. Michael Sidney Tyler-Whittle (writing as Mark Oliver). 1959. Victor Gollancz (UK). The dust cover says this is the vivid, compassionate and deeply moving story of 12-year-old Pasquale, one of the hungry children of Giovanni Rossano, a fisherman who has recently drowned. Interestingly, in 1959, there was a book published in America called The Wanton Boys by the same author. The Wanton Boys was a novel of doomed youth and an Italy the tourist never sees (unless he knows where to look). The story of Pasquale, a poor peasant boy, who certainly falls in with the wrong crowd and ends up selling his body to rich American and German tourists.

August. Judith Rossner. 1983. 376p. Houghton Mifflin. With August Judith Rossner returns to contemporary New York, the setting of Looking for Mr. Goodbar, to explore the lives of two women, each unique yet both reminding us in startling ways of ourselves and others. Dr. Lulu Shinefeld is a psychoanalyst in her forties. She is twice divorced and the mother of three children. Dawn Henley, her new patient, is a beautiful, talented Barnard College freshman—beautiful, promiscuous and the adopted child of a lesbian couple—is the patient who has behind her a disastrous childhood, little of which she can remember when she enters treatment with Dr. Shinefeld. August portrays their parallel lives: Dawn’s in a series of analytic sessions that have the suspense of a taut thriller, Lulu’s through episodes with her children, husbands, and lovers that constitute a superb comedy of manners about cosmopolitan life in the latter part of the twentieth century. August is a tour de force by a writer who has always been distinguished by her ability to tell a story without sacrifIcing compassion and understanding for the people about whom she writes. It will be a revelation to those who know her only through Looking for Mr. Goodbar or, for that matter, through anyone of her six previous novels. August combines the narrative power of Emmeline and Rossner’s earlier works with the ribald wit of Attachments. It is a compelling story that will be many things to each of its readers.

August Strangers, The. Michael Slosberg. 1977. 234p. Dial Press. David August is dying. The only thing that can save him is a kidney transplant, and the only person who can donate it is one of his “natural” parents. Mike August doesn’t know who they are. He doesn’t know where they are. He doesn’t know if either of them will agree to be the donor. He only knows one thing. He will stop at nothing to save his son.

Austerlitz. WG Sebald. Translated by Anthea Bell. 2001. 300p. Hamish Hamilton (UK). Over thirty years, in the course of conversations that take place across Europe, a man named Jacques Austerlitz tells a nameless companion of his ongoing struggle with the riddle of his identity. A small child when he immigrates alone to England in the summer of 1939, Austerlitz is told nothing of his real family by the Welsh couple who raise him, and he strains to orient himself in a world whose natural reference points have been obliterated. When he is a much older man, fleeting childhood memories return to him, and he obeys an instinct he only dimly understands and follows their trail back to the vanished world he left behind a half century before, the void at the heart of twentieth-century Europe.

Awakening of Helena Richie, The. Margaret Deland (1857-1945). Illustrated by Walter Appleton Clark. 1906. 356p. Harper & Brothers. A novel about the moral decision of a woman who must choose between her adopted son and her lover.

b-mother: A Novel. Maureen O’Brien. 2007. 288p. Harcourt. From Publishers Weekly: Among the recent spate of adoption memoirs, the voices of birth mothers have been woefully underrepresented. O’Brien covers the territory in her debut novel spanning nearly 20 years, beginning in 1980—less than a decade after the legalization of abortion and the advent of open adoptions. Hillary Birdsong, 16, has felt adrift since the death of her idealized older brother in a fraternity hazing ritual four years earlier. Emotionally neglected by her perpetually grieving mother, Hillary clings to glamorous party boy Miles, becoming pregnant during a summer fling when he vacations in her small Maine resort town. Unsupported by Miles and her parents, Hillary waits out her late pregnancy in a Catholic girls’ home. Her son, Tom, is adopted, and Hillary spends the next 18 years putting her life back together while anticipating annual letters from Tom’s adoptive mother and awaiting the day when she can legally interact with her son. Beyond some florid description and artificial dialogue, O’Brien’s narrative does convey the long healing process after giving up a child for adoption. But the novel’s long time span seems vague and undeveloped, making readers feel as if they, like Hillary, are just biding time until the mother and son’s eventual reunion. © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Baby Trail, The: A Novel. Sinéad Moriarty. 2004. 320p. Penguin Books (UK). Makeup artist Emma Hamilton is thirty-three when she and her husband James decide it’s time to start a family. She has it all mapped out: Go off the pill in December, have sex, get pregnant by January, have the baby in September. With the help of a personal trainer, she figures she’ll be back to her fighting weight in time for Christmas. But when three months of candle-scented sex fails to produce the desired result, Emma decides that maybe Mother Nature needs a helping hand. Soon her life is a roller coaster of post-coital handstands (you can’t argue with gravity), hormone-inducing (sanity-reducing!) drugs, and a veritable army of probing specialists (torturers, more like). It’s out with alcohol and spontaneous sex, in with green tea and ovulation kits. Emma and James try everything from fertility drugs to in vitro, but all their carefully laid plans seem to go south—along with Emma’s rapidly plummeting self-esteem. The members of her support team are unquestionably loyal, but distracted by their own personal dramas. There’s Babs, her younger sister, who prescribes Emma half an Ecstasy pill to treat her depression. Her friend Jess is pregnant with her second child and gives Emma an earful about the downside of motherhood. The glamorous Lucy, Emma’s closest pal, fears she might be stuck in her “single rut” forever—that is, until she meets Donal, a rough-around-the-edges rugby player who passes out on their first date but quickly proves that he is worth a second chance. And last, but certainly not least, is James, Emma’s rugby coach husband, who quite unhelpfully manages to give himself a groin injury just when she is ovulating. But just when Emma feels as if her obsession may have alienated all of her loved ones, including James, events take a ninety-degree turn that will have unforeseen consequences for everyone. Sinead Moriarty brings a wicked sense of humor to a subject of feverish concern for women worried by the loud ticking of their biological clocks in this sizzlingly funny, yet deeply moving novel. By the Same Author: From Here to Maternity (2006) and The Right Fit (2006).

Baby’s Breath. Lynne Hugo & Anna Tuttle Villegas. 2000. 376p. Synergistic Press. What does unconditional love mean? Baby’s Breath is a groundbreaking novel about a mother-daughter relationship shattered by a crime so horrific that even in our jaded culture few speak of it without an involuntary shudder. None of us thinks it could happen in our family. Leah Pacey, however, is not allowed the luxury of such denial. For her, the only notion more unthinkable than Alyssa’s act is that of abandoning her daughter. Leah’s search for understanding is as halting as our own. She persists only because she must. As we all must. Baby’s Breath is an unprecedented story of human suffering and human redemption. Sometimes art takes us where we have not imagined, where we do not go of our own accord, and in doing so becomes an instrument of social change. In this meticulously researched work, Hugo and Villegas patiently open our hearts to see beyond the surface of one girl, beyond the surface of sensational headlines. Important literature is rarely easy and this novel is no exception. About the Authors: Lynne Hugo and Anna Tuttle Villegas first collaborated on the novel Swimming Lessons, which was published before they had their first face-to-face meeting. While they were writing it—collaborating by fax, phone and e-mail—the two mothers of college-age children became concerned about the increasing number of news accounts about hidden pregnancies and left-to-die newborns and the then-absence of attempts to understand the phenomenon of neonaticde. That concern led to Baby’s Breath. Hugo is also the author of two collections of poetry, has received fellowships in poetry and prose from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the Ohio Arts Council, and is with the latter’s Artists in Education program. A resident of Ohio, she is a licensed psychotherapist and former clinical director of a residential treatment center for adolescents. Villegas’ debut novel, All We Know of Heaven, was published in 1997 and translated into 10 languages. Her essays, poems and short stories have appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies. A fifth-generation Californian, she lives in the Central Valley and has taught college and university English for the past 25 years.

Baby Merchant, The. Kit Reed. 2006. 336p. Tor Books. The baby business is booming. Billions of dollars are spent each year on strollers, cribs, and clothing, not to mention assisted reproduction and adoption. With fertility rates dropping precipitously in the US and babies becoming ever more valuable as a combination of status symbol and perfect accessory, there’s clearly a developing market for someone like Tom Starbird. Tom is The Baby Merchant—though he’d never think of himself in such terms. In his mind, Tom creates perfect families by matching famous couples with prime—but neglected—newborns. Tom’s a master of surveillance and secret “pickups”. His small staff is extremely well-paid, especially the doctor who implants the government-required tracking chip into each infant’s developing skull. Sasha Egan is a talented artist feeling trapped by an accidental pregnancy. Determined to place her child with a loving family, Sasha is jolted by the arrival, at her chosen home for unwed mothers, of the unborn baby’s father. Behind Gary’s insincere protestations of love, Sasha detects the hand of her powerful, wealthy grandmother. Nearly nine months pregnant, Sasha disappears, going to ground at a seedy motel. Jake Zorn is a crusading TV journalist who has broken some of the biggest scandals of the day. His life is perfect—except that he and his rainmaker attorney wife, Maury, cannot have children. They’ve tried everything; repeated miscarriages drove Maury to a terrible act that makes adoption agencies turn them away. Tom Starbird is Jake’s last chance, but it’s too late—Tom wants out of the baby business. Jake Zorn knows more than a few hard truths about Tom Starbird, and he’s not afraid to expose them to the nation. Desperate to find a baby for the Zorns, Tom Starbird settles on Sasha Egan as the perfect supplier. Soon Sasha’s baby will be born. And many lives will be forever altered. About the Author: Kit Reed is the author of the Alex Award-winning Thinner Than Thou and many other novels. Her most recent short fiction collection is Dogs of Truth. Reed has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award; collections of her short fiction have been finalists for the James W. Tiptree Award. Kit Reed lives in Middletown, CT, and teaches at Wesleyan University.

Back Again to Me. Gretchen Hirsch. 2009. 320p. BookSurge Publishing. Everyone in Kingswood Heights, Ohio, knows that Corrin McCrae, a stubby little PR director with great legs, chipmunk cheeks, a moderate overbite, and an oddball sense of humor that’s often in conflict with her short fuse, is a success. A 42-year-old widow, she’s vice president of an advertising and public relations agency and the mother of beautiful, brilliant 16-year-old Shelley, who’s headed for a career in medicine. Corrin also is blessed with close friends, especially Tom Fielding, the rector of St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church, who has a secret only Corrin knows; Barbara Gibson, her college sorority sister; and Rob Haley, a client who becomes a lover. However, when Shelley becomes pregnant, the relationships that have formed Corrin’s support structure undergo seismic change. In an odyssey that takes her from Ohio to Maine to Florida, she suffers the greatest tragedy of her life and learns that family ties, whether by blood or affinity, are the ones that last. About the Author: Gretchen Hirsch is the author or co-author of six nonfiction titles, including Talking Your Way to the Top: Business English That Works; The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Difficult Conversations; Bud Wilkinson: An Intimate Portrait of an American Legend; and Womanhours: A 21-Day Time Management Plan That Works. Two of her co-authored books, Helping Gifted Children Soar: A Practical Guide for Parents and Teachers and A Love for Learning: Motivation and the Gifted Child, were named Arizona Best Books by the Arizona Book Publishing Association; the latter also won an Indie Award of Excellence, an iParenting Award of Merit, and a Legacy Book Award from the Texas Association for the Gifted and Talented. A resident of Columbus, OH, Gretchen is “Chief Surgeon” at Midwest Book Doctors (www.midwestbookdocs.com), where she offers editorial services for authors seeking representation or publication. She blogs at writebetternow.blogspot.com.

Back To Madeline Island. Jay Gilbertson. 2006. 307p. Kensington. Things have been good for Eve and Ruby ever since they moved to Madeline Island in northern Wisconsin. Their apron-making business has taken off, their once-dilapidated cottage is now the envy of the town, they’ve made great new friends, and there’s always lots of love and laughter. But there’s still something missing from Eve’s life—her daughter. When she was just seventeen, Eve gave her up for adoption—and not a day has gone by where she hasn’t wondered. Professor Helen Williams isn’t sure what to make of the breezy letter from her “biological” mother, inviting her for a visit as if they’ve been dear pals who just happened to lose touch. She’s not so sure she wants to know this woman who decided to pass her off to someone else. But curiosity gets the better of her, and soon Helen finds herself careening through the middle of Eve and Ruby’s marvellous, madcap world. And before long, she’s realizing that getting to know her new mother is the best gift of all.

Bad Seed, The. William March. 1954. 247p. Rinehart. Are serial killers born or made? That is the question that forms the basis of March’s book, which, as the title implies, takes the former position in this debate, favoring nature over nurture, a popular point of view of the day. The eponimous “bad seed” takes the form of a thoroughly self-centered eight-year-old girl named Rhoda, a remorseless and amoral murderer who dispatches her victims (a young male classmate who won a penmanship medal that she feels was unfairly denied her; and an adult groundskeeper who discovers and threatens to reveal the former crime) with cold-blooded determination. Christine, Rhoda’s mother, pieces together the puzzle that is her daughter, but cannot fathom why Rhoda behaves as she does until she discovers, through recollections of the time before her parents adopted her, that her birth mother was herself an infamous serial killer. This revelation is both comforting (obviously, Rhoda is the result of bad genes--a “bad seed”--and her mothering is no longer impuned by her duaghter’s criminal behavior) and frightening (equally obviously, the nature of Rhoda’s criminal behavior means that it will never end), and Christine must decide how best to deal with the situation Rhoda has created. A best-seller of the time, the book was adapted for the stage by Maxwell Anderson and screen by John Lee Mahin. About the Author: William March (1893-1954) was born in Mobile, AL, attended Valparaiso University in Indiana, and studied law at the University of Alabama. He served in the Marine Corps during World War I and was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the Navy Cross, and the Croix de Guerre with Palm. After the war, he took a job with the Waterman Steamship Corporation, and worked there for eighteen years before giving up his position to devote himself to writing. March published three volumes of stories and six novels, including The Bad Seed, his final book.

Balzan of the Cat People: The Blood Stones. Wallace Moore (Pseudonym of Gerard F Conway). 1975. 190p. (Balzan of the Cat People #1). Pyramid. Space flight Ares Probe One was thirteen months away from earth on a manned journey to Mars. The IT happened! The craft was plucked out of the solar system to crash on a wild planet never seen by man. Only an infant boy, sleeping in stasis inside a safety cube, survived. He was to become Balzan, adopted son in a tribe of bipeds resembling earth cats! Reptilian raiders, flashing deadly neutron swords, had taken Balzan’s cat-people into slavery to satisfy the blood-lust of an insatiable queen. Only Balzan could hope to rescue them. But first he must learn the terrible truth about the evil blood stones, even if the knowledge destroyed him!

Balzan of the Cat People: The Caves of Madness. Wallace Moore (Pseudonym of Gerard F Conway). 1975. 159p. (Balzan of the Cat People #2). Pyramid.

Balzan of the Cat People: The Lights of Zetar. Wallace Moore (Pseudonym of Gerard F Conway). 1976. 144p. (Balzan of the Cat People #3). Pyramid. The Forest of the Krells: A new world for Balzan to survive, where Orala the priestess plans to seduce him and Androth the Krell king to kill him. Only the Lights of Zetar, dazzling sentries left over from a civilization dead millions of years, can thwart these enemies and emblazon a path between hallucination and reality. Balzan wins his weirdest combat yet in a twilight world of slaves and six-legged spider antrhopoids.

Banana Bottom. Claude McKay. 1933. 315p. Harper & Bros. In the early 1900s, Bita Plant, a young Jamaican, is adopted by Malcolm and Priscilla Craig, white missionaries, and sent to England to be educated and transformed into cultivated young woman. She returns to her home village of Banana Bottom seven years later. The Craigs have Bita’s future mapped out: training at the mission and marrying a dedicated theological student. Reluctant to accept this fate, and despite the evangelical guidance of her foster parents and the friendship of a with squire, Bita is increasingly drawn back to the festivals, beliefs and passionate love affairs of her West Indian culture, with its festivals, superstitions, revival meetings, and passionate courtships. Pictured: 1974 Harcourt Paperback Edition.

Battle for Christabel, The. Margaret Forster. 1992. 272p. Penguin Books (UK). Rowena wants a baby. What she doesn’t want is the baby’s father. Yet five years after the birth of Christabel, Rowena is dead, tragically killed in a climbing accident. The battle for Christabel has begun. On one side are Christabel’s indomitable Scottish grandmother, and Isobel, the unsentimental narrator. On the other are the foster mother and the social workers. Everyone suffers, but the main casualty is the child. About the Author: Margaret Forster was born in Carlisle in 1938, and educated at the Carlisle and County High School for Girls. From here she won an Open Scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford where in 1960 she was awarded an honours degree in History. The day after she finished her final exams, she married Hunter Davies, whom she met and fell in love with at the age of 17. Since 1963 Margaret Forster has worked as a novelist, biographer and freelance literary critic, contributing regularly to book programmes on television, to Radio 4 and various newpapers and magazines. She lives half the year in London and half in the Lake District, and is married to the writer Hunter Davies. They have three children. By the Same Author: Shadow Baby.

Be Careful What You Wish For.... Stef. 2008. 384p. Xlibris Corp. Ten-year-old Gwen lives in Idleburg, Pennsylvania where she spends her days lost in a world of fantasy. One rainy afternoon, bored and wishing for excitement, she reads an article in Universal Scandals Magazine about the Queen of Idlebury in Dimension XIII, who is searching for her long-lost adopted daughter. To prove she is the princess, Gwen endures a series of harrowing events. She is catapulted through the thirteen dimensions and lands in Personadonia where she befriends two of her other selves and a young dragon. She is hunted by the Soul Seeker and protected by the dragon queen of Beastonia. She endures tests of moral fortitude in the Field of Wisdom, jeopardizes her life by waking the dead, survives poisoning with rotteroot, defi es the paparazzi, and meets a cast of characters who are thrown into their own journey of personal discovery, spiritual questioning, and transformation. Gwen’s journey ends at the Royal Assembly after she enters the Wall of Passages and undergoes a test that no one has ever passed. Will she emerge as Gwendolyn the Great, Savior of Idlebury, Protector of the Universe? Or will she return home as a nobody? About the Author: Stef grew up in the Washington, D.C. area. She earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Maryland and her master’s from Marymount University. She had two prior careers, the first as an advertising copywriter and the second as a mental health therapist. She hopes her third career as an author will bring enjoyment to many. She lives with her husband and dog.

Beach Boy. Ardashir Vakil. 1997. 224p. Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd (New Delhi). In this first novel, eight-year-old Cyrus Readymoney introduces us to his magical universe of movies and mischief; tennis tournaments and truant afternoons; sex and samosas; the sea and the shore. Exploring Bombay in the early 1970s, Cyrus strays from his mostly absent parents, members of the Parsi elite, into the complex world of his neighbors, including a mysterious maharani and her seductive adopted daughter. In his travels, he experiences the splendor of Hindi films and delights in all manner of mouthwatering food. But in the course of his wanderings, Cyrus finds himself caught between the innocence and insouciance of his youth and the responsibility and worry that await his in adulthood. When his parents’ marriage falls apart and his family is shattered, Cyrus is forced out of his carefree existence into a more severe reality. With an acute ear for the nuances of Indian English and a comic appreciation of a boy’s life, Ardashir Vakil creates an extraordinarily vivid tableau of India while at the same time drawing a rich portrait of adolescence and its appetites. (First American edition pictured at right.)

Bean Trees, The. Barbara Kingsolver. 1988. 232p. Harper & Row. Taylor Greer, a Kentucky-born girl whose two major goals in life were not to get pregnant and to get out of Kentucky, discovers on a cross-country road trip, begun with the determination to rename herself after the first place where she has to get gas, that car trouble can change more than just her name: when the rocker arm of her windowless 1955 Volkswagen breaks in Oklahoma, she is “given” a baby; and when she has two flat tires in Tucson, she limps into Jesus Is Lord Used Tires, where she begins to learn that her troubles are minor compared to people hiding from Guatemalan death squads.

Beat of a Distant Drum, The. Ray Grant Toepfer. 1969. 256p. Chilton. A fairly lively fictional version of the infamous 1779 “massacre” at Cherry Valley, New York, as seen by the protagonist, a brave boy named Davy Quentin, orphaned before the start of the war, and his struggles to protect himself and his adopted family.

Beet Queen, The. Louise Erdrich. 1986. Henry Holt & Co. Now, from the award-winning author of Love Medicine, comes a vibrant tale of abandonment and sexual obsession, jealousy and unstinting love. On a spring morning in 1932, young Karl and Mary Adare arrive by boxcar in Argus, North Dakota. Orphaned in a most peculiar way, Karl and Mary look for refuge to their mother’s sister Fritzie, who with her husband, Pete, runs a butcher shop. So begins an exhilerating 40-year saga brimming with unforgettable characters: Ordinary Mary, who causes a miracle; seductive Karl, who lacks Mary’s gift for survival; Sita, their lovely, disturbed, ambitious cousin; Wallace Pfef, a town leader bearing a lonely secret; Celestine James, a mixed-blood Chippewa; and her daughter, Dot. Theirs is a story grounded in the tenacity of relationships, the magic of natural events and the unending mystery of the human condition. About the Author: Louise Erdrich grew up in North Dakota and is a mixed blood enrolled in the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe. She is the author of eight novels, including the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Love Medicine and the National Book Award finalist The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, as well as poetry, children’s books, and a memoir of early motherhood, The Blue Jay’s Dance. Her short fiction has won the National Magazine Award and is included in the O. Henry and Best American short-story collections. She lives in Minnesota with her children, who help her run a small independent bookstore, The Birchbark.

Beetlecreek: A Novel. William Demby. 1950. 223p. Rinehart. After several years of silence and seclusion in Beetlecreek’s black quarter, a carnival worker named Bill Trapp [an adoptee] befriends Johnny Johnson, a Pittsburgh teenager living with relatives in Beetlecreek. Bill is white. Johnny is black. Both are searching for acceptance, something that will give meaning to their lives. Bill tries to find it through good will in the community. Johnny finds it in the Nightriders, a local gang. David Diggs, the boy’s dispirited uncle, aspires to be an artist but has to settle for sign painting. David and Johnny’s new friendship with Bill kindles hope that their lives will get better. David’s marriage has failed; his wife’s shallow faith serves as her outlet from racial and financial oppression. David’s unhappy routine is broken by Edith Johnson’s return to Beetlecreek, but this relationship will be no better than his loveless marriage. Bill’s attempts to unify black and white children with a community picnic is a disaster. A rumor scapegoats him as a child molester, and Beetlecreek is titillated by the imagined crimes. Cover Image: 1998 Reprint Edition

Benjamin’s Gift. Michael Golding. 1999. 299p. Time Warner, Inc. His European-North Dakota-Jewish origins were humble, but New York tycoon Jean Pierre Michael Chernovsky eventually towered over a gilded era. To money itself he was indifferent. All that mattered was that he was able to surround himself with things of beauty, not the least of which was his exotic companion Cassandra Nutt, whose thirst for life was exceeded only by Jean Pierre’s own fabulous hunger for cars, clocks, cloaks, pianos, horses, houses, swimming pools, airplanes, and lovers. Then, at the age of seventy-one, Jean Pierre Michel finally acquires the one possession that has always eluded him: a son. Benjamin is an astonishingly beautiful orphan of the Depression, marred by only a single, striking imperfection: a strawberry birthmark that spreads, like the Russian steppes, across his right cheek and throat. Generous and selfish, prodigy and fool, he will grow to be the betrayed son, the spurned lover, the escaped Jew. And he will be blessed by a disturbing yet wondrous gift.

Berlin Connection, The: A Novel. Lily Scheel. 2009. 422p. BookSurge Publishing. Middle-aged and still reeling from her four-year-old divorce, Dee spends her days helping people piece together their family histories and worrying about the day her adopted daughter Jill will meet her birth mother. But when Dee meets seventy-four-year-old Mikhail, she is drawn from her life in present-day Seattle to war-torn Europe a half-century earlier. As a young man, Mikhail fled his native Latvia into Germany to escape Hitler’s army. Forced to leave his loved ones behind, he eventually reached the United States to begin a life there. Decades later, the Berlin Wall fell, the Iron Curtain was lifted, and Mikhail learned he had a child back in Europe. With Dee’s help, he sets out to reconcile with his son before it’s too late, and together the pair embark on an emotional journey of healing. From Seattle to New York City, from Berlin, Germany, to Riga, Latvia, The Berlin Connection is a compelling novel that resonates with the human drama of loss and new beginnings.

Beyond the Dreaming: The First Wave. Annette Upfal. 1989. 370p. Hanuman Publishing (Australia). The setting is Parramatta, 15 miles west of Sydney, in the early years of colonial settlement, centred on Governor Macquarie’s futile attempts at intergrating aborigines and traces the lives of two boys; Toby Redmond, an aboriginal boy adopted by white settlers and John Batman, struggling to overcome the stigma of his father’s convict past.

Beyond the Vision. Kay L McDonald. 2000. 361p. Five Star. In 1830 Ross Chesnut (White Eagle) leaves the Indians who raised him to follow his vision. In 1843 he marries a white woman in the Oregon Territory. In 1850 he loses his family to smallpox. In the spring of 1851, in Beyond the Vision, Ross heads east on the Oregon Trail with a young, half-breed Indian woman who, like himself, is neither white, nor red. At Fort Laramie he is arrested for the murder of one of three men he agreed to guide to the fort and is released to Indian Agent Thomas Fitzpatrick on the pretext that Ross has agreed to be the agent for the Yanktonai tribe who raised him. With mixed emotions Ross takes on the job as agent. He is conflicted about the changes the treaty will bring and the greater conflicts his return to his Indian family will bring when he faces his life-long enemy in a power struggle to save his people and their culture in the face of the inevitable. At the same time, Ross faces a personal struggle to find a life and a family for himself between the forces threatening to destroy him. [Pictured: 2004 paperback edition]

Big Girls, The. Susanna Moore. 2007. 240p. Knopf. At the heart of this electrifying novel is a crime of unfathomable horror and its effect on several profoundly different lives, each altered by a surprising connection to the others. We hear four brilliantly realized voices: Helen, an inmate at Sloatsburg women’s prison serving a life sentence for the murder of her children; trapped within the maze of her own tortured mind, she is the subject of damning national attention. Dr. Louise Forrest, the recently divorced mother of an eight-year-old boy—the new chief of psychiatry at Sloatsburg. Angie, an ambitious Hollywood starlet, intent on nothing but fame. And Ike Bradshaw, a sardonic corrections officer, formerly a New York City narcotics detective. As the alternating narratives unfold, we begin to wonder why Dr. Forrest has chosen Sloatsburg over the Park Avenue practice for which she was trained. And the origin of Helen’s psychosis is revealed—both its shocking depths and its disturbingly convincing rationale—as well as why she is desperate to make herself known to the young actress Angie. The Big Girls is a powerful and audacious novel about the anarchy of families, the sometimes destructive power of the maternal instinct, the vitality and evil of communities, and the cult of celebrity—written in spare, evocative prose and with a bold understanding of the darkest, most hidden aspects of human nature. About the Author: Susanna Moore is the author of the novels One Last Look, In the Cut, Sleeping Beauties, The Whiteness of Bones, and My Old Sweetheart, and a book of nonfiction, I Myself Have Seen It. She lives in New York City.

Birthright, The. Clayton Matthews. 1980. Pinnacle Books.

Bitterroot Landing. Sheri Reynolds. 1994. 239p. Putnam. From Publishers Weekly: Reynold’s first novel is an original, lyrically written tale about an incest survivor’s recovery. By age 21, Jael has experienced the loss of her guardian, whom she accidentally killed 10 years earlier; sexual abuse by the man who subsequently adopted her; and abandonment by another in the swampy, Southern backwoods setting. Educated by her guardian and on her own, Jael is utterly unprepared for the wider world she finally enters. A social worker, a survivor’s group and the inhabitants of a local church community ease her move into society and her gradual understanding of what has happened to her. Reynolds makes minimal use of the psychological jargon of victimization; Jael, quirky and dead sure of her instincts, is a beautifully realized character. The novel’s suggestion of an almost mythic female spiritual power, and the abundance of religious imagery, including the presence in the village of the Madonna, is occasionally tiresome, and the male characters are not as fleshed-out as the female ones. Still, Reynolds aims high and just about hits the bull’s-eye, displaying a self-assurance and a taste for moral and social issues that make her debut a most welcome one. © 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Black Oxen. Elizabeth Knox. 2001. 400p. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Byzantine intrigue and melodramatic excess abound to an almost unprecedented degree in this fascinating, inordinately busy new novel from the New Zealand author (The Vintner’s Luck, 1999). Brief summary won’t help much, but here goes. In 2022, medical therapist Carme Risk is herself undergoing “narrative therapy,” attempting to comprehend the mysterious figure of her father, an apparently ageless and possibly supernatural being known variously as Abra Cadaver, “Ido Idea,” and Walter Risk. An extended flashback takes us to Eden (doubtless in new Zealand), where a foundling who’s autistic, or a genius, or both (“something between feral child and street kid”) is adopted by bachelor loner Carlin Cadaver. The charismatic Abra fathers a daughter, whose later life is chronicled in reports of her therapy sessions and in scenes set (out of chronological order) in Eden, the fictional South American republic of Lequama, and a southern California campus. The restlessness and volatility of Knox’s characters find objective correlatives in the complex aftereffects of Lequama’s bloody revolution (especially as experienced by its Taoscal ethnic majority, as rebel forces rise to and falls from power), and in the tangled interrelations of a cast of nearly 50 important characters, including an ostensibly reformed prostitute and her rebellious daughter, a bisexual male military hero and an Amazonian woman officer, a martyred poet, a morose Newfoundland dog, and a desiccated billionaire who schemes to live forever. Reading this cheerfully overstuffed novel is rather like watching an insanely lavish “epic” film in which dozens of actors play vividly imagined eccentrics: the spectacle is rousing, but thebrain-weary viewer despairs of connecting logically together everything that keeps flying past him. Nevertheless, clues are provided by Knox’s brilliantly chosen title (from Yeats’s line “The years like great black oxen tread the world ...”) and by subtly placed allusions to Patrick White’s utterly mad novel of hermaphroditism and psychic transference, The Twyborn Affair. “Why are these people trying to teach the world about Taoscal magic?” The answers to this question, and many others, will be found by the diligent-and patient-reader, somewhere within the sprawling, infuriating pages of Black Oxen. — From Kirkus Reviews

Bleak House. Charles Dickens. Illustrated by HK Browne. 1853. 624p. Bradbury & Evans (UK). Often considered Charles Dickens’ masterpiece, Bleak House blends together several literary genres—detective fiction, romance, melodrama, and satire—to create an unforgettable portrait of the decay and corruption at the heart of English law and society in the Victorian era. Opening in the swirling mists of London, the novel revolves around a court case that has dragged on for decades—the infamous Jarndyce and Jarndyce lawsuit, in which an inheritance is gradually devoured by legal costs. As Dickens takes us through the case’s history, he presents a cast of characters as idiosyncratic and memorable as any he ever created, including the beautiful Lady Dedlock, who hides a shocking secret about an illegitimate child and a long-lost love; Mr. Bucket, one of the first detectives to appear in English fiction; and the hilarious Mrs. Jellyby, whose endless philanthropy has left her utterly unconcerned about her own family. As a question of inheritance becomes a question of murder, the novel’s heroine, Esther Summerson, struggles to discover the truth about her birth and her unknown mother’s tragic life. Can the resilience of her love transform a bleak house? And—more devastatingly—will justice prevail? Originally published in serial form between March 1852 and September 1853, it was then issued in book form and, like many well-known books from the 19th century, the full text can be read online. Click on the title above to go to one such site. Read It Online.

Blessings. by Sheneska Jackson. 1998. 395p. Simon & Schuster. In Blessings, her third, most ambitious, and most accomplished novel, bestselling author Sheneska Jackson proves that she can capture the sound of women talking like no one else can. She knows what thrills, angers, and motivates them, and she shares the secrets that spill out from under hair dryers with heartbreaking and often hilarious candor. At Blessings, Patricia Brown’s Los Angeles salon, we listen in on the dish and the drama and get real with the four unforgettable women who work there. Pat is the owner and matriarch of the salon, and she presides over Blessings with a kind but commanding air—preventing fiery arguments, smoothing over conflicts, and lending a sympathetic ear to those who need it. But she may never get a chance to be a mother of her own children. After discovering she is infertile, she embarks on a mission to adopt a child, but learns that the process is filled with more anguish than she expected. Zuma is Blessings’ star stylist, and she knows it. This brash diva is a self-described superwoman committed to making her dream of being both a businesswoman and a mom come true. She’s got so much confidence that she has vowed to get artificially inseminated if she doesn’t find Mr. Right soon—and she secretly hopes that this will eradicate the indescribable sorrow lingering from the abortion she had years ago. Faye, another stylist, can’t quite forget the memory of her late husband. Lonely and overweight, she turns to food to dull the pain of raising her two children alone. Her daughter has grown up into an explosive young woman, and her little boy is learning the hard way how to survive in the world without a dad. But companionship and support will come along when she’s least expecting it. Sandy, the manicurist, is still searching for her own fulfillment and can’t be bothered with the needs of her two small kids. Though she makes no apologies for her highly neglectful mothering, she ultimately makes a mother’s biggest sacrifice. Written with Jackson’s trademark skill and sass, Blessings paints a deeply moving picture of female struggle and triumph. As Pat, Zuma, Faye, and Sandy laugh, weep, argue, and console each other, Jackson reveals the priceless, inextricable bond between motherhood and sisterhood, and shows why she’s become a beloved chronicler of the hearts and minds of women.

Blind Heart, The. Storm Jameson. 1964. 217p. Harper & Row. At the age of sixty, Aristide Michal is exuberantly happy. From a Greek childhood scarred by poverty, he has risen to be proprietor and master chef of a suberb small restaurant in the south of France. Although he has never married the woman he calls his wife, nor adopted the orphan he calls his son, Aristide regards them both with a love approaching adoration.

Blood Brothers: A Family Saga. MJ Akbar. 2006. 350p. Roli Books Pvt Ltd (India). Blood Brothers is M.J. Akbar’s amazing story of three generations of a Muslim family—based on his own—and how they deal with the fluctuating contours of Hindu-Muslim relations. Telinipara, a small jute mill town some 30 miles north of Kolkata along the Hooghly, is a complex Rubik’s Cube of migrant Bihari workers, Hindus and Muslims; Bengalis, poor and “bhadralok”; and Sahibs who live in the safe, “foreign” world of Victoria Jute Mill. Into this scattered inhabitation enters a child on the verge of starvation, Prayaag, who is saved and adopted by a Muslim family, converts to Islam and takes on the name of Rahmatullah. As Rahmatullah knits Telinipara into a community, friendship, love, trust and faith are continually tested by the cancer of riots. Incidents —conversion, circumcision, the arrival of plague or electricity—and a fascinating array of characters—the ultimate Brahmin, Rahmatullah’s friend Girija Maharaj, the workers’ leader, Bauna Sardar, the storyteller, Talat Mian, the poet-teacher, Syed Ashfaque, the smiling mendicant, Burha Deewana, the sincere Sahib, Simon Hogg, and then the questioning, demanding third generation of the author and his friend Kamala—interlink into a narrative of social history as well as a powerful memoir. Blood Brothers is a chronicle of its age, its canvas as enchanting as its narrative, a personal journey through change as tensions build, stretching the bonds of a lifetime to breaking point and demanding, in the end, the greatest sacrifice. Its last chapters, written in a bare-bones, unemotional style, are the most moving as the author searches for hope amid raw wounds with a surgeon’s scalpel.

Bloodworth Orphans, The. Leon Forrest. 1977. 383p. Random House. The story is about the relationships of the bastards and orphans sired by the slave-owning Bloodworth family. It is South Side Chicago from the perspective of African Americans who had migrated from the South and settled in urban ghettoes. Forrest is noted for his use of the lyrical speech and Baptist pulpit oratory of African American speech. This is the author’s second novel. Introduction by John G. Cawelti. The author is a winner of the DuSable Museum Certificate of Merit and Achievement in Fiction, the Carl Sandburg Award, The Friends of Literature Prize & the Society of Midland Authors Award for fiction.

Blows of Circumstance: From Hopeless to Heroic. Ann McKinrick Turnbull & Joseph Wase. 1989. 298p. White Mane Publishing. The story of an abandoned child in modern America. Based on a true story, this dramatic account of the life of David Heidecker follows him from his abandonment in Baltimore to his redemption by his loving adoptive parents, his growth to maturity in the 101st Airborne, and his tragic death returning with his unit from Sinai peacekeeping duties.

Blue Jay, The. Max Brand (pseudonym of Frederick Faust). 1927. 267p. Dodd, Mead & Co. Kitchin’s introduction to the kid was informal: a thrown knife that missed him by a fraction of an inch. Something about the fiery Mexican teenager caught his fancy, and he “adopted” Pepillo, mostly as a mascot for the good luck he needed in running a ranch crewed by gunmen and threatened by rustlers. Decked out in his new clothes, Pepillo looked so proud that Kitchin named him “the Blue Jay.” He should have remembered that the jay is the trickiest bird there is, for Pepillo was a lot more than he seemed and Kitchin’s life was soon to depend on the Blue Jay’s nerve and wits!

Bone People, The. Keri Hulme. 1985. 450p. Picador. The Bone People weaves its story together with dreams, myths and legends, the world of the dead, and the ways of ancient cultures. The result is an unconventional and powerful novel which, after being rejected by major New Zealand publishers, was published by a women’s collective and won the prestigious Booker Prize in 1985. The Bone People explores the potential within families for both destruction and healing, as well as the great personal costs of the disintegration of individual connections to traditional communities and cultures—in this case, the indigenous Maori culture of New Zealand. The novel centers on a strange trinity of characters, each isolated, each spiritually adrift. Simon, a mute child surrounded by mysteries, is found on a beach and is adopted by Joe, a Maori man embittered by the loss of his wife and son and thwarted in his desire for family, religious, and cultural ties. The two are bound together by “a bloody kind of love that has violence as its silent partner.” Simon and Joe come into the life of Kerewin, a part-Maori woman estranged from her family. She is a strong woman, compassionate and powerful, a sensualist who delights in color and landscape, food and archaic language, but who is also wary and conflicted. The three come together, break apart, experience great pain and loss, and eventual healing. Ultimately, the family they create stands as Keri Hulme’s assertion of vitality and regeneration for individuals, families and traditional cultures. — From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Prudence Hockley.

Bone Walker. Kathleen O’Neal & W Michael Gear. 2001. 352p. Doherty, Tom Associates, LLC. Continuing their Anasazi series (The Visitant, 1999, etc.), the Gears bury New Mexico archaeologist Dale Emerson Robertson upside down in a Chaco Canyon kiva pit, slice off the soles of his feet, drill a hole in his head so his soul can be sucked out, and twine him up in a hoop of yucca. Since the canyon is federal parkland, the FBI steps in, but Dale’s adopted son Dusty insists his death was a ritual murder that will never be solved by White Man reasoning. Owls hoot, dead souls whisper, and symbols of el basilisco appear, along with smarmy folk from Dale’s past, including the mother who abandoned Dusty when he was only six and one of her ex-husbands. Meanwhile, in alternating chapters describing life at the Chaco site 800 years ago, the Made people (led by elder Stone Ghost and his nephew Browser), the First People (loyal to evil Two Hearts and the stunning Shadow), and the White Moccasins (assassins without pay) are clubbing each other to death and desperately seeking a soul-protecting turquoise wolf amulet. Browser, who becomes an ace tracker, military tactician, and diplomat, finds love, vanquishes two witches, and brings peace. Centuries later, Dusty, after absorbing Dale’s journals, heeding his friend Magpie’s visions, and being deterred from vengeance by the estimable anthropologist Maureen Cole, faces down present-day “Wolf Witch” murderer Kwewur in a wrap-up that loosely ties together ancient and modern events. — From Kirkus Reviews

Book of Daniel, The: A Novel. EL Doctorow. 1971. 303p. MacMillan (London). The tragic story of Daniel and Susan, two Jewish children whose parents were executed for providing atomic secrets to the Russians. Seems reasonable to assume that the story is based on the infamous case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. (Interestingly, recently [December, 2001] Alan Greenglass, whose testimony was instrumental in putting his sister, Ethel Rosenberg, in the electric chair, has said that he lied on the stand in the Rosenbergs’ trial in order to protect his own wife.)

Border of Truth, The. Victoria Redel. 2007. 304p. Counterpoint Press. From Kirkus Reviews: A woman is drawn inexorably deeper into her father’s past as a World War II refugee in Redel’s second novel. Sara Leader, a New York professor, has a substantial to-do list for the summer of 2003: She needs to complete the bottomless pile of paperwork required to adopt a baby from overseas, get moving on a translation of books and papers by influential German philosopher Walter Benjamin and keep a watchful eye on her elderly father, Richard, a Belgian-born Jew who narrowly escaped the death camps. Sara’s awareness of her father’s past is vague at best; Richard (born Itzak Lejdel) has successfully repelled his daughter’s attempts to learn more about his passage into the U.S. The reader is in on the secret, though: Sara’s story is interspersed with the letters Itzak wrote to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in September 1940, when he was trapped in U.S. docks aboard a European refugee ship, the Quanza. Amid his descriptions of his first love, his broken-up family and his narrow escape from German-occupied Europe, he emerges as a tender and bright 17-year-old who made more sacrifices than he ever confessed to his daughter. There are strong parallels between Sara’s father and Walter Benjamin, who killed himself in September 1940, despairing of crossing the French-Spanish border and escaping the Nazis, but Redel (Loverboy, 2001) doesn’t oversell that connection, nor does this story become a simplistic tale of father-daughter bonding. Instead, its best moments contain lucid observations about the struggle to uncover family secrets, and to understand the depths of self-hatred and fear that war generates. Other portions of the novel are less convincing: Sara’s relationship with a married man (and herincreasing attraction to another suitor) is thinly depicted, as is her relationship with her best friend, who mechanically dispenses tough love at every turn. Still, within the confines of its father-daughter story, a powerful essay on the instinct to both keep and reveal family secrets.

Bought With Blood. Ann Quinton. 2002. 256p. Severn House Pub Ltd. What do English smalltown vigilantes, two murders, a missing pedophile and some newly discovered letters of Thomas Hardy have in common? It’s up to Detective Inspector Nick Holroyd to find out in Ann Quinton’s (This Mortal Coil) Bought with Blood, a fast-paced and carefully plotted tale that has poor Holroyd also coping with a hitch in his wedding plans he may have discovered a son and a hit-and-run accident involving his fiancee and another surprise child. — From Publisher’s Weekly; © 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Boy at the Window, The. John Boyd Brandon. 2007. 207p. iUniverse, Inc. Scott Morgan and Vallie Taylor are two young, gay men who decide they want nothing more than to adopt a child. They contact Happy Home Adoption Services in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to find out what their chances might be to adopt. They are investigated, finding out they do qualify. Prepared to adopt a newborn or toddler of any race, they find a fourteen-year-old gay teenager, Nicholas, desperately needs a home. They take the time to get to know him and decide to make him their new son. Nicholas is elusive, never smiling and does not make eye contact, but he agrees to be adopted. Nicholas starts high school and begins having trouble with a bully. Scott, Vallie, and the rest of their family do what they can to help. Nicholas goes through a frightening experience, which helps him finally realize what a real family is and how much his new family really loves him. About the Author: John Boyd Brandon (seated in photo) is an artist who lives in Jemez Springs, NM, with his partner of 26 years, Roy Joe Lee. He earned an MFA from Northern Illinois University. John has enjoyed painting and printmaking as well as writing for many years, creating some interesting pieces. The Boy at the Window is his second novel, a sequel to his first, Appropriate Applause (2004).

Boy Who Hears Music, The. Robert B Fox. 1999. 164p. Xlibris Corp. Alfred King, wealthy, retired, and in his seventies is traveling in Kenya on a photo safari when he meets Koro, a small Masai boy at a roadside stop who wants to “practice his English.” On a sudden impulse, King asks him if he would like to go to America. The boy is overjoyed and takes King to his village to receive permission from the tribal elders. They tell him that Koro has a unique gift: he hears strange music that often leads him to people needing help. The elders tell King that Koro is very special to his tribe, but if the boy wants to go they will regretfully give permission. Back in America, where King owns a large cattle ranch in Utah, Koro quickly adapts to his new lifestyle under the care of King and his rowdy ranch hands. Koro’s music leads him to help several people and he soon earns admiration from the everyone he meets. In school, Koro encounters prejudice, but also the friendship of an American Indian girl. In the meantime, he has grown to a tremendous height, as many of his people do, and in high school he becomes a star basketball player. Everyone expects him to pursue the sport professionally, but he surprises them all by following a much different dream. About the Author: Robert Barlow Fox served in the Navy in the Pacific and the Army in Europe. He was also a missionary for three years among the Maori people of New Zealand. He earned Bachelor and Masters degrees and did other graduate studies at the University of Utah and Utah State University and is now a retired educator. He is a member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators and has published short stories, articles, poetry, and essays in many magazines and journals. He also won three Freedom’s Foundation Awards. One, an essay on Abraham Lincoln, was read into the Congressional Record by then Senator Wallace F. Bennet of Utah. Once when Robert and his wife were traveling in Kenya and Tanzania, they met a small Masai boy who wanted to “practice his English.” Fox saw the beginning of a story, and, like many writers, he asked the question: “What if...?” This mystical book is the result. Robert Fox is also the author of To Be a Warrior, Inherited Family, and The Seeker, all from Sunstone Press.

Breakfast with Scot. Michael Downing. 1999. 208p. Basic Books. An enlightened modern couple faces sudden parenthood—and the embarrassing truth about their own definitions of “normal”—in this hilarious novel chronicling a joyride into the unknown. Sam and Ed are living the good life: happy, healthy, devoted to each other and their careers, they have no yearning for the joyful mysteries of parenthood. But when eleven-year-old Scot’s mother suddenly dies, the couple is determined to make good on a wine-soaked promise made years before. With the best intentions, Sam and Ed hang a tire swing in the backyard and call the neighborhood school to arrange enrollment. Scot arrives just in time to start fifth grade-with a pair of lacy white socks in his duffel bag. It doesn’t take Sam and Ed long to realize that Scot won’t be trying out for the football team. He adores feather boas, wishes the house had better drapes, and keeps Pink Gardenia lotion in his camera bag. Spells of vertigo cause him to drop to the floor in panic, and the kids at school want to beat him up. Breakfast with Scot is a fast-paced, comic novel with resonance for everyone trying to raise children in our relentlessly sophisticated culture. In wry dialogue, frothy characters, and an offbeat plot, Michael Downing’s mastery reaches new heights of brilliance. About the Author: Michael Downing is the author of the novels Perfect Agreement, Mother of God, and A Narrow Time. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Brendan Wolf. Brian Malloy. 2007. 289p. St. Martin’s Press. From Kirkus Reviews: A lifelong loser finds new ways to screw up in Malloy’s depressing second novel. Brendan Wolf is a 35-year-old gay man living in Minneapolis. His parents, financial consultants caught bilking their clients, were jailed when Brendan was seven; he then went through several sets of foster parents before being adopted by sadistic psychologists who forced the teenager into brutal “conversion therapy” upon discovering he was gay. Brendan severed all contact with them after dropping out of college. Now, he’s just lost his latest dead-end job and is facing eviction. His favorite book is Into the Wild, the 1996 nonfiction bestseller about Christopher McCandless, the brilliant young loner found dead in the Alaskan wilderness and, in Brendan’s fantasies, his soul- and bedmate. He is pulled in an altogether different direction by big brother Ian, doing time for conning seniors out of their life savings. Ian is due for release, and he and his wife, Cynthia, want Brendan to participate in an elaborate heist, stealing the proceeds from a pro-life group’s Walk for the Unborn. Through a prison contact, Ian also hooks Brendan up with Marv Fletcher, a rich, ugly old queen looking for a “houseboy.” Both scenarios spell disaster, but Brendan, true to form, jumps right in, ingratiating himself with the pro-lifers with a phony story and moving into Marv’s house. The old man has a stroke, but Brendan whisks him out of the nursing home and becomes his incompetent caregiver. This is wholly implausible, as is Marv’s accidental shooting of Brendan. The final absurdity comes when Brendan, still recovering from his wound on the day of the Walk, drives the getaway van without a license. Malloy (The Year of Ice, 2002) fails to bestow upon his character one bit of self-knowledge, and that’s the most dispiriting thing of all.

Brightwood Expedition, The. Kay L McDonald. 1976. 342p. Liveright. Novel of a woman’s move to Oregon in 1842-3. McDonald’s first novel, and the first of her subsequent trilogy, which includes: Vision of the Eagle (1977) and The Vision is Fulfilled (1983). Marlette Brightwood came from a sheltered life in Philadelphia to the unmapped, untamed Oregon Territory in 1842. Her guide was Ross Chesnut. Some said he was a white renegade, or had Indian blood, but no one doubted his abilities in battle or conquests on the field of love. Marlette had no intention of surrendering to this man she’d despised at first sight and Ross would not take no for an answer from this woman whose life was in his hands. This is a soaring novel of passionate romance set against the majestic grandeur of the Northwest frontier.

Bring on the Blessings. Beverly Jenkins. 2009. 384p. HarperCollins. On Bernadine Brown’s 52nd birthday she received an unexpected gift—she caught her husband, Leo, cheating with his secretary. She was hurt—angry, too—but she didn’t cry woe is me. Nope, she hired herself a top-notch lawyer and ended up with a cool $275 million. Having been raised in the church, she knew that when much is given much is expected, so she asked God to send her a purpose. The purpose turned out to be a town: Henry Adams, Kansas, one of the last surviving townships founded by freed slaves after the Civil War. The failing town had put itself up for sale on the Internet, so Bernadine bought it. Trent July is the mayor, and watching the town of his birth slide into debt and foreclosure is about the hardest thing he’s ever done. When the buyer comes to town, he’s impressed by her vision, strength, and the hope she wants to offer not only to the town and its few remaining residents, but to a handful of kids in desperate need of a second chance. Not everyone in town wants to get on board though; they don’t want change. But Bernadine and Trent, along with his first love, Lily Fontaine, are determined to preserve the town’s legacy while ushering in a new era with ties to its unique past and its promising future.

Brooke. VC Andrews. 1998. 192p. (Orphans Series #3). Pocket Books. Brooke, the narrator for Runaways, has the least traumatizing foster experience of the four. She’s adopted by an ex-beauty queen who is determined to make Brooke win all the pageants she didn’t win as a teen. But Brooke — naturally athletic and quite the tomboy — has other plans in mind. She’s stuck with a foster mom who’s nuts, and a foster dad who’s sympathetic but of little help, but there’s little here that’s likely to give anyone nightmares. Fortunately, Brooke is such a likable, intelligent character that you’ll still be hanging on every page.

Brother & Sister. Joanna Trollope. 2004. 311p. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. We all need to know where we come from, where we belong. But for David and Nathalie, this need to know is even more urgent, since they are adopted. Brought up by the same parents but born to two different mothers, they have grown up as brother and sister, and share a fierce loyalty. Their decision, in their late thirties, to embark upon the journey to find their birth mothers is no straightforward matter. It affects, acutely and often painfully, their spouses and children, the people they work with, and, most poignantly, the two women who gave them up for adoption all those years ago, and who have since made other lives, even borne other children.

Buffalo Soldier, The. Chris Bohjalian. 2002. 416p. Shaye Areheart Books. From the bestselling and critically acclaimed author of Midwives and Trans-Sister Radio comes a hauntingly beautiful story of the ties that bind families—and the strains that pull them apart. In northern Vermont, a raging river overflows its banks and sweeps the nine-year-old twin daughters of Terry and Laura Sheldon to their deaths. In the aftermath of the tragedy, the highway patrolman and his wife, unable to have more children, take in a foster child: a ten-year-old African-American boy who has been shuttled for years between foster families and group homes. Young Alfred cautiously enters the Sheldon family circle, barely willing to hope that he might find a permanent home among these kind people still distracted by grief. Across the street from the Sheldons live an older couple who take Alfred under their wing, and it is they who introduce him to the history of the buffalo soldiers—African-American cavalry troopers whose reputation for integrity, honor, and personal responsibility inspires the child. Before life has a chance to settle down, however, Terry, who has never been unfaithful to Laura, finds himself attracted to the solace offered by another woman. Their encounter, brief as it is, leaves her pregnant with his baby—a child Terry suddenly realizes he urgently wants. From these fitful lives emerges a lyrical and richly textured story, one that explores the meaning of marriage, the bonds between parents and children, and the relationships that cause a community to become a family. But The Buffalo Soldier is also a tale of breathtaking power and profound moral complexity—and exactly the sort of novel readers have come to expect from Chris Bohjalian.

Bunduki. JT Edson. 1975. 204p. Corgi (UK). Edgar Rice Burroughs “pastiche.” First book of this adventure series featuring Bunduki, the adopted son of Tarzan. From the Back Cover of the British First Edition (shown at left): A shot rang out...the driver slumped over the wheel...suddenly the Land Rover began a three-hundred-foot dive down the Gambuti Gorge to what should have been certain death for both itspassengers, but it wasn’t... Bunduki awaoke in a strange country, dressed in a crudely shaped leopard skin, and armed withn primitive weapons. Who had saved him? And why had they bothered to transport him to this alien jungle, far away from Africa? And, more important, had they also rescued his cousin, Dawn, and was she, too, alone somewhere in this foreign land? He had to find her and then maybe together they could solve the mystery of their miraculous survival. But first he had to overcome the dangers of the jungle—a terrifying prospect for an ordinary man, but not for Bunduki, adoptive son of Lord Greystoke—otherwise known as Tarzan of the Apes...

Burning of the Marriage Hat. Margaret Benshoof-Holler. 2002. 381p. Wind Women Press. Based on author’s own account of coming of age in 1960s Wyoming, Burning of the Marriage Hat tells a story of loss and grieving and a woman’s journey into the past to dig up long-buried secrets. This fictionalized account of the conditions of unwed pregnant women in the middle and early 20th century is important to today’s readers because it shows the limited choices available to women.

Burning Sand. LA Ruggiero. 2001. Beaconridge Press. Michael Delaney’s attempt to escape his life of crime ends in a fiery disaster. He wakes with no memory, a new face, and a new identity—Beach Volleyball champion Quinton Squid.

Butterfly. VC Andrews. 1998. 170p. (Orphans Series #1). Pocket Books. Janet, nicknamed Butterfly, is clearly modeled after the heartbreaking character of Carrie from the V. C. Andrews classic Flowers in the Attic. Self-conscious about being physically smaller than other kids her age, and sadly terrified of most adults, Janet suffers even further when her foster mother pressures her into being a ballet star — despite the fact that she simply may not have the dancing skill it would require.

Butterfly Field, The. Rose Boucheron. 1998. 235p. Piatkus (UK). Their pretty commuter-belt village was crying out for a community center and the public-spirited ladies of Swanbridge had their eye on the butterfly field as the ideal site. The formidable fundraising skills of Lady Janey Utox-Smythe and her cohorts are brought into play and soon a comfortable sum is amassed. As far as Janey is concerned, the center is as good as built. Then the bombshells begin to land. First comes the news that the ghastly, nouveau-riche Carpenters have been granted permission to build houses on the butterfly field—the village is already aghast at the ruthless modernisation of their gracious Georgian house, The Mount. Then it looks as if the fields’s owners, Leopold Mathieson and his adopted son David are determined not to sell at any price: the land holds precious memories for them. Finally, the redoubtable Janey is hit by a family scandal just when she most needs her wits about her. As rumor and counter-rumor spread through the village, it begins to look as if the butterfly field is more of a hornet’s nest. Will Swanbridge ever be the same again? A delightfully warm and perceptive look at village politics, The Butterfly Field is the tenth novel from the popular author of Victoria’s Emeralds and Friends and Neighbours.