Nan of the Gypsies. Grace May North. 1926. 235p. Saalfield Akron. An orphan child from a gypsy caravan is adopted by a wealthy woman.

Nantucket Nights. Elin Hilderbrand. 2002. 233p. St Martin’s Press. Three women in their 40s have met for 19 years on the Friday of Labor Day weekend for moonlit Champagne-and-lobster-tails, all-night nude swim, and heartfest. Kayla Montero, with four kids, fights her weight while married to her gorgeously handsome Brazilian husband, Raoul, a contractor with a ten-million-dollar house to build—and quite possibly mistresses to service. Antoinette Riley, who has been “having crazy sex,” is “dark-skinned like an Egyptian priestess” and has “the sexiest voice on the planet ... dark and exotic, like sandalwood, like expensive chocolate.” A daughter, Lindsey, “the color of a wine cork” and given up for adoption as a baby, has tracked Antoinette (who has $30 million from Microsoft investments) down and wants to meet her the day after the swim party. Married Valerie Gluckstern, Nantucket’s top lawyer, has been having an affair “with someone they all know” and will tell all at the swim. Valerie brings a Methuselah of Laurent-Perrier Champagne to the swim, Antoinette a tub of lobster tails, Kayla a quart of raspberries and pale creamy Saint André cheese. Then Antoinette swims out, never returning. Police, coast guard, no Antoinette. Next day Kayla meets Lindsey, gives her the bad news, escorts her about. As it happens,Antoinette was pregnant by Kayla’s 18-year-old son, Theo! From there, everything dips deep into Peyton Place country, with Kayla turning adulteress as the muck rises. One hates to see Kayla, a good Nantucketer, take it on the chin like this. But, well, for a good story? Hey.—From Kirkus Reviews; © 2002 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Nashborough. Elsie Burch Donald. 2001. 416p. HarperCollins. First-novelist Donald (“a member of one of America’s families, the Polks”) chronicles the declining power of two blueblood Tennessee families-in a narrative overloaded with obtrusive commentary and a cast of thousands. Ostensibly a memoir by wheelchair-bound Dan Douglas, a childhood polio victim, the story begins in the late 1920s as Chloe Douglas marries from the family home in Timbuctoo. All the Douglases are there, of course: patriarch Hamilton, his second wife Jane, his six children, and three grandchildren. Also in attendance are Alice and Edward Nash of Cottonwood, connected by only son Seneca’s marriage to free spirit Dartania Douglas. But the main action occurs in Nashborough (read: Nashville), as Donald aspires to write the history of the South as much as a family saga, scanting character development in favor of a parade of events and awkwardly inserting such real-life personalities as the Prince of Wales, who has a one-night fling with Dartania. Jasmine Douglas falls in love with Frank, an angry young artist from the wrong side of the tracks, and Seneca contemplates a political career. Then the Depression hits. The Douglas-owned bank closes; alcoholic Robin Douglas abandons his wife and children; Robin’s elder brother Bayard sells his mansion; Bayard’s chagrined wife Ellen returns to England with adopted son William; and Jasmine runs away to Paris with Frank. The families, still not exactly poor, try to hold on to the old ways despite infidelities, alcoholism over several generations, and a fatal fire. But as William Douglas becomes a Hollywood star and Seneca joins the growing Civil Rights movement, it’s clear that the times are changing both the families and theSouth. If only the characters’ claims on our attention were as obvious. Busy and ultimately superficial, for all its serious intentions. — From Kirkus Reviews

Natural Man, The. Ed McClanahan. 1983. 229p. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. A story of growing up in the small town of Needmore, in south-central, northeastern Kentucky in the 1940s, and the friendship that develops between the hero, Harry Eastep, a fifteen-year-old with the hots for a movie theatre owner’s daughter, and Monk McHorning, also fifteen years old, but six-foot-five and 238 lbs., an orphan, who has been recruited and adopted by the Burdock County High School principal and basketball coach.

U.K 1st Edition

Net, The. Ilie Nastase. Translated from the French by Ros Schwartz. 1987. 276p. St Martin’s Press. From Publishers Weekly: Nastase proves again that his world-class tennis background is fertile soil for popular fiction. Hungarian-born tennis star Istvan Horwat finds his increasingly younger court opponents more and more of a strain. The swinging bachelor life is becoming a bore, and he suffers from a recurrent nightmare of drowning. When his best friends die in a plane crash, leaving their 12-year-old daughter Natty orphaned, Istvan adopts the girl. Most of the book revolves around Natty’s growing-up and Istvan’s steady slippage in the seedings. In Natty’s late teens, she emerges as a top tennis contender and, after some struggle, as a contender for Istvan’s love. Following a short period of bliss, however, Istvan renounces her, whether gallantly or nervously, readers must decide. The rich, high-flying life of sports stars is interesting if a bit shallow, but Nastase knows this scene inside-out. He also knows how to keep readers turning pages, though the book would have benefited from a more credible ending. Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Never Letting Go of Hope: A Novel. Shannon Guymon. 2001. 170p. Bonneville Books. Cassie Roberts’ ordinary life as wife and mother changes forever when her best friend makes a dying wish. She asks Cassie care for her child, an African-American girl named Hope. Despite the potential struggles that await them, Cassie takes Hope and never looks back. Cassie’s unusual “adoption” creates a stir within her church and neighborhood, and many are convinced Cassie made the wrong decision. Tensions continue to mount, and finally the unthinkable happens, leaving Cassie at a crossroads. As she turns to her Heavenly Father, Cassie knows there is one thing she can never let go of—Hope. This riveting story brings home the need for loving tolerance, and will touch your heart! About the Author: As a small girl, Shannon Guymon lived in Plano, Texas, where her best friend was an African-American girl. This book is in memory of their friendship. Shannon currently lives in Alpine, Utah, with her husband and three children. She enjoys the mountains, gardening, being with her family and of course, writing.

New Tribe, The. Buchi Emecheta. 2000. 154p. Heinemann. When a baby girl is abandoned at birth, Reverend Arlington and his wife Ginny are only too happy to adopt her. The media cover this moving story, and a Nigerian woman living in England takes more than a passing interest in the Arlingtons. She decides that they would provide the right Christian home for her own baby, Chester. Shortly afterwards, Chester is delivered to social services with a letter explaining that the Arlingtons should be his new parents. So young Chester enters the vicarage of the sleepy seaside village of St. Simon. He is the only black child for miles around. The New Tribe tells the story of Chester’s long search for his true identity, and the challenges he faces as a black child in a white family.

Next of Kin. Joanna Trollope. 1996. 248p. Bloomsbury (London). From the back cover of a British paperback edition: Two generations of Merediths farm the land running down to the River Dean. Robin Meredith bought his dairy farm just before he married Caro, his enigmatic Californian wife, while his father Harry is an arable farmer on the adjoining farm, working the land, with the help of his other son Joe, just as his father and grandfather had before him. But now Caro has died, as much of a mystery to the Meredith family as she was when she arrived twenty years ago, leaving Robin and the rest of the family to cope with the loss. With Caro gone, her adopted daughter Judy feels cut adrift, while for Joe the despair at her death is far deeper than the family suspects. And into the midst of this unhappy family comes Zoe, Judy’s London friend, an outsider with her strange townie appearance, independent spirit and disturbing directness. Everyone underestimates Zoe’s power as a catalyst for change as the realities behind the seeming idyll of a rural community become ever clearer.

Next Thing on My List, The. Jill Smolinski. 2007. 304p. Crown Publishing Group. From Kirkus Reviews: Smolinski’s follow-up to Flip-Flopped (2002) offers a surprisingly un-morbid account of an underachieving young woman who decides to live out another’s unrealized dreams after a tragic car accident. Technically, a piece of furniture toppling off a truck caused the crash that killed 24-year-old Marissa Jones. But June Parker can’t help but feel responsible, since she had given Marissa a lift home from a Weight Watchers meeting. The guilt amplifies when June discovers a list in Marissa’s purse detailing the 20 things she wanted to do before her 25th birthday. Throwing herself with gusto into completing tasks that range from silly (“go braless”) to heartbreaking (“change someone’s life”), June finds that they give her lackluster life a focus it has been missing. She mentors an inner city “little sister,” trains for and finishes a 5K race, even finds a way for her childless brother and his wife to adopt a baby. Along the way, she grows closer to Marissa’s older brother Troy, a helicopter traffic reporter with surfer-boy good looks. He not only helps June check off certain items, such as taking Marissa’s mom and grandmother to Las Vegas to see Wayne Newton, but his high-flying job inspires her to do something that just might revolutionize her stalled career. As she powers through Marissa’s list, June realizes that her own dreams need tending and tries to break some patterns that have held her back for far too long. Smolinski crafts a believable heroine, and her chipper carpe-diem message may have readers devising their own Top 20s. Sweet, though not particularly memorable.

Night Journeys. Avi. 1979. 143p. Pantheon Books. The year is 1768. In eight years, the American Revolution will begin. Newly orphaned, 12-year-old Peter York has been adopted by a deeply religious Quaker, Mr. Shinn, the local Justice of the Peace. Peter chafes under his new guardian’s strict and unyielding views and vows to break away. He sees his chance when two runaway indentured servants are reported to be fleeing through his community. If he catches one, there will be a reward—and freedom. At first Peter is eager to join in on the hunt, but when he learns the runaways are two mistreated children, he decides to aid them in their escape. See also, Encounter at Easton (1980) (sequel).

Night Lamp. Jack Vance. 1996. St. Martin’s Press. Found as a child with no memory of his past, adopted by a scholarly couple who raised him as their own, Jaro never quite fit into the rigidly defined Society of Thanet. When his foster parents are killed in a mysterious bombing, Jaro Fath sets out to discover the truth of his origins—a quest that will take him across light-years and into the depths of the past.

Night Listener, The. Armistead Maupin. 2001. 344p. HarperCollins. Many years ago, when the first volume of Tales of the City was going to press, Christopher Isherwood compared its author’s narrative gifts to those of Charles Dickens. This has proven to be the blurb of a lifetime, an ever-renewable currency appearing on almost all of Armistead Maupin’s subsequent books. Yet it has held up well—Dickens’ gentle satire and broad good humor live on in Maupin more than in any other English-speaking writer. The Night Listener is his most ambitious work to date. While not strictly autobiographical, the story does teasingly suggest correspondences to the author’s own life in a way that will delight and frustrate his many fans. The main character, Gabriel Noone, is a professional storyteller who broadcasts roughly autobiographical sketches for a long-running PBS series, “Noone at Night,” stories about people “caught in the supreme joke of modern life who were forced to survive by making families of their friends.” When the novel opens, Gabriel is still reeling from the announcement that his much younger, longtime partner Jess (a.k.a. Jamie in the “Noone at Night” stories, and a.k.a. Terry Anderson, Maupin’s real-life, much-younger partner, for those who like to track associations) wants to move into his own apartment and start dating other men. With the success of his HIV cocktail, Jess has exceeded his own life expectancy. Having prepared himself so well to die, he now needs to learn how to live again. To Gabriel’s distress, Jess’s new life involves leather, multiple piercings, and books on men’s drumming circles. When an editor sends Gabriel yet another book to blurb, he reluctantly opens the package to find a long, rending memoir by Pete Lomax, an HIV-positive 13-year-old survivor of incest, rape, and sexual slavery. The book is called The Blacking Factory, after the miserable London bottling factory where Dickens spent part of his poverty-stricken childhood. As Gabriel reflects: “Pete thinks we all have a blacking factory, some awful moment, early on, when we surrender our childish hearts as surely as we lose our baby teeth. And the outcome can’t be called. Some of us end up like Dickens; others like Jeffrey Dahmer. It’s not a question of good or evil, Pete believes. Just the random brutality of the universe and our native ability to withstand it.” After Pete escaped from his parents and was adopted by a therapist named Donna Lomax, his slow recovery was helped along by his memoir-writing and by frequent doses of “Noone at Night.” Touched by Pete’s devotion to his stories, as well as the boy’s obvious need for a father figure, Gabriel finds himself drawn into an intense relationship with his young fan, involving long, late-night phone calls that begin to worry Gabriel’s friends. And, other than their mutual need, how much does he really know about Pete, anyway? As Gabriel begins to question his own motives, as well as those of the boy, The Night Listener transforms itself from an absorbing but quotidian story of loss and midlife angst into a dark and suspenseful page-turner with a playful metaphysical aspect and an un-Dickensian sexual candor. —Regina Marler

9 Lives, Cat Tales. Jan Crossen. 2008. 168p. (9 Lives Trilogy, Book 2). Dragonpublishing.net. Safe and happy in his new adoptive home, young Joshua Carson has multiple interests and talents, as well as a keen hunger for experiencing life. He is confident in his abilities and is eager to try new challenges. In 9 Lives, Cat Tales, the second book of the trilogy, Joshua shares several adventures from his elementary and middle school years. He befriends an adopted boy from Russia, shares adventures from his week at the Y-Mountain Camp, sharpens his athletic skills, experiences his African American roots at a cultural heritage camp, makes new friends at a ranch for special needs animals and people, and meets Martin Luther King, III. Like all kids, Joshua wants to be accepted. He believes in magic and miracles, and makes an unusual Christmas wish, which he thinks will help him fit in...will his dream come true? About the Author: Jan’s interest in the welfare of children began years ago when she was a high school teacher and coach in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, PA. Jan was a mentor for many of her students and athletes, and maintains contact with several of them even today. Jan has always dreamed of creating her family through adoption. Her vision became a reality in 1999 with the adoption of her son, Joshua. The fictionalized stories, in the 9 Lives Trilogy, were inspired by their love and lives together.

9 Lives, Full Circle. Jan Crossen. 2008. 160p. (9 Lives Trilogy, Book 3). Dragonpublishing.net. Being a teenager is tough for most kids, and Joshua Carson is no exception. Like many adopted teens, Josh struggles to understand his past and his identity. He is a handsome and charismatic guy, with a fabulous smile and a normal IQ. But Josh has social, academic, and behavioral issues that are difficult for his parents, his teachers, and him, to understand. Josh makes poor choices and his risky behaviors get him into trouble at school and with the law. Desperate to be accepted, Josh falls in with a gang and later with an irresponsible adult who tries to use him. At the same time, Josh tries to handle normal teenage activities like multiple girlfriends, getting his first real kiss, being on the high school football and basketball squads, skate boarding with other guys, and creating beats on his keyboard. Just prior to his eighteenth birthday, Josh reunites with a birth family member who explains that Joshua’s birth mother drank alcohol during her pregnancy with him. As a result, Joshua has an invisible disability, Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders or FASD. The brain damage caused by the alcohol explains his bizarre behaviors, but now he must find a way to manage his disabilities in order to achieve his dreams. About the Author: Jan’s interest in the welfare of children began years ago when she was a high school teacher and coach in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, PA. Jan was a mentor for many of her students and athletes, and maintains contact with several of them even today. Jan has always dreamed of creating her family through adoption. Her vision became a reality in 1999 with the adoption of her son, Joshua. The fictionalized stories, in the 9 Lives Trilogy, were inspired by their love and lives together.

9 Lives, I Will Survive. Jan Crossen. 2007. 116p. (9 Lives Trilogy, Book 1). Dragonpublishing.net. Joshua is an adorable and tenacious young boy who, like a lucky cat, appears to live a charmed life. Born premature, at only 26 weeks gestation, baby Joshua weighs a mere 2 pounds, 2 ounces at birth. For the first four months of his life, Joshua is connected to life-support equipment, in the Neo-natal ICU of a hospital in Tucson, AZ. This tiny infant’s journey of challenges and hope has begun. Joshua’s life-giving parents are unable to properly care for him, so Josh and his two siblings, are sent to live with relatives. This placement proves dangerous and unsafe. After four years of stress and tension, these three innocent children are removed from this environment, and enter the foster care system. Josh and his sister are eventually adopted into separate families. 9 Lives, I Will Survive, is the story of young Joshua’s struggle for survival. It is an introduction to the foster care system, the diversity of families, and the interracial adoption of this older, special needs child into the home of two loving and committed mothers. About the Author: Jan’s interest in the welfare of children began years ago when she was a high school teacher and coach in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, PA. Jan was a mentor for many of her students and athletes, and maintains contact with several of them even today. Jan has always dreamed of creating her family through adoption. Her vision became a reality in 1999 with the adoption of her son, Joshua. The fictionalized stories, in the 9 Lives Trilogy, were inspired by their love and lives together.

Nights at the Circus. Angela Carter (Angela Olive Stalker Carter; 1940-1992). 1984. 295p. Chatto & Windus (UK). Nights at the Circus is a novel by Angela Carter, first published in 1984 and that year’s winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. The novel focuses on the life and exploits of its main female protagonist, known as Fevvers. Fevvers is—or so she would have us believe—a Cockney virgin, hatched from an egg laid by unknown parents ready to develop fully fledged wings. The story takes place in 1899 at which point she is a celebrated aerialiste, a sensational, often outrageous performer who captivates the young journalist Jack Walser during an interview. Walser runs away with the circus and falls into a world that none of his journalistic exploits could have prepared him to encounter. Nights at the Circus can fall under many different categories of fiction such as postmodern, magical realism, or postfeminist but, rather like its protagonist, is an artful blend of many different philosophies and styles. In keeping with her previous works, Angela Carter plays with many literary aspects and dissects the traditional fairy tale structure in the most imaginative way.

No Enemy But Time. Michael Bishop. 1982. 397p. Timescape. John Monegal, rootless, alienated, beset by the manifold complexities of modern life, lives a secret life in his dreams, his spirit traveling to a bright equatorial world he comes to love. A product of the postwar baby boom, he is reared as an air force brat, the adopted son of a staff sergeant, dragged from one air force base to another, from Seville, Spain, to Fort Walton, Florida, and Van Luna, Kansas. Monegal’s interior world is strange and confusing and an even more intoxicating alternative to the harsh and painful realities of his life in the twentieth century. As a young black, working in a dead-end job, he encounters a man, a scientist, who is interested in his dreams and offers him the possibility of living them. A secret experiment in time travel sends him a million years into the past in Central Africa and, at last, he finds his dreams ... and his home. Stranded and alone, he joins a tribe of proto-hominids and learns to survive while providing them with a few of the handy benefits of his own time and place. Out of this life comes love and, eventually, family. [From the flyleaf of the Timescape first edition]. No Enemy But Time won the 1982 Nebula Award for best science fiction novel of the year.

No Longer Strangers. Rachel Ann Nunes. 2005. 295p. Deseret Book Co. When zoologist Mitch Huntington agreed to be named in his best friends’ will as guardian to their daughter, Emily Jane, he was sure it meant nothing more than pony rides, presents on birthdays, and an occasional day at the circus. Instead he finds himself up to his elbows in diapers and soggy oatmeal. While Mitch soon discovers that animal care and baby care are not the same thing, he quickly becomes totally devoted to the adorable little girl. But Cory Steele, Emily Jane’s estranged aunt, will stop at nothing to rescue her niece from the clutches of this single Mormon man—even if it means pretending to join his strange church in order to gain his trust—and seize custody of the baby. Is Cory deceiving herself as much as she’s trying to deceive Mitch? What’s really in her heart? And what’s best for Emily Jane? You’ve met Mitch’s sister Amanda and read her gripping tale in the best-selling novel Winter Fire. Now Mitch’s story will tug at your heartstrings as it explores the nature of commitment and selfless love. About the Author: Rachel Ann Nunes (pronounced noon-esh) began writing in the seventh grade and is now the author of more than twenty books, including her most recent novel, Winter Fire, the popular Ariana series, and the picture book Daughter of a King, voted Best Children’s Book of the Year in 2003 by the Association of Independent LDS Booksellers. She and he husband, TJ, are the parents of six children, and she believes that raising her family is the most important thing she will ever do.

No Place to Cry. Adam Kennedy. 1989. St Martin’s Press. From Publishers Weekly: If the other two volumes in the projected Bradshaw Trilogy are half as absorbing, edifying, amusing and intelligent as this one, Kennedy has a trio of winners. The Bradshaws are an old, landed Northumbrian family whose only son, Raymond, after a tragic love affair, flees the North of England, sails to Boston and there re-creates himself as American-born. His marriage to Anna Bardoni essentially ends when she leaves the Illinois college town where Raymond is teaching to return to New York, taking with her their young daughter Helen. After her father’s death, Helen discovers that Raymond had a family in England; she and Jesse, a young man whom Raymond had virtually adopted, travel to the Bradshaw estate. Periodically, the author steps back from his characters to discuss them in a tone at once serious and very funny: “There are few people, modest as they may be ... who do not think themselves expert on the subject of marriage.” Kennedy’s achievement in conveying that people love and suffer and grow is crowned by the fact that, without recourse to any bedroom scenes, bad language or catalogue of possessions, this book is impossible to put down. Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

No Second Chance. David A Simpson. 2003. 176p. Athena Press Publishers (UK). When space combat hero Captain Mureke receives from his beautiful wife, Anastasia, a strange gift—an Atallian, a creature he wraps around his wrist—he little knows it is going to save his life. Sent on a mission to warn Earth of an impending disaster, Mureke bursts into the White House to alert the president. The leader’s cowardly and arrogant reaction sends Mureke—quite literally—to Hell and back, and pitches humanity to the brink of chaos. In this dramatic, merciless exposure of hypocrisy and hubris, the author pulls no punches. Weaving together myths of Atlantis, Christianity and evolutionary theory, he points to religious bigotry as the prime source of human ills. Acknowledging the continuing conflict of good and evil, he gives us a glimpse of the form their final combat will take. Detailed, engaging and at times disturbingly beautiful, this clarion call for secularity will provoke as it convinces.

Norah’s Children. Ann O’Farrell. 2006. 250p. iUniverse, Inc. Ireland, 1924. When Norah Kelly unexpectedly dies, her family’s peaceful, rural life is shattered. Her husband, Brendan, decides he must seek a new wife, and temporarily places their four youngest children with an elderly aunt. His plans inexplicably change the morning after his wedding. He refuses to take the children back, and will keep only the eldest, Pierce. He also steadfastly refuses to explain his decision. The aunt is left to resolve the children’s plight and find new homes for them. The subsequent story of Norah’s Children holds us in its spell until the final, moving chapter. About the Author: Ann O’Farrell has an M.A. from Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, where she studied drama and sociology. Married to husband John for thirty-seven years, she has three sons and one grandson and is retired in Florida.

Novel. George Singleton. 2005. 335p. Harcourt. From Kirkus Reviews: A state-sponsored snake handler and defrocked speechwriter finds even more unusual outlets for his peculiar talents, in the South Carolina author’s meticulously deranged first novel. Just down the road a piece from the literary territories of James Wilcox and T. R. Pearson is the town of Gruel, where the story begins with a literal bang. Novel Akers’s mother-in-law, Ina Cathcart, perishes along with her common-sense-challenged son Irby, whose lit cigarette encounters her oxygen tube as he’s driving Mom home from the hospital. Then, things get strange. Novel (so named by his ex-concert-pianist parents, because it seemed to fit with those of his older adopted Irish orphan siblings James and Joyce), having lost his job as an itinerant advocate for snakes’ rights (and ecological usefulness)-which is actually a cover for the subversive speeches Novel penned for a clueless lieutenant governor-decides to hunker down and write his autobiography (to be titled, of course, Novel). His wife (Re)Bekah, unhinged by either the above-mentioned fatal accident or her own possible complicity in her daddy’s putative suicide, skips town, leaving Novel to re-renovate the venerable Gruel Inn (which Bekah had turned briefly into the Sneeze ’n’ Tone weight-loss spa) as a writers’ retreat. Novel hangs with philosophical bartender Jeff the Owner, deflects the wandering attention of surplus storeowner (and, probably, Bekah’s hired contract killer) Victor Dees, and half-heartedly romances recently slimmed-down Maura Lee Snipes (whose emporium features her specialty “Jesus Crust”), before being hired as Gruel’s town historian. So it goes, interspersed with Novel’s memories of his siblings’ sociopathic merriment andhis eccentric father’s nuggets of useless wisdom (“A great pianist should keep a rabbit with him at all times . . . to keep his hands warm”). There’s a novel somewhere inside Novel, but it’s buried under the gags, many of which are just about irresistible.

Nursery, The. Judi Culbertson. 1996. 266p. St Martin’s Press. Caroline Denecke, long childless, is overjoyed to take home at long last an adopted son, Zach. But her bliss is short-lived; she awakens one night a few days later to find Zach still and cold in his crib. The child is dead. SIDS seems to be the only explanation, until an autopsy reveals that the baby died of asphyxiation. Caroline soon finds herself cast as the villain, suspected as either the murderer of her own son or the victim of hysterical fantasies. But Caroline is convinced that the dead infant is not her own. Her insistence that Zach has been taken away is dismissed by everyone around her—the police and even her husband think she is suffering from delusions brought on by the child’s death. Refusing to be deterred, she begins to search for the missing Zach on her own. Then Caroline meets a reporter investigating the practices of a sinister adoption mill. The bereaved mother finds an ally. Together, the two women battle daunting odds to rescue baby Zach.

Object of My Affection, The. Stephen McCauley. 1987. 316p. Simon & Schuster. The Object of My Affection is a different modern love story. Happily avoiding the fast track, George Mullen and his friends all seek something a little more complicated and elusive than six-figure incomes and Manhattan co-ops. Having been diffidently kicked out by his lover, Robert, George moves into the terminally disordered apartment of Nina Borowski. And very soon, as George teaches kindergarten at an upscale school and Nina strains to be inspired into writing her psychology dissertation, their relationship comes to dominate both their lives. It’s all easy enough, until Nina finds herself pregnant by her boyfriend, Howard, a legal-aid attorney who believes “If more men would take responsibility for child care, we could balance out the ratio of men and women lawyers in this country.” Nina decides she wants to go ahead and have the baby—with George. The situation gets even more complicated. There’s Howard, who is too sweet for Nina to give up but too insufferable to live with; Paul, a Vermont man with an adopted son, who is becoming George’s romantic interest; and George’s family, which leads the sort of respectable life that he has always wanted to avoid but now nervously finds himself draw into by Nina’s “original” arrangement.

Octave Displacement, The. Matthew Marullo. 2007. iUniverse. From Kirkus Discoveries: A gifted young music professor’s composition unlocks a doorway to a parallel universe in which he must protect the sequence of notes from time-traveling terrorists, and solve a mystery involving a seductive student. The lost chord, the music of the spheres, microtonal mysticism?for centuries, the physics of music has hinted at great mysteries beyond just pleasant melodies. In that context, Mike Chessel, the witty protagonist, discovers the Cosmic Notes, a sonic progression that, when performed outside soundproofed parameters, generates specific vibrations resulting in dynamic explosions of time and space. When he plays the Cosmic Notes for his girlfriend inside a protected room, both of them rocket through a space-time fissure to Antiearth—our planet’s cosmic twin—where they have new physical forms and new identities. Chessel meets a fan of his symphonies and learns that her beautiful adopted daughter, Jamie, is one of his students. When nude photographs of Jamie turn up on a porn website and are traced to one of Chessel’s faculty colleagues, who has mysteriously vanished, the professor begins an investigation. He also discovers that alien terrorists from the future are tracking him to secure the secret of the Cosmic Notes for nefarious purposes, which could alter the history. Marullo’s premise is clever, and he skillfully interweaves the more conventional porn-site mystery with the sci-fi construct—including a satisfying twist at the end. He also displays promise as a humorous prose stylist. But he’s guilty of a first-timer’s outsized ambition. Many of the comic scenes are overlong, which slackens the dramatic tension, and the author lingers too frequently on secondary characters. Excessively ambitious, but an encouraging debut. About the Author: Matthew Marullo received his Doctor of Musical Arts from Boston University in 1997. He has won numerous creative awards, including a Kahn Award for the Arts in Music Composition. An active composer, his piano and orchestral music has been published, recorded, and performed in public. Among his research interests are nuclear physics and astronomy. He lives with his wife Victoria in Long Island, New York, where he teaches high school music theory and music technology.

Old Capital, The. Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972). Translated by J Martin Holman. 1987. 164p. North Point Press. Originally published in Japan in 1962, this highly acclaimed novel was first translated into English in 1987 by J. Martin Holman. Holman’s newly evised edition of his translation was published in February 2006 by Shoemaker & Hoard Press. The Old Capital is one of the three novels cited specifically by the Nobel Committee when they awarded Kawabata the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968. Synopsis: Chieko Sada is the daughter of Takichiro and Shige, who operate a kimono wholesaling business in Kyoto. Now twenty, Chieko has known for years that she was a foundling adopted by Takichiro and Shige. Soon after a chance encounter at Yasaka Shrine, Chieko learns of a twin sister Naeko, who had remained in her home village in Kitayama working in the mountain forests north of the city. The identical looks of Chieko and Naeko confuse Hideo, a traditional weaver, who is a potential suitor of Chieko. The novel, one of the last that Kawabata completed before his death, examines themes common to much of his literature—the gulf between the sexes and the anxiety its recognition brings. It also addresses other themes, such as yearning for a pure, virginal ideal, the linking of nature and man, setting and character—notions for which The Old Capital offers even deeper resonance as it acknowledges and explores the necessarily ironic and often seductive relationship between innovation and tradition among the post-War artists of the old capital city of Kyoto as they confront disorienting changes in society and taste that they deplore even as they feel their attraction.

On the Loose. John Stroud. 1961. 192p. Longmans (UK). Old enough to want to run away from a loveless home, but too young to know where to go, Royston Beedman is a small boy on the loose. Royston is the wretched result of an adoption gone wrong—gone wrong because his well-to-do “parents” thought that bringing up a child consists in paying school fees and buying expensive presents. He cuts a tragi-comic figure as his rebellious jaunts force him to spend cold nights huddled in beach huts or railway trucks. Driven to petty crime, he becomes “a social problem,” as well-intentioned but over-worked officialdom does its best to take over where the home failed. [Pictured: 1963 Penguin paperback]

Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done, The. Sandra Newman. 2004. 389p. HarperCollins Publishers. When Chrysalis Moffat and her brother Eddie inherit a mansion on the coast of California, Eddie hatches a plan to fleece credulous Californians of their cash by starting the fraudulent Tibetan School of Miracles. With Ralph as the would-be guru and miracle worker, the “school” quickly becomes more successful than anybody first imagined. But something else is happening. As Chrysalis begins to discover her adoptive father’s secret past, her own identity begins to unravel. Was it actually in Peru that she was born? What has the CIA got to do with it? Who is Denise Cadwallader? At the same time, Chrysalis is being drawn into Ralph’s strange and compelling world: a realm of mind-blowing coincidence, obsessive gambling, and mysterious siblings. It is rare that novels come as intelligent and as funny as this one. Newman reveals a subtle understanding of human nature and our philosophical dilemmas, while at the same time charting a hilarious roller-coaster ride through the flotsam of American pop culture: from Californian Buddhist retreats to the temples of gambling, from secret agents to UFOs, and then around the corner to the parking lot of the nearest 7-Eleven. At its core, The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done is a novel about self-discovery. As Chrysalis lays down the facts of her life, she gambles her identity against the contradictions, half-truths, and fables of her past, leading her ultimately to question what it is we can truly know, and whether it is fate or chance that dictates our lives. About the Author: Born in America, Sandra Newman has lived in Germany, Russia, Malaysia, and England. Her professions have included copyediting, gambling, and typing. A student of the late W. G. Sebald, she now devotes herself to writing full-time. Sandra Newman lives in London and California.

One Smart Indian. Robert J Seidman. 1977. 381p. GP Putnam’s Sons. A wonderful, poignant novel about a young Cheyenne adopted by white people.

Openwork. Adria Bernardi. 2007. 344p. Southern Methodist University Press. From Kirkus Reviews: More slices of Italian immigrant life and heritage from Drue-Heinz winner Bernardi. An earlier collection (In the Gathering Woods, 2000) introduced several of the characters who figure in Bernardi’s second novel. Around the turn of the last century, Imola, a wife and mother in Ardonla, a Northern Italian mountain village, supplements her family’s income by transporting unwanted infants to convents for adoption by wealthy families. Ultimately, she succumbs to the catatonia that has afflicted her female ancestors. Her brother Egidio and his friend Antenore, who nursed a childhood crush on Imola, emigrate to New Mexico to work as coalminers. Egidio is killed in a 1913 mine disaster, after Antenore departs for Colorado to organize miners. When Antenore returns to Italy to find Imola confined to an insane asylum, he meets and marries lovely redhead Desolina and the couple settle in Chicago, where Antenore becomes a prosperous stonemason. Their son Ray, a successful but conflicted traveling salesman, his wife Rina and their children Adele, Michael and Theresa lead a suburban middle-class existence complicated by squabbling, ever-encroaching relatives and Rina’s brush with cancer and subsequent hospitalization for depression. Rina’s mother, Adalgisa, is an alcoholic and Rina may have inherited Imola’s family curse: Her father, Ettore, a landscaper at a country club, is Imola’s nephew. Bernardi’s strengths are her ear for dialogue and her ability to articulate characters’ emotions. However, with the voices of seven principals and many other points-of-view, the narrative threads fail to tie together, leaving only a loose pastiche of linked stories. A tendency to over-explicate serpentine familyties and to circumvent pivotal action with (albeit beautifully rendered) impressionistic strokes further slackens the pace. Bernardi is a prodigious talent, but this time she attempts to do too much. About the Author: Adria Bernardi is the author of In the Gathering Woods, a story collection awarded the 2000 Drue Heinz Prize. Her novel, The Day Laid on the Altar, won the Bakeless Fiction Prize. She is also a translator (of works from Italian) and essayist, and teaches at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers near Asheville, NC. She grew up in the northern suburbs of Chicago, not far from Highwood—the immigrant community where her grandparents first settled. She now lives in Worcester, MA, with her husband and two sons.

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Jeanette Winterson. 1985. 176p. Pandora Press (UK). This title, the winner of the 1985 Whitbread Award for a First Novel, chronicles the struggles of a young girl against a domineering mother and the strictures of religion. The novel takes a look at religious excess and human obsession. Jeanette, the protagonist of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit and the author’s namesake, has issues—“unnatural” ones: her adopted mam thinks she’s the Chosen one from God; she’s beginning to fancy girls; and an orange demon keeps popping into her psyche. Already Jeanette Winterson’s semi-autobiographical first novel is not your typical coming-of-age tale. Brought up in a working-class Pentecostal family, up North, Jeanette follows the path her Mam has set for her. This involves Bible quizzes, a stint as a tambourine-playing Sally Army officer and a future as a missionary in Africa, or some other “heathen state.” When Jeanette starts going to school (“The Breeding Ground”) and confides in her mother about her feelings for another girl (“Unnatural Passions”), she’s swept up in a feverish frenzy for her tainted soul. Confused, angry and alone, Jeanette strikes out on her own path, that involves a funeral parlour and an ice-cream van. Mixed in with the so-called reality of Jeanette’s existence growing up are unconventional fairy tales that transcend the everyday world, subverting the traditional preconceptions of the damsel in distress. In Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Winterson knits a complicated picture of teenage angst through a series of layered narratives, incorporating and subverting fairytales and myths, to present a coherent whole, within which her stories can stand independently. Imaginative and mischievous, she is a born storyteller, teasing and taunting the reader to reconsider their worldview. — Nicola Perry (amazon.com UK)

Orphan, The. Robert Stallman (1930-1980). 1980. 240p. Pocket Books. The Werewolf, a crature of the night, a solitary, fur-covered thing. A wild-eyed, five-clawed beast with a taste for blood and the soft crunch of bone between the teeth. But when he discovered he could change to a human form, he became “Robert” and hid in a barn, and was subsequently adopted by a kindly farmer and his wife. Neither Robert nor the monster could control the shifting of its form, and always, the emerged beast lurked within, ready to spring for the throat. The Orphan is the first volme of the author’s “Book of the Beast” trilogy, which also includes The Captive and The Beast.

Other Room, The. Jane Blackmore. 1968. 222p. Collins (London).

Other Women’s Children. Perri Klass. 1990. 285p. Random House. Dr. Amelia Stern became a pediatrician to cure children, not see them die. In a kind of bargain she strikes with herself and fate, she does everything she can to save other women’s children, hoping to keep her own child safe from harm. It’s never easy. Amelia’s hospital life contrasts so starkly with her cozy domestic world that she can’t help but bring it home sometimes. Always available for medical emergencies and the needs of her helpless patients, Amelia begins to ignore her own needs. And her family life and marriage fade in importance as she heroically fights to save all of her children.

Out of Season. Robert Bausch. 2005. 384p. Harcourt. From Kirkus Reviews: As autumn descends on an Atlantic coastal resort town that’s seen better days, a quartet of characters haunted by the past collide in a moving novel. Bausch (A Hole in the Earth, 2000) uses a showdown with Cecil Edwards, the town bully, to drive the narrative, and does so with a sense of the inevitable, albeit with a twist. But his real agenda is an examination of how we compensate for what’s missing in our lives: Cecil, who operates the Ferris wheel when he’s not pointing guns at people, is alone, confused and scared. When his adopted half-sister Lindsey comes to town, she becomes a civilizing influence. Also new on the scene are Sheriff David Caldwell, who attempts to broker an uneasy truce between Cecil and other locals, and Caldwell’s son Todd, who’s spent years locked up for accidentally killing his brother—then panicking and burying the body in the back yard. The corrosive effect of grief has taken a toll on Caldwell’s marriage, but the family can’t be made whole until Caldwell accepts his surviving son’s account of the tragedy. And Todd—who’s been free and hasn’t seen his family in two years—is still nursing wounds Caldwell unintentionally inflicted. Some readers may feel a bit cheated by how Cecil’s feud with the local coffee klatch is resolved. But by deftly sprinkling backstory into the narrative, Bausch (Creative Writing and Literature/Northern Virginia Community College) makes his characters’ histories compelling and conflicted. They’re frail and stubborn, yearning to be understood, but on their terms, determined not to be defined in the present by losses in the past. Bausch gets the quirks and rhythms of a small town in decline exactly right.

Outnumbered, The. Catherine Hutter. 1944. Chatto & Windus (London). The story of a Jewish orphan girl in a south Austrian peasant village is also the story of the death of Austria. Fehge is a little girl without a name, whose parents, Jewish peddlers, died on the road and left her destitute. Around her swirls the turmoil of Austria’s last days. A story of an Austrian village during the early years of WWII “who managed by spiritual means to defeat the Nazi forces.” The Nazi storm was fast approaching, threatening to wipe out the serenity of the Austrian Alps, Fehge’s home.hundreds who looked to her for courage.

Pagan’s Father. Michael Arditti. 1996. 407p. Soho Press. When free-spirited photographer Candida dies in London after wasting away from a degenerative motor disease, her will dictates that care of her six-year-old daughter, Pagan, be left to Candida’s best friend and longtime companion, Leo, a national celebrity and TV talk-show host. Since Leo isn’t Pagan’s father (Candida never revealed his identity), her adoptive, arch-conservative parents, from whom Candida has long been estranged, object; after losing the first round of legal encounters, they weigh in with evidence of Leo’s homosexuality. Forced to admit being gay, turned into food for scandal in the tabloids, Leo loses custody, which proves to be only the beginning of his humiliation. When Pagan (renamed Patience) exhibits bizarre behavior after three months of living with her grandparents, Leo suspects sexual abuse, but his discreet inquiry into the matter backfires when he finds himself charged with the crime. Arrested and jailed, vilified in the press and on the street, with his career in a shambles, Leo becomes despondent; eventually, however, he has his day in court, where Pagan’s videotaped testimony, seemingly so damaging to his case, points the finger at her grandfather instead. Society’s darling once again, innocent Leo has the satisfaction of seeing the real villain, who proves to have abused Candida and her brother too, locked up, while Pagan and he resume their former life together—but not without some fresh surprises. (First published in Great Britain under the title Pagan and Her Parents.)

Pakistani Bride, The. Bapsi Sidhwa. 1990. 245p. Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd. Zaitoon, an orphan, is adopted by Qasim, who has left the isolated hill town where he was born and made a home for the two of them in the glittering, decadent city of Lahore. As the years pass, Qasim makes a fortune but grows increasingly nostalgic about his life in the mountains. Impulsively, he promises Zaitoon in marriage to a man of his tribe. But for Zaitoon, giving up the civilized city life she remembers to become the bride of this hard, inscrutable husband proves traumatic to the point where she decides to run away, though she knows that by the tribal code the punishment for such an act is death.

Pale Indian, The. Robert Arthur Alexie. 2005. 344p. Penguin Canada. In 1972, John Daniel, an eleven-year-old Blue Indian from Aberdeen in Canada’s Northwest Territories, and his six-year-old sister, Eva, were brought to live with a white couple in Alberta, having been removed from their parents by the Powers that Be. John promised he’d never go back. But in October 1984, at twenty-two, he broke that promise. A job with a drilling company brought him back to the land of his people, and Tina Joseph, to whom he was deeply attracted, encouraged him to confront the sad truths of his parents’ lives. In a compelling combination of storytelling and truth-telling, The Pale Indian recalls the power and passion of its predecessor, Porcupines and China Dolls. It is a novel of secrets, lies, and madness written with power and eloquence. About the Author: Robert Arthur Alexie was born and raised in Fort McPherson in Canada’s Northwest Territories. He became the chief of the Tetlit Gwich’in of Fort McPherson, served two terms as vice president of the Gwich’in Tribal Council, and was instrumental in obtaining a land claim agreement for the Gwich’in of the Northwest Territories. He now lives in Inuvik.

Paper Wife, The. Linda Spaulding. 1994. 238p. Knopf Canada. Despite an intriguing start full of psychologically complex relationships and ambiguous connections, Spalding’s second novel (after Daughters of Captain Cook, 1989) pales halfway through without ever regaining its initial vibrancy. The uneven tale of Lily’s life begins when, as a young girl, she is deposited with her grandmother Zozzie following the mysterious death of her mother. Zozzie lives underground, an apt metaphor for their sheltered life together: Grandpa didn’t have time to build anything more than a cement cellar before he died, so the woman and child wander about in cool darkness, hidden from the world. At age seven, though, Lily is introduced to a world of sunshine and privilege when she is befriended by Kate and her wealthy parents. The girls become inseparable, sharing some inscrutable bond. When they leave for college together, not even the new-found mystery of boys or the upheavals generated by the Vietnam War can separate their union—until, that is, Turner shows up and entrances them both. On a drunken night Turner breaks his pledge of love to Kate and sleeps with Lily—engendering not only a child but a new plot direction. Lily flees to Mexico to have the baby, intending to put it up for adoption, but instead finds herself teaching orphans for the sinister Mr. Hogan, a baby-broker. Here, the pace of the story shifts from the gently contemplative to fast-moving as Kate sends Turner to retrieve Lily, and the two become entangled in baby-smuggling plots and Cuban refugees—and then stumble across what may be a child pornography ring. Spalding has a fine way with conjuring complex, mysterious characters, of building a sense of barely perceptible foreboding. Unfortunately, though, she overshadows these elements with her hectic plot—one that in the end brings us no closer to understanding the characters she so nicely crafts. — From Kirkus Reviews. Copyright © 1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Paris Match. Kathleen Reid. 2004. 262p. Kensington Publishing Corporation. “I have some things I need to find out about my real mother. I’ll let you know where I am when I’m ready.” With one hastily scrawled note from her daughter, Lauren Wright’s carefully ordered life starts to unravel. Sure, Nélie has been moody lately—try finding a seventeen-year-old who feels perfectly understood—but the soul-deep bond between Lauren and her adopted child seemed unbreakable. Now Nélie has gone to find the answers about her roots that Lauren never gave her. All she knows is that she was born in Paris and lived there until her real mother—Lauren’s best friend, India Vernon—died, far too young. Others might be convinced that Nélie can take care of herself in a foreign city, but Lauren learned long ago that courage isn’t always enough to keep you safe. Returning to Paris, where every picturesque street rings with blissful and bittersweet memories, is the most difficult thing Lauren has ever done. There are secrets here, long buried but still potent enough to wreak havoc. And before Lauren’s search is over, she’ll realize that Nélie isn’t the only one who’s about to have her whole life—and everything she ever believed —turned upside down. About the Author: Kathleen Reid is a freelance writer who lives in Richmond, Virginia. Her articles have appeared in such publications as Southern Living and Richmond Surroundings, and her children’s book, Magical Mondays at the Art Museum, has been enthusiastically endorsed by the former First Lady of Virginia.

Parting Gifts. Charlotte Vale Allen. 2001. 384p. Mira Books. New York Times bestselling author Charlotte Vale Allen’s 35th novel, Parting Gifts, introduces Kyra Latimer, who was reared in a Barrymore-esque family feeling like she never quite fit in with the rest of her beautiful, talented relatives. Devastated when her beloved older husband is killed in a tragic accident, Kyra can barely function, though her eccentric family does their best to help her cope. But Kyra quickly snaps back to reality when salvation arrives in the form of a dirty, bruised little scrap of humanity: a 3-year-old boy named Jesse. Literally dumped on her doorstep by his hard-eyed young mother who claims to be the daughter Kyra gave up for adoption as a teenager—an interesting proposition, as Kyra is unable to have children—Jesse has seen and experienced too much ugliness in his young life and keeps warily silent. Given the choice of taking the tiny stranger into her home and heart or letting his mother place Jesse in foster care so she can move away with her boyfriend, Kyra begins negotiating the rough waters of teaching a child to trust again. Thrown together by chance, this unlikely duo muddles along as well as it can. Kyra and Jesse simultaneously grieve their losses and learn to love the new opportunities they’ve been afforded just by being together. Along the way, the boy, who has no reason to trust others, especially a mother, grows into an exceptionally loving and talented young man. And Kyra, who once lamented her inability to conceive, devotes herself to nurturing and loving Jesse, thereby learning to nurture and love herself as well. As Kyra learns how to become a mother, Jesse learns to let her try—and sometimes fail—to parent him. But the biggest challenge of all lies ahead for Kyra and Jesse. Can a mother who loves her young son respect his life-or-death choice? Canadian-born Allen has never shied away from exploring less-than-admirable human behaviors, including incest and sexual abuse. In Parting Gifts, she turns her discerning eye to physical and emotional abuse, blended families, and the unique problems of foster care and adoption. Allen captures the day-to-day struggle of all women, making their problems and issues real and making readers care what happens to Jesse and Kyra. A captivating and touching read. — Alison Trinkle

Passpost: A Novel. Christopher Blunt. 2008. 404p. Pelican Crossing Press. Passport is an engaging coming-of-age story about a young man’s discovery of self-sacrificial love. It is told through the eyes of Stan Eigenbauer, who is living a generally upright—but comfortable and self-satisfied—bachelor’s life with his dog and hobby cars. When a lapse in judgment brings consequences he hadn’t anticipated, Stan must make a series of agonizing decisions about how to move forward. He struggles to rearrange his life, and finds himself increasingly attuned to the needs of others. As Stan grows more faithful to his commitments, and more committed to his faith, he discovers a depth of joy and happiness far beyond what he or we could have expected.

Past is a Secret Country, The. Maree Giles. 2005. 416p. Virago Press Ltd (UK). Freya Kirby lives on a houseboat on the Grand Union Canal in London. She’s happy there —she’s started a business as a natural therapist; she likes her own company and loves the friendly, albeit eccentric canal lifestyle. There’s one thing missing—her two teenage children: Kirsty and Tom. They are living with her born-again Christian ex-husband Neill, and his new wife. The courts need to be convinced that Freya is a better parent for them than Neill and Freya is obsessed with proving this. One day, just before the court is to decide, she has a visitor—someone, who just happens to be black and have an American accent—who claims to be Freya’s sister and that there’s another, a twin. Shocked, Freya cannot believe it but gradually is forced into listening to Connie’s story and look back at her Australian childhood. She has to temporarily put aside her children to find out who she really is. Freya’s battle to regain custody of her children is about to take her back to her past in Australia, to a time of hidden truths — towards a spiritual heritage that manifests itself in her dreams but which she does not recognise or understand. Freya is changing. She is developing her innate gift for healing. She’s going to need this gift, for one day the wounds of the past arrive in the shape of Connie. High-flying Connie is an indigenous Australian with an American accent. As unlike the fair-skinned Freya as it is possible to be. Passionate about her children, unsure of her future and confused about her earlier life, Freya is certain of only one thing: she must embark on a quest that is at once spiritual, emotional and physical. A journey without expectations, to an unnamed destination. About the Author: Maree Giles was born in Australia and trained as a journalist in New Zealand. She has had an extremely varied career including editing Parents Magazine. In between journalism she worked as a trainee psychiatric nurse in New Zealand for two years. She also spent time as a marine biology research assistant in New Zealand, looking after sharks and other sea life at the centre’s aquarium—including a friendly octopus that liked to climb up her leg when she cleaned the tanks! There was a year accompanying underprivileged Outback children on train journeys to a residential health centre in Sydney, and a few months working as an Inland Revenue clerk. And she spent a year as an art teacher at a school for disturbed children in England’s Lake District. When she first arrived in Britain in 1980 she lived on a houseboat for five years, an experience she plans to write about. For twenty years she was married to a rock musician/Reuters journalist. She now lives in London with her two children. For the past five years she has been going out with a Canadian book freak. She was winner of the She magazine short story competition in 1997 and 1998 her short stories were highly commended in the Ian St. James Awards. By the Same Author: Invisible Thread, which is semi-autobiographical, was her first novel.

Patron Saint of Liars, The. Ann Patchett. 1992. 368p. Houghton Mifflin. Unanticipated pregnancy makes liars out of young women, this thoughtful first novel shows, as they try to rationalize, explain, and accept what is happening to them. When she arrives at St. Elizabeth’s, a home for pregnant girls in Habit, Kentucky, Rose Clinton seems as evasive and deceptive as the other unwed mothers. But Rose is different: she has a husband whom she has deserted. Unlike most St. Elizabeth’s visitors, she neither gives up her baby nor leaves the home, staying on as cook while her daughter grows up among expectant mothers fantasizing that they, too, might keep their infants. The reader learns from Rose how she came to St. Elizabeth’s, but it is her doting husband and rebellious daughter who reveal her motives and helpless need for freedom. Together, the three create a complex character study of a woman driven by forces she can neither understand nor control.—Thomas L. Kilpatrick, Southern Illinois Univ. at Carbondale Lib. (Library Journal). By the Same Author Run

Paul Marchand, F.M.C.. Charles Waddell Chesnutt; Introduction by Matthew Wilson. 1998. 144p. University Press of Mississippi. Chesnutt wrote this novel at the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance, but set it in a time and place favored by George Washington Cable. Published now for the first time, Paul Marchand: Free Man of Color examines the system of race and caste in nineteenth-century New Orleans. Chesnutt reacts, as well, against the traditional stance that fiction by leading American writers of the previous generation had taken on the issue of miscegenation. After living for many years in France, the wealthy and sophisticated Paul Marchand returns to his home in New Orleans and discovers through a will that he is white and is now head of a prosperous and influential family. Since mixed-race marriages are illegal, he must renounce his mulatto wife and bastardize his children. Chesnutt resolves Marchand’s dilemma with a surprising plot reversal. Marchand, although white, chooses to pass as a black so that he can keep his wife and children. Thus by altering the traditional narrative that Cable, Twain, and Howells had developed for their fiction on mixed-race themes, he exposes the issue of race as a social and legal fabrication. Moreover, Chesnutt shows Marchand’s awareness that traits of inferiority and superiority are not based on “blood” but on other factors. In him Chesnutt has created an admirable male character responsive to human needs and civility rather than to artificial institutions. Books by Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932) include Baxter’s Procrustes, Hot-Foot Hannibal, The Conjure Woman, The House Behind the Cedars, The Marrow of Tradition, and The Colonel’s Dream. Matthew Wilson is an associate professor of humanities and writing atPennsylvania State University, Harrisburg. By the Same Author: The Quarry.

Payment in Full. Henry Denker. 1991. 454p. William Morrow. When it becomes clear to Rebecca and David Rosen, a young immigrant couple struggling to survive in New York, that they will not be able to have children of their own, they decide to open their home to an orphaned black girl. Even though the eight-year-old Elvira Hitchins is going to be raised in a Jewish household, the Rosens vow that they will make her aware of her own culture and heritage. Thus begins Payment In Full one of Henry Denker’s most poignant and heartfelt novels to date.

Perfect Mother, The. Jon Salem. 2000. 301p. Kensington Publishing Corporation. Sharon Driver seems to have a perfect life but doesn’t. Her husband, Heath, coach of the Atlanta Infernos football team, is unfaithful. Her children are her world, but she and her teenage daughter Katie are constantly fighting. And now a secret from the past is coming back to haunt her. Katie was adopted but they’ve never told her, and Katie’s birth mother, Georgette, is making outrageous demands and threatening to come to Atlanta. Sharon, trying to hold her world together, decides not to allow Georgette see Katie. But Georgette will let nothing stop her and has devised a cunning, murderous plan to reach Katie. Her evil mind has come up with a scheme so devious that Sharon’s life will turn into a living hell.

Perfect Piece. Rebeca Seitz. 2009. 360p. (Sisters, Ink Series #4). B&H Publishing Group. Perfect Piece is a perfectly conceived conclusion to the charming Sisters, Ink series of novels for women (Sisters, Ink [2008]; Coming Unglued [2008]; and Scrapping Plans [2009]). At the heart of each story are four unlikely sisters, each separately adopted into the loving home of Marilyn and Jack Sinclair where they still meet as adults in their late mother’s attic to work on scrapbook projects and work through life together. The Sinclair sisterhood is about to be rocked from its foundation when Meg—the bedrock sibling most like Momma—collapses with a brain tumor. Surgery removes the invading mass but leaves a sister full of mood swings, depression, anger, and bitterness. Tandy, Kendra, and Joy struggle to find a trace of their formerly happy sister, who always pointed them to life’s positives. Meg’s husband, Jamison, struggles even more. With no idea how to handle the new, unimproved person inhabiting his wife’s body, he finds it too easy to seek solace in the clever conversation of another woman. What none of them realize is that the wisdom they need is already at hand. About the Author: Rebeca Seitz is the author of Prints Charming and the founder and president of Glass Road Public Relations, a company dedicated solely to representing novelists who write from a Christian worldview. She has previously worked with authors including Ted Dekker, Frank Peretti, Robin Jones Gunn, and Brandilyn Collins. Seitz lives with her husband and son in Fulton, KY.

Perseus Breed, The. Kevin Egan. 1988. Pageant Books. Every thirty years beautiful women disappeared off the face of the earth. Each one haunted by visions of another world and tormented by a dream that she had been adopted. Share discovers this terrifying pattern when his own girlfriend vanishes after she dreams she was adopted and destined to vanish.

Picture Makers, The. Emily Ellison. 1990. 252p. William Morrow & Co. From Publishers Weekly: As characters retell past events and describe the relationships that give meaning to their lives, they create a vivid and touching account of one family’s growth and change in this novel by the author of First Light. Various members of the Glass family speak in turn; they fill in the gaps in others’ stories and reveal their own philosophies and emotions in distinctive voices. The relationship between Eleanor, a middle-aged artist, and her father, Henry, a South Carolina peach farmer, is explored through reminiscences about Eleanor’s childhood and first marriage, and also through her parents’ memories of their early years together and their life plans, now greatly altered. Feeling that she is losing the creative center of her life, Eleanor leaves Atlanta and her second husband, and endures a lonely, introspective stay in New York. With a new perspective, she realizes her family’s importance to her, as well as her own self-worth. As the seven leading characters speak of their relationships, joys and tragedies, the Glass family gains warmth, complexity and appeal. Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Pigs in Heaven. Barbara Kingsolver. 1993. 323p. Harper Collins. When six-year-old Turtle Greer witnesses a freak accident at the Hoover Dam, her insistence on what she has seen and her mother’s belief in her lead to a man’s dramatic rescue. But Turtle’s moment of celebrity draws her into a conflict of historic proportions. The crisis quickly envelops not only Turtle and her mother, Taylor, but everyone else who touches their lives in a complex web connecting their future with their past. A deeply felt novel of love despite the risks, of tearing apart and coming together, Pigs in Heaven travels the roads from rural Kentucky and the Urban Southwest to Heaven, Oklahoma, and the Cherokee Nation. Along the way it introduces a vivid cast of characters, including Jax, Taylor’s insecure boyfriend, who plays in a band called the Irascible Babies; Barbie, a perky young woman who has modeled her life on Barbie the doll, except for her habit of crime; Alice, Taylor’s mother, who is on the verge of leaving a silent husband whose idea of partnership in marriage is to spray WD-40 on anything that squeaks; and Annawake Fourkiller, an idealistic young attorney for the Cherokee nation, who must learn to reconcile the truths in her heart with those in her head. As this spellbinding novel unfolds, it draws the reader into a world of heartbreak and redeeming love, testing the boundaries of family and the many separate truths about the ties that bind. With Pigs in Heaven, Barbara Kingsolver has given us her wisest, most compelling work to date.

Pilgrimage, A. Johan Bojer (1872-1959). Translated from the Norwegian by Jessie Muir. 1924. 246p. The Century Co. A novel about a mother and her illegitimate child by a Norwegian author who caused a brief sensation in the American literary world with the publication of his novel The Great Hunger in 1919, and was lauded as the most important Scandinavian writer since Ibsen.

Pillar of the Sky, The: A Novel of Stonehenge. Cecelia Holland. 1989. 534p. Ballentine Publishing Group. Here is the story of Moloquin, the unwanted child. Outcast sister-son of the chief of Ladon’s tribe, he is adopted instead by the wise-woman Karella, storyteller, lawgiver, prophetess. He was a special one, a speaker to the gods, who was determined to build a gateway to heaven, and inspired a people to follow him, to raise the great stones on Salisbury Plain.

Pinch of Dry Mustard, A. Barbara Roose Cramer. 2009. 272p. Trafford Publishing. Natalie Pickford Andrews gives birth to a baby girl at the young age of eighteen and her parents force her to give the baby up for adoption. After she attempts to commit suicide, she is no longer physically able to have a child of her own. Obsessed by what she can no longer have, Natalie becomes involved in a series of drug dealings, kidnapping, and an attempted murder to get a child which she so desperately wants—even if it means seeking out and abducting her own daughter’s child. Sarah Waverly Kestwick, Natalie’s biological and musically talented daughter is aware of her adoption but has no idea who her birth parents are nor does she care to know. She has no idea that her biological mother is crafting an evil scheme to kidnap Sarah’s unborn child and claim it as her own. Sarah’s faith in God guides her through her difficult delivery and the pain she suffers when her husband, Ben, goes missing at sea. A Pinch of Dry Mustard takes place over a three-day period in a quaint fishing village along the coast of Maine. It is an intriguing mystery and a family’s ultimate testament to faith, hope, and love.

Place Called Lantern Light, A. Ellen Miller. 1975. 142p. Collins (Australia). An adopted girl travels with her foster family to meet a “real” uncle.

Plain Seeing: A Novel. Sandra Jean Scofield. 1998. 320p. HarperCollins Publishers. When Lucy was fifteen, her mother died. Everything that has followed—her education, husband, and child —has been “after the fact.” Her perennial grief is compounded by a sense of never having really known her mother, who ran away to California, then came home pregnant at seventeen. Did she really love Lucy? Could she have struggled harder to live? Lucy has only the image of her mothers stepping down from a train into her own mother’s arms, and her memories of an enigmatic, melancholy woman. How often she has thought, I wish there were more to know. More to tell. The reader does know more. “Emma Laura’s Book,” which opens with a family gathered for a portrait in a 1938 West Texas farm town, sweeps to wartime Hollywood and illuminates the myth of the vibrant young woman whose beauty might have made her a star. Nearly half a century later, in “Lucy’s Book,” her daughter is struggling to recover from a terrible injury when she realizes her family life is falling apart. Lucy’s visit to her last older relative, her funny and feisty Aunt Opal in Lubbock, Texas, leads to the discovery of a second photograph taken that day in 1938. From there she embarks on a quest to understand her mother’s young life, as a way to see the plain truth of her own. Only as she accepts the mystery of her mother’s story can she begin to live a real and present life.

Playing the Jack. Mary Brown. 1984. 583p. Hutchinson (UK). On a brilliant April day in 1785, a runaway orphan is adopted by a band of travelling players, led by the infinitely charming, infinitely mysterious Jack. With Fat Annie, the World’s Largest Woman, a troupe of dwarf acrobats, a turbanned juggler and master magician, and Daily, the dancing pony, the newly christened “Sprat” learns the tricks of their trade. .More than one character in this exeberant, picaresque novel plays a double game. And how they all are linked is the key to a romantic adventure teeming with life. The author’s first novel.

Portrait of an Unknown Woman. Vanora Bennett. 2007. 432p. William Morrow. From Kirkus Reviews: In Henry VIII’s England, a spirited heroine grows from impulsive girl to wiser woman as religious intolerance rages. British journalist Bennett’s first novel takes a sober approach to a well-trod patch of English history. Her educated heroine, Meg Giggs, is a ward in the home of Lord Chancellor Sir Thomas More, giving her a ringside seat overlooking the terrible drama of religious conflict. More is committed to defending the Catholic faith, which is coming under threat from the heretics, i.e., Lutheran Protestants. As Hans Holbein arrives to paint what will be his famous portrait of More and family, Meg comes back into contact with the man she always loved, John Clement, and with whom she shares healing aspirations. (She is an herbalist; he has been studying medicine.) John declares his love and intention to marry Meg, but More blocks the wedding until John is elected to the College of Physicians. Eventual plans for the union are eclipsed by John’s revelation that he is, in fact, Richard Plantagenet, one of the two princes assumed murdered by Richard III. But the wedding finally proceeds, initially happily, and a son is born. Suppression of the heretics, led by More, intensifies, with torture and burnings at the stake, resulting in Meg losing faith in her adopted father. When her husband reveals another important secret, she becomes estranged from him, too. The king, desperate for an heir and seeking a divorce in order to marry Anne Boleyn, begins to side with the Protestants, and More resigns. Holbein returns, now a better artist with an undying admiration for Meg, leading to the exposure of additional secrets and Meg’s final decision to opt for forgiveness and reconciliation. Anengrossing, quietly impassioned historical that blends some big ideas into the love story and ends with a touching burst of emotional insight. About the Author: Vanora Bennett is an award-winning journalist who writes a weekly column for The Times (London) Web site, TimesOnline. She lives in North London. Portrait of an Unknown Woman is her first novel.

Prayer For Owen Meany, A. John Irving. 1989. 640p. Ballantine. Irving’s storytelling skills have gone seriously astray in this contrived, preachy, tedious tale of the eponymous Owen Meany, a latter-day prophet and Christ-like figure who dies a martyr after having inspired true Christian belief in the narrator, Johnny Wheelwright. The boys grow up close friends in a small New Hampshire town, where Owen’s loutish parents own a quarry and where the fatherless Johnny, whose beloved mother never reveals the secret of his paternity, becomes an orphan at age 11 when a foul ball hit by Owen in a Little League game strikes his mother on the head, killing her instantly. The tragedy notwithstanding, Owen and Johnny cleave to a friendship sealed when Owen uses desperate means to keep Johnny from going to Vietnam, and brought to its apotheosis when Johnny is present at the death Owen has seen prefigured in a vision. Despite the overworked theme of a boy’s best friend causing his mother’s injury or death (one thinks immediately of Robertson Davies and Nancy Willard), the plot might have been workable had not Irving made Owen a caricature: Owen is, all his life, so tiny he can be lifted with one hand; he is “mortally cute,” and he has a “cartoon voice” because he must shout through his nose, which Irving conveys by printing all of Owen’s dialogue in capital lettersan irritating device that immediately sets the reader’s teeth on edge. Then too, the author’s portentously dramatic foreshadowing, which has worked well in his previous books, is here sadly overdone and excessively melodramatic. On the plus side, Irving is convincing in his appraisal of the tragedy of Vietnam and in his religious philosophizing, in which he distinguishes the true elements of faith. But that is not enough to save the meandering narrative. Owen is not the only one to hit a foul ball in this novel, which is too “mortally cute” for its own good. — Publisher’s Weekly.

Prestige, The. Christopher Priest. 1996. 404p. St Martin’s Press. From Kirkus Reviews: After a ten-year hiatus, Priest (The Glamour, 1985, etc.) returns in strength with a taut, twisting, prize-winning story of two magicians and their fierce fin-de-siècle rivalry that taints successive generations of their respective families. A London journalist is brought to an English manor house by a ruse, there to meet a young woman who claims to have known him as a child—and to have watched him die at her father’s hands. Baffled by these memories, the two join forces to plumb the written records of their ancestors, Alfred Borden and Rupert Angier, talented magicians who bore each other tremendous ill will. Their first clash came in 1878, as Borden, in an excess of zeal for the purity of the magician’s craft, attempted to expose Angier as a fraud during a séance he and his wife were conducting. The attempt failed, but in the process Angier’s pregnant wife was hurt and lost their baby, thereby prompting an unending feud between the men. Many ruined performances later, with both men having risen to prominence in their work, Borden seems at last to have gained the upper hand with his use of then-novel electricity to transport himself, inexplicably and instantaneously, from one part of a stage to another. Not to be outdone, Angier visits Colorado to meet with the eccentric master of electricity, Nikola Tesla, commissioning him to build a transporting device that will top Borden’s act. In time he learns that his rival’s trick is only an illusion while his is the real thing, and this fact creates a catastrophe that will reverberate through several generations when Borden again disrupts Angier’s act by pulling the plug on Tesla’s device at the worst possible moment. Electrifying effects and a deft handling of mysteries and their explanations (some remaining tantalizingly incomplete) in an unexpectedly compelling fusion of weird science and legerdemain.

Pretty Blue. Kari Caulfield. 2006. 232p. Outskirts Press. Faye works in New York’s fashionable and cutthroat cooking-show industry, where the people are as disposable as overripe fruit. She is sharp, hip, and wisely discreet. Although scarred by the tragic deaths of her adoptive parents and her fiancé—who was killed in the 9/11 attacks—she keeps her private life and its heartbreaks to herself. When Faye’s therapist suggests that she locate her birth mother, the long-awaited reunion does not go as planned. Annie Parker is a shady alcoholic who will do anything to try to cut her newfound daughter down to size. The wise course of action would be for Faye to walk away and forget the past. But will she be able to turn her back on her mother’s final, harrowing call for help? About the Author: Kari Caulfield was born in New York City’s Greenwich Village, and now lives on Long Island. She is a practicing attorney and a member of several Manhattan writers’ groups. She has borrowed heavily from her own incredibly outrageous life to pen this hauntingly beautiful yet shocking first novel.

Prince of Central Park, The. Evan H Rhodes. 1975. 224p. Coward, McCann & Geoghegan. Eleven-year-old orphan boy Jay-Jay runs away from his drunken foster mother and a tough life of being bullied at school and beaten at home to the only place he has, paradoxically, ever felt safe—the hostile environment of Central Park, a realm of muggers and drunks, a place of terror once one steps away from the sunny walks. There he discovers that the day a kid runs away from home, he stops being a kid. But he finds refuge in a huge spreading oak tree, among whose branches he builds a tree house, and he begins to build a life for himself uncovering the resources of the park. And, as the once-withdrawn boy starts to conquer his fears and to learn the value of friendship with both animals and human beings, he also faces up to the dangers which had driven him from home, many of them embodied in a single, sinister figure from his past who seems to be his nemesis. About the Author: Evan Rhodes is the co-author of Only You, Dick Daring!  He lives in New York and Key West, Florida.—From the Dust Jacket.

Princess June: A Novel. Veronica Lee. 2001. 272p. Daniel & Daniel Publishers. Set in Korea during the 1950s and 1960s, this is a novel about a young girl who becomes a young woman, and in the process, and against enormous odds, takes charge of her life. Junee’s mother, buffeted by history—the Japanese occupation and the Korean War—fled the family when Junee was very young, leaving Junee to be raised by her father, a successful and wealthy pimp and gangster. This father is a horrible parent who abuses and sexually molests the young girl. The other member of the family is Hosuk, Junee’s older brother, who has chosen to follow in his father’s shady footsteps. Eventually the father and son have a struggle and showdown, and young Hosuk emerges the winner—a temporary blessing for young Junee, and as Junee becomes an attractive teenager, he drags her about to attract victims for his gang of thugs. Junee manages to escape Hosuk’s clutches and she moves from job to job, making her way. For a while she works for a family and finds she has a talent and a love for taking care of small children; this will become an important theme of the book before it is over. Unfortunately, she can not really rise in the world because of her class and, more importantly, because of her gender. As an attractive young girl on the way to becoming an attractive young woman, she is usually placed in jobs that make her feel cheap. She becomes a hostess in an important restaurant, but when she won’t become the kept mistress of its owner, she loses her chances for advancement. Eventually, though, she does land a job in a good restaurant and bar and she becomes a bartender. There she meets an American teacher of English, Sparky DiMacchio, who befriends her and makes her feel worthwhile. Sparky introduces Junee to his American friend Greg, and before long Junee and Greg fall in love and move in together. Greg’s gentleness and compassion overcome Junee’s sexual fears—the vestige of her childhood abuse—and they become lovers. Junee gets pregnant, and she gives birth to a baby girl, whom she and Greg name Mary. It appears to be a happy ending. But the happiness doesn’t last. Greg cannot escape the authority of his family, especially his father, and he deserts her. Junee is once again a young woman in big trouble. Sparky comes to her aid again and helps her with the main problem at hand: how to ensure little Mary’s future happiness. Junee puts the child, only one year old, up for adoption. This is a traumatic experience for her, but she knows, with the help of her therapist Dr. Lee, that this is for the best. A final development is the violent death of Hosuk, Junee’s nemesis and the last of her family. Junee is now free to make her own choices, and thanks to the struggles she’s endured throughout her youth, she will be strong enough to make good choices. Visit the author’s website.

Princess of Roumania, A. Paul Park. 2005. 368p. Tor Books. From Publishers Weekly: Sharp characterization and an unusual historical backdrop distinguish Park’s charming leadoff to an intricate new fantasy series. In an alternate 18th-century world where England’s been swamped by a tidal wave, America teems with blond savages and “Roumania” and Germany battle for European domination, a magic book concocted by conjuress Aegypta Schenck sends young Miranda Popescu, the “white tyger” descendant of ancient royalty and Roumania’s hope of freedom from “black tyranny,” to Massachusetts to escape the fiendish Baroness Nicola Ceausescu and the heinous elector of Ratisbon. With her best friend, Andromeda (turned magically into first a yellow dog and later a charismatic male Roumanian courtier), and her loyal teenage admirer, Peter (“really” the son of Roumania’s bravest warrior), Miranda makes hard choices to start fulfilling her destiny. Park (Celestis, etc.) leaves some tantalizing loose ends, while the wily baroness and the necromancing elector promise dashing adventure and delicious heartbreak ahead. Blurbs from Ursula K. Le Guin and John Crowley testify to the novel’s high quality. © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Prodigal Troll, The. Charles Coleman Finlay. 2005. 357p. Prometheus Books. The Prodigal Troll is a tale of a human child raised by a band of mythological creatures that is both hysterical and moving. When Lord Gruethrist’s castle is laid under siege by an invading baron, he sends a trusted knight and nursemaid off with his infant son. Their escape across a wilderness landscape populated by fantastic creatures and torn by war takes unexpected turns until the baby is finally adopted by a mother troll grieving for her own lost child. Christened “Maggot” by a hostile stepfather, the human boy grows up amid the crude but democratic trolls until he leaves the band to rediscover the world of humankind. But the world of man is a complex and capricious place. Maggot must master its strange ways if he is to survive, let alone win the heart and hand of the Lady Portia. Finlay’s society of trolls are unlike any you’ve ever read before, and his matriarchal medieval world, pitted as they are against an analog of Native American tribesmen, provides a rich setting for many poignant social and political insights.

U.K. 1st Edition

U.S. 1st Edition

Promise of Light, The. Paul Watkins. 1992. 218p. Faber & Faber (UK). In 1921, on an island off the New England coast, Ben Sheridan is settling down as a clerk at a small local bank. Across the bay at Newport, Rhode Island, the 1920s are just beginning to roar. When Ben’s Irish-American father is fatally injured in a fire, Ben gives blood to try to save his life, only to find out that his father is not really his father. He then sets out for Ireland to track down his real family, only to be drawn into the world of the newly formed Irish Republican Army and the British soldiers, called the Black and Tans.

Quarry, The. Charles Waddell Chesnutt; Edited by Dean McWilliams. 1999. 288p. Princeton University Press. This novel, completed in 1928, was rejected by publishers because it abandoned the popular style of Chesnutt’s fables, with their Negro dialects, in favor of a straightforward social-problem narrative. Here, Chesnutt (1858-1932) returns to the theme of his second story collection, the issue of mixed racial heritage, arguing both passing as white and against black separatism. The narrative centers on the exemplary life of Donald Glover, a foundling of uncertain parentage, who develops into a preeminent man of letters. Along the way, he confronts social and intellectual temptations representative of the challenges facing gifted Negroes in the first quarter of the 20th century. From an early age, when his white adoptive parents discover his black blood and reject him, light- skinned Donald commits himself to the uplift of his race. Raised in Ohio, he moves with his second set of parents to the South, where he experiences segregation for the first time. Byronically handsome, hes almost tricked into an early marriage but goes off instead to an integrated college in Kentucky thats eventually segregated by law. At Columbia, where he gets his Ph.D., Donald is tempted by a movie director who promises him a successful career if hell pass as white; by a local hustler who schools him in the ways of Harlem life; and by a character representing back-to-Africa proselytizer Marcus Garvey. Later employed by a Booker T. Washington figure, Donald decides that his obligations as a member of the talented tenth require loyalty to his true mentor, Dr. Lebrun, who stands in for Chesnutts own role model, W.E.B. DuBois. Although it makes an interesting contrast with Wallace Thurmans recently reprinted Infants of the Spring, which rejects the high- minded race consciousness of older intellectuals like Chesnutt, this formulaic, overly determined novel seldom transcends its obvious plot devices and emblematic characters. However meritorious, strictly for scholars and literary historians. © 1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. About the Editor: Dean McWilliams is Professor of English at Ohio University. He is the author of books on Michel Butor and on John Gardner. By the Same Author: Paul Marchand, F.M.C.

Queen’s Gambit, The. Walter Tevis. 1983. 243p. Random House. Orphaned at eight, Beth Harmon is sent to the Methuen Home. A plain, shy, frightened little girl, she survives on the tranquilizers the Home doles out to keep the children “easier to handle.” Then one day she is sent to the basement to clean the blackboard erasers, and she sees the janitor sitting over a checkerboard, moving strangle little pieces on it. She is immediately fascinated, and she keeps sneaking back to the basement to watch until she has learned the moves by herself. She discovers that, when playing chess, her senses grow sharper, her thinking clearer, and for the first time in her life she feels herself fully in control. By the age of sixteen, she’s competing for the U.S. Open championship. But as she hones her skills on the professional circuit, the stakes get higher, her isolation grows more frightening, and the thought of escape becomes all the more tempting. By the Same Author: The Hustler and The Man Who Fell to Earth.

Quiet Passion, A. Louise Hoffman. 1975. 190p. St Martin’s Press

Quinn Brothers, The. Nora Roberts. 2006. 496p. Berkeley. Now, for the first time in one volume, she presents the first two novels of her Chesapeake Bay saga, introducing some of her most beloved characters—the close-knit adopted brothers known as the Quinns. Includes the novels Sea Swept—A champion boat racer, Cameron Quinn travels the world spending his winnings on champagne and women. But when his dying father calls him home to care for Seth, a troubled young boy not unlike Cameron once was, his life changes overnight—and Rising Tides—of the three brothers, it was Ethan who shared his father’s passion for the Maryland shore. And now with his father gone, Ethan is determined to make the family boat-building business a success. But amidst his achievements lie the most important challenges of his life. About the Author: Nora Roberts is the bestselling author of more than 150 novels. She is also the author of the bestselling futuristic suspense series written under the pen name J.D. Robb. With more than 280 million copies of her books in print and more than 100 New York Times bestsellers to date, Nora Roberts is indisputably the most celebrated and beloved women’s fiction writer today.

Rain. VC Andrews. 2000. 440p. Pocket Books. Growing up in the ghettos of Washington, D.C., the cards are stacked against a hardworking dreamer like Rain Arnold. Rain has fought to be the best daughter she can: she studies hard and gets good grades; she helps her mother cook and clean. And unlike her defiant younger sister, she avoids the dangers of the city streets as if her life depends on it...and it does. But Rain can’t suppress the feeling that she has never truly fit in, that she is a stranger in her own world. Then one fateful night, Rain overhears something she shouldn’t: a heartbreaking revelation from the past, a long-buried secret that is about to change her life in ways she never could have imagined. In the blink of an eye, everything Rain has ever known—the family she has loved and the familiar place she has called home is left behind, and Rain is sent to live with total strangers, the wealthy Hudson family. But just as she did not belong to the troubled world she was raised in, Rain is also out of place in this realm of luxury and privilege. With nowhere to turn, Rain finds an escape in the theater, inside the walls of an exclusive private school. But will it be enough to fulfill her heart’s deepest wish—and give her a place to call home?

Raising Hope. Katie Willard. 2005. 336p. Warner Books. There couldn’t have been two more dissimilar girls in the town of Ridley Falls, New Hampshire. Ruth Teller, raised by a hardworking single mother, barely scraped through high school before she settled into a minimum-wage job. Sara Lynn Hoffman, doted upon by her well-to-do parents, graduated class valedictorian before conquering college and law school. Their paths shouldn’t have crossed again, but life threw them some curveballs and now they are sharing a house...and more. Together, they are raising a girl named Hope, who came into their lives as an infant and changed everything. Set in the summer of Hope’s twelfth year and moving back and forth in time, this is the story of an unlikely family. It’s the story of Hope, on the edge of growing up and yearning to find out everything she can about her birth parents. It’s also the story of Ruth and Sara Lynn—the girls they once were and the women they’ve become. Finally, it’s the story of Aimee, Sara Lynn’s mother, and Mary, Ruth’s mother—both of whom formed their daughters for better and for worse. Told from the perspectives of four unique female voices from three generations, this debut novel is about mothers, daughters, and the power of family love.

Randy’s Ride. Barbara Taylor Blomquist. 2009. 320p. Tate Publishing. Randy never felt like he fit in. Adopted when he was young, he never found his place within his family. Because of this disconnected feeling, Randy decided to set out on his own. Author Barbara Blomquist invites readers to come along on Randy’s Ride, a touching story of one young man’s journey to self-discovery. During his travels, Randy meets interesting people who teach him many life lessons. There’s Ellie, a hard woman struggling with the death of her mother; Bill, the teacher who encourages Randy to make something of himself; and Mindy, a young girl who touches Randy’s heart. Through his encounters with these individuals and others, Randy learns a very important lesson: your life is what you make it.

Rapture of Canaan, The. Sheri Reynolds. 1995. 320p. GP Putnam’s Sons. From Publisher’s Weekly: In this gritty portrait of a young girl who battles repression in a rural Southern religious community, Reynolds (Bitterroot Landing) once again showcases a compelling narrative voice that’s simultaneously harsh and lyrical. The narrator is Ninah Huff, granddaughter of Herman Langston, the founder of a Pentecostal sect in rural South Carolina. Herman is a strict disciplinarian, to say the least: he forces one congregant found guilty of drinking to sleep in an open grave. Because of the Pentecostal group’s rigid attitudes, Ninah and her peers are frequently scorned and mocked at school. But her real problems start when she becomes pregnant by her prayer partner. Ninah’s subsequent rebellion and the tragic aftermath of her tryst threaten to tear the community apart, particularly when the despotic Herman interprets an ordinary, curable birth defect in her infant son, Canaan, as a sign that she has given birth to the new messiah. While many of the issues Reynolds deals with are coming-of-age staples-teen rebellion; the standoff between adolescent expression and religious repression; the morality of the individual vs. the morality of the group-her gift for characterization ultimately transcends the material as Ninah’s strength and resilience enable her to move beyond benighted religiosity toward a true and lasting faith. By the Same Author: The Sweet In-Beteen (2009).

Raven. VC Andrews. 1998. 192p. (Orphans Series #4). Pocket Books. Raven is unique in that she does have a mother who she knows; but unfortunately, Mom’s behind bars and not likely to be coming home any time soon. Beautiful Raven was never crazy about her mom’s drug use—but even a mother who’s stoned is preferable to going to live with her uncle, who seems set on plunging Raven into a twisted, abusive life from which there appears to be no escape.

Ray of Hope. Kinsey Wade. 2002. 305p. Trafford Publishing Co (Canada). Gabriella and Yessenia are teenage Guatemalan girls of Mayan Indian decent. They have been raised as sisters by Bill and Jean Barlow, American missionaries to the Peten region of Guatemala. Placed in their orphanage as infants, the Barlows decide to adopt both girls. While Yessenia’s adoption gained approval several years earlier, Gabriella’s adoption continues to be bogged down in the massive bureaucratic red tape of the Guatemalan government. The story opens on an early Sunday morning at the orphanage, Ranch of the Children, in the jungles of Guatemala’s Peten region. Two teenage boys from the Ranch are missing. The quiet morning is disturbed by the arrival of Guatemalan soldiers who inform the Barlows they are investigating reports of guerrilla activity in the area. The hostile, political situation of Guatemala is introduced. During the search, the soldiers shoot one of the boys who were returning to the ranch after escpaing from their captors. Bill Barlow orders the soldiers to leave the Ranch property. On a later visit to the Ranch by the guerrilla forces, the two boys realize it was some of these men who captured them. Gabriella cooperates with the boys in hiding the information from her parents. While dealing with this conflict, Gabriella realizes separation from her parents and sister could happen. The legal mess in her adoption unfolds. Yessenia promises to never be seperated from Gabriella. The political situation in the Peten region intensifies as the guerrilla forces seek funding for their endeavors by imposing a “war tax” on foreign land owners. During the ensuing weeks, the Barlows hear reports of kidnappings of those who refused to pay the illegal tax. They receive an “official document” from the guerilla forces levying a tax of $100,000.00 The Barlows make a daring escape to Guatemala City, leaving the operation of the orphanage in the hands of Guatemalan workers. While in Guatemala City, the Barlows seek intervention from the United States Embassy on Gabriella’s adoption. The political quagmire renders the embassy helpless in assisting Gabriella. The Barlow’s resolve to stay together in Guatemala City against the embassy’s recommendation. As the Barlow family settles into a routine in Guatemala City, the embassy informs Bill Barlow that a death warrant on him has been issues by the guerrilla forces. The violence in Guatemala City against foreigners spreads, leading the Guatemala government and the embassy to order immediate evacuation from the country. Gabriella and Yessenia decide to run away. Their intricate plan unfolds almost flawlessly until Yessenia is attacked by muggers, nearly getting both girls killed. During their first night in hiding, Gabriella wrestles with the consequences of their plan. Under the leadership of the Holy Spirit, Gabriella convinces Yessenia to return to their parents. Gabriella escorts the Barlows and Yessenia to the airport. Though the departure hurts her far more than she ever imagined, Gabriella realizes that faith, courage and love for family can overcome separation from each other. About the Author: Kimsey Wade is a native Oklahoman, reared on the ceremonial grounds of the Osage Indian tribe in Hominy, Oklahoma. After graduating from Hominy High School, Kimsey attended Southwestern State College and Oklahoma Baptist University (OBU). He graduated from OBU in May of 1974 witth a Bachelor’s Degree in political science and music. He continued his education at Central State University and the University of Missouri, Columbia, where he studied political science, specializing in state and local government. Upon completion of his higher education, Kimsey worked several years in public administration with the Boy Scouts of America in Southern Oklahoma, and with the sub-state planning organization in Northeast Oklahoma. In 1987, he left the public sector and opened a private piano studio in Vinita, Oklahoma, where he continues to teach piano to children, teens, and adults. In 1987 the Wades adopted a young girl from an orphanage in the Peten region of Guatemala. Moved by what he saw, Kimsey organized and led seven mission trips back to Guatemala to assist the orphanage with construction of buildings, schools and a mission church in San Andres. In 1992 he formed a non-profit organization to solicit funds for the operation of the school and mission church. Kimsey’s desire to write became a reality in the spring of 1995 when he enrolled in a course with the Institute of Chilren’s Literature. He has had his works published in several magazines inlcuding: Clubhouse Magazine; Focus on the Family; Listen Magazine; Grit; Power Station; Boy’s Quest; Sirs; Straight; Discovery Trails; and Club Connection. In addition, he has won numerous awards at the Christian Writer’s conference held at Glorieta Conference Center in New Mexico. Kimsey married his wife Anita, in February 1980. They are parents of four children. The youngest two are high school students. The oldest daughter is attending OBU, and majoring in Children’s Ministry. The oldest son is married, and lives in Vinita with his wife and two-year-old daughter. Kimsey’s latest book, Our Awesome God, was also published with Trafford.

Reading Group, The: A Novel. Elizabeth Noble. 2005. 429p. HarperCollins (Originally published in 2004 by Coronet Books/UK). From Kirkus Reviews: British chick-lit bestseller hits all the right marketing buttons. Uplifting, interconnected stories of women in a reading club overcoming crises? Check. Twelve months’ worth of mini book reviews? Check. And first-novelist Noble packages it so neatly, outlining the books and characters for reference before her story even begins. Harriet and Nicole are stay-at-home moms in their 30s whose husbands work “in the City.” Harriet doubts she still loves sweet, upright Tim; Nicole loves philandering Gavin too much. Polly and Susan are a decade older. Polly, a divorced paralegal with a teenaged son and a college-aged daughter, has just accepted a marriage proposal from dashing lawyer Jack. Susan runs a soft-goods business; she and perfect husband Roger, a doctor, are dealing with her beloved mother’s suddenly failing health. The club’s fifth and most expendable member is Claire, the deeply depressed daughter of Susan’s employee. A midwife who can’t have children, Claire has withdrawn from long-suffering husband Elliot. Each month’s chapter begins with a club meeting at which lightweight intellectual discussion takes place (hot for Heartburn, cool to Atonement), then follows the women’s evolving situations. Harriet pulls back from the brink of adultery and wakes up to her real love for Tim once he threatens to walk. Catching Gavin in the act, Nicole finally finds the gumption to throw him out. When Polly’s daughter Cressida announces that she’s pregnant and doesn’t want to marry the father, Polly decides to keep the child for her so that Cressida can finish her education. Jack balks at first, but the baby’s charms win him over. Their mother’s death brings together Susan and her bitter, long-absentolder sister after they realize that Susan was actually adopted. Shocked to learn that Elliot is the father of Cressida’s child, Claire finds her calling as a nurse in Romania. Bound to be a hit, but depressingly adept at perfecting the formula.

Reckoning, The. Beverly Lewis. (The Heritage of Lancaster County Series, No. 3). Bethany House. Katherine Mayfield, the new Mistress of Mayfield Manor, always dreamed of a fancy “English” life. But as the seasons pass, she finds herself grieving the loss of her Amish family and dearest friend, Mary Stolzfus. Shunned from the Plain life she once knew, Katherine finds solace in volunteer work with hospice patients a labor of love she hopes will bring honor to the memory of her birth mother. Unknown to Katherine, her long-lost love, Daniel Fisher, is desperate to locate his “Sweetheart girl,” only to be frustrated at nearly every turn. Meanwhile, she delights in the modern world once forbidden cherishing the attention of Justin Wirth, her handsome suitor. Her childhood entwined with Daniel’s, yet her present life far removed from Lancaster County, Katherine longs for the peace that reigned in her mother’s heart. And once again, she is compelled to face the heritage of her past. By the Same Author: The Shunning and The Confession, volumes 1 and 2 in the series.

Red Moon: Story Three of Four from the Series Time Lines. Troy Patoine. 2007. 424p. Authorhouse. Lance Longfall has everything going for him: brains, money, good looks and a promising future as a scientist. One fateful day in 1983, he meets Miranda Evans who will forever change his life. Fate, however, usually has a plan; even when it is tragic. With the help of Stephen Bropalski, his best friend, Lance will stop at nothing to bring Miranda back, even if it destroys everyone around him. To do this, Stephen and Lance will have to perform two of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of all time-but no one must know about it. As they race towards the future, beating time in the process, to complete their mission, someone from their past relentlessly pursues them which could hinder their success. Lance is obsessed. His only obstacles are inescapable demons from his past and the secret of the mysterious Red Moon. About the Author: Troy Patoine grew up in New Hampshire and has lived his whole life, both in Concord and Bow. He received his B.S. in Physical Education from Keene State College. When he’s not at work, or writing, he devotes his time to his two children, Brittany and Tristram, his fiancée, Teressa, and their Australian Shepherd, Trixie. In this, his first novel, Troy tells the tragic story of a gifted scientist, years ahead of his time, who found love, lost it, then tried to get it back in a most unconventional way. The author is currently at work on a new novel.

Red Sea Place, The. Shirley Jean Schooler. 2003. 229p. PublishAmerica. The last thing Laura Dunbar needs is another problem. So when she receives a letter from the daughter she placed for adoption thirty years ago, she panics. Jennifer Lang made contact with her birth father, Gary Frederick, a year ago. Now Jennifer wants to know if lightning can strike twice in the same place. But Laura’s 20-year marriage to Curt Dunbar is on the rocks. She is fed up with catering to her control-freak husband’s every whim. Relations with her other two children, especially her daughter, are strained. Then there is the problem of Curt’s aged, ailing mother, who can no longer live alone. No matter what Laura decides, someone will be unhappy. On the other hand, Laura has spent most of her life pleasing other people. Isn’t it time she pleased herself?

Refiner’s Fire: The Life & Adventures of Marshall Pearl, a Foundling. Mark Helprin. 1977. 373p. Alfred A Knopf. Both serious and comic, always marvelously moving, the adventures of Marshall Pearl, a foundling born on an illegal immigrant ship off the coast of Palestine in 1947, take us on a haunting journey into our deepest fears and most cherished dreams. Whether jumping freighters, climbing cliffs, or falling in love, Marshall Pearl is shaped by his origins and his visions, pulled ever eastward in his restless search for a home, and turned, at last, into an exceptional soldier in wartime Israel—“full of sorrow, alive as the blaze of a fire, full of sex and desires of the heart”—in this extraordinary novel that blazes like a profound allegory of our times.—From the 1985 Dell paperback edition, whose cover is pictured at right.

Relative Interest. Anita Richmond Bunkley. 2003. 304p. Dafina Books. From Booklist: Kira Forester arrives back in North Carolina after an extended assignment in Africa only to learn that the foster mother caring for her six-year-old niece, Vicky, has died. Wealthy white mayoral candidate Ralph Roper and his wife, Helen, are planning to adopt Vicky. When Kira contacts the adoption agency, she is both pleasantly surprised and mildly irritated by the owner, Evan Conley. Kira expresses concern about the transracial adoption and begins to check out the Roper family. Ralph’s opponent, an African American businessman, wants her to challenge the adoption in order to discredit Ralph. Kira is not pulled into the political battle, but she soon realizes that Vicky’s adoption has become a divisive racial and political time bomb. In spite of the personal and professional trials that Kira endures, she remains determined to forge a relationship with her niece and finds an ally in Evan. As they move through the adoption process, Kira learns that matters of love and race are not always as obvious as they may appear. —Lillian Lewis; © American Library Association. All rights reserved.

Renegades of Pern. Anne McCaffrey. 1989. 384p. Del Rey. Behold Acorna, the Unicorn Girl. Discovered as an infant and adopted by three gruff asteroid miners, she has now grown into a beautiful young woman with delicate ivory fur and silken skin, the tiny horn on her forehead all but hidden by her silvery locks. Acorna is known as Lukia of the Light by the grateful children she rescued from brutal slavery in the mines of Kezdet. She is helping them recover, and enjoying life with her guardian “uncles,” when she receives a mysterious and disturbing message: There are yet more children enslaved on Kezdet, overlooked by the Child Labor League—children suffering a cruel, almost unimaginable fate. Only Acorna, with her healing powers, can rescue them from the enigmatic figure known as “The Dodger.” But to save the children, she must deceive Pal Kendorno, the man she is beginning to love in spite of herself.

Requiem For a Princess. Ruth M Arthur. Illustrated by Margery Gill. 1967. 182p. Atheneum. Adopted! Willow Penelope Forrester could not believe it. Why in all her fifteen years had no one told her? And why did she have to find out now, by accident, just when she was having such a struggle with her parents over the musical career she wanted. She simply could not bring herself to discuss the matter with anyone, least of all her parents. And so, she literally worried herself sick, until her unsuspecting mother took her away to recover, to Penliss, a lovely house on the Cornish coast, open to guests. It was there that Willow discovered the portrait of Isabel, an adopted daughter of the Tresilian family, who had owned Penliss for centuries. Gradually, through a series of strangley real dreams, Willow came to know the story of the lonely, proud 16th century girl. And through this came to understand and accept her own situation.

Reunion. Therese Fowler. 2009. 336p. Ballantine Books. Celebrity talk show host Blue Reynolds is the queen of daytime television—she is smart, funny, and as down-to-earth as her adoring fans. In the eyes of the world, she has it all. But no one knows about the secret she has harbored for the last twenty years—a secret that could destroy her image, her reputation, and her career. Twenty years ago, she gave birth to a son and put him up for adoption through illegal channels. And every day since, she’s been filled with regret. Now Blue has hired a private investigator to find her son, knowing full well the consequences. A week in Key West to do her show on location brings Blue a much-needed change of pace—and an unexpected reunion with an old flame, Mitch Forrester. Helping him launch a television series may help her recapture the kind of genuine romance and affection long missing from her life. But it also means having to deal with Mitch’s disapproving son, Julian, who is only nine years younger than Blue. Emotionally battered from his years as a war photographer in the world’s most dangerous hotspots, Julian struggles to get close to his father while making his disdain for Blue crystal clear—which makes his desire for her all the more shocking. As serendipity and scandal collide, Therese Fowler’s passionate, illuminating novel takes a dramatic turn deep into our own hearts, as the healing power of love—family love, romantic love, and self-love—transforms pain and regrets into promises and second chances. About the Author: Therese Fowler is the author of Souvenir. She holds an MFA in creative writing. She grew up in Illinois and now lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with her husband and two sons.

Reunion. Karen Kingsbury, with Gary Smalley. 2004. 378p. (Redemption Series #5). Tyndale House Publishers. This touching story allows us to see into the lives of the Baxter family as Erin and Sam attempt to adopt a child. As the family looks forward to a heartwarming reunion they find out that Mr. and Mrs. Baxter have a secret that could change their lives forever. The story is continued in the author’s Firstborn Series: Fame (#1); Forgiven (#2); Found (#3); Family (#4); and Forever (#5).

Rhythms of Grace. Marilynn Griffith. 2008. 432p. Revell. Grace Okoye was a promising young dancer when her career was cut short by a brutal assault that left her scarred for life. Twenty years later, when her past gets in the way of her happiness, she heeds the invitation of her dance instructor and returns home to help hurting children and rediscover the rhythms of grace. What she doesn’t expect is to meet a man who already seems to know her beat. But for all they share in common, the biggest thing in Grace’s life is noticeably absent in his--faith. She’s finally found the love of her life, but can she choose between him and God? Real, raw emotion and the promise of redemption run through this soulful new book from Marilynn Griffith. About the Author: Marilynn Griffith is a freelance writer and conference speaker whose online columns and blogs reach thousands of women each year. She is the author of the Shades of Style series. Marilynn lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with her husband and their seven children. By the Same Author: Songs of Deliverance (2009), a sequel which features the same principal characters.

Rich Again. Anna Maxted. 2009. 464p. St. Martin’s Griffin. From Kirkus Reviews: Maxted abandons her usually thoughtful version of chick lit for a train-wreck of a soap opera. London-based globetrotters Jack and Innocence Kent own a chain of boutique hotels and have the multimillions to buy shoes for each new day (her) and a truckload of Prozac (him). Their obscenely overindulged 14-year-old daughter Emily has her sights set on Lord Timothy, eventual owner of a drafty Scottish castle. Bulimic, frigid and friendless Claudia is Jack’s adopted daughter from his first marriage. Problems abound. Claudia is engaged to her biological father-good thing she’s so messed up about sex they haven’t consummated their relationship. Jack, involved in a financial scandal that nearly ruins him, is only saved by Innocence’s duplicity; she swindles him out of his fortune by transferring all the property into her name. Then Emily, now 16, gets pregnant by Tim, they marry in Vegas and his father disinherits him. Emily has to start selling gossip about herself to the rags to keep herself in Manolos. Flashback 20 years to East London: Innocence is Sharon Marshall, a tough girl with big dreams. She trains as a lady’s maid and works her way up (often on her knees) while Jack, a happier man, is married to Felicia, just beginning to build his empire, and father to sweet Claudia and the newly adopted Nathan. When Felicia suddenly dies, Nathan is sent back to the adoption agency and grows up to become a sociopathic killer, believing that Jack’s rejection ruined his life. After killing his foster parents at four in an “accidental” fire, Nathan finds his biological mother (also dispatched, eyeballs retained as souvenirs) and then becomes a world-famous moviestar, all so he can pick off members of the Kent family one by one. Plot-packed silliness filled with laughable baddies whose deaths are only slightly mourned by the reader. No wonder Maxted published this nonsense under a pseudonym in Britain (Betrayal by Sasha Blake). By the Same Author: Getting Over It (2000), Running in Heels (2001), Behaving Like Adults (2002), and Being Committed (2004), A Tale of Two Sisters (2006).

Right Fit, The: A Novel. Sinéad Moriarty. 2006. 256p. Washington Square Press. Emma, the irrepressible protagonist from The Baby Trail (2004), is back, and still eager to start a family. After trying every fertility treatment in the book, as well as following a slew of advice from her friends, family, and women’s magazines, she and her husband have given up on conceiving naturally. They’re now trying international adoption, which should, in theory, be more pleasant than the fertility shots and postcoital headstands of their baby-making days. However, with the rigorous screening process—including a Russian class where they learn about their potential baby’s culture alongside competitive adoptive-parents-to-be and über-critical case managers—Emma finds herself once again in over her head. The pressure to prove that she and her husband are the perfect couple, and thus the perfect parents, drives him and all her friends crazy along the way. Hilarious and heartwarming, Emma’s outrageous adventures are sure to charm mothers, mothers-to-be, and nearly everyone in between. By the Same Author: From Here to Maternity (2006).

Right Thing, The. Judy Astley. 1999. 271p. Black Swan (UK). Funerals are strange things. Kitty hadn’t really wanted to go to this one—a old school friend she hadn’t seen for years—and she hadn’t bargained for the way it made her think of the past. In particular, it made her think of the baby she had given birth to when she was eighteen, the baby her parents had insisted she give away for adoption. She’d called her Madeleine, and she remembered her every day, what she was like, if she was happy. But now, reminded of how cruelly short life can be, she had to see her—just to make sure she’d done the right thing. Life had turned out pretty well for Kitty. Secure in her marriage, with her two teenage children and a house within sound and sight of the Cornish surf, she counted herself among the lucky ones. But the hole left by that first baby wasn’t getting any smaller, and she decided to make the first, tentative steps towards filling it—although she, and all her family, were quite unprepared for the upheaval which followed.—From the Back Cover

Rising. Darnella Ford. 2002. 224p. Griffin. Set in a wealthy community in northern Michigan, Rising tells the story of nine-year-old Symone, who is adopted by the Hustons— “a shameless family with a house at the top of the hill” —after her mother dies of a drug overdose. And though Symone is all too happy to leave the Dorchester projects behind, she can’t help but wonder why this rich white couple has come to the ghetto to adopt “a black girl who looked white.” Soon Symone discovers that the Hustons aren’t saviors but instead demons who have delivered her into another kind of hell. She escapes only to return again years later, realizing that she must face the demons of her past if she has any hope of surviving the future.

Rising Tides. Nora Roberts. 1998. 382p. Jove Books. Set on the windswept shores of the Chesapeake Bay, Nora Roberts’s Rising Tides, the second book in the Quinn Brothers trilogy, continues the story of the lives and loves of adopted brothers Ethan, Cameron, and Philip Quinn. Eager to honor their father’s dying wish that their other brother, Seth, be cared for, the three settle into life with a 10-year-old. Of all the brothers, it is Ethan who finds himself drawn to the young boy, because both suffered horrific abuse before being adopted by the Quinns. Time hasn’t extinguished Ethan’s pain, only buried it deep within his heart, a fact that may keep him from the only woman he has ever loved. A moving contemporary with universal appeal, Rising Tides is Nora Roberts at her best. Other Titles in the Series: Sea Swept (1998); Inner Harbor (1999); Chesapeake Blue (2002).

Road Home, The. Jim Harrison. 1998. Atlantic Monthly Press. With his 1988 novel, Dalva, Jim Harrison commenced an epic of the American Midwest—or more specifically, the Nebraska sandhills. In The Road Home, his eponymous heroine returns in search of the son she abandoned 30 years before, only to find herself more deeply enmeshed than ever in the coils of the family romance. (Quite literally, by the way: the father of Dalva’s son was her half-brother.) Now, a decade later, Harrison continues her story in The Road Home. Ranging over an entire century, this second installment encompasses both Dalva’s ancestry and her valedictory impulses in the face of death, circa 1987. As he did in the earlier book, the author passes the narrative baton from one character to another. There are five highly individual voices at work, including not only Dalva’s own but that of her grandfather, mother, and son. This makes for a dense, Rashomon-like structure, in which events are revisited by one generation after another and truth is a relative thing—in every sense of the word. Harrison leavens this spiraling saga with splendid passages about everything from the Lakota Sioux to bird hunting, from the complexities of art to the simplicities of the wandering life: “There’s a sweet, vaguely scary feeling in disappearance,” notes Dalva’s son, Nelse. And as always, the author can convey both the surprising beauty of a landscape and an almost suffocating sense of its abundance. “It is neither more nor less endurable in May,” says Dalva of the lilac-encircled family cemetery, “when it is enshrouded by the heavy-scented purple and white flowers, a smell that on warm evenings is so dense as to be almost visible. ... The sound of the crickets arrived one by one until they were a chorus, and if you walked down the gravel road toward the Niobrara the frogs from the lower, marshy areas were so loud as to be barely endurable.” — Bob Brandeis

Road to Purgatory. Max Allan Collins. 2004. 320p. HarperCollins. From Publishers Weekly: When you’re dealing with the straight-text sequel to a bestselling American graphic novel, Road to Perdition (2002), which became a memorable Tom Hanks movie, the words take on extra significance. Luckily, Collins is, among his other talents, a dedicated word man, the author of dozens of sharply written and impeccably researched mysteries and thrillers. In 1942, Michael O’Sullivan Jr.—the wide-eyed boy who watched his father turn into an angel of vengeance—is now grown up and about to become a WWII hero in the savage battle for Bataan. Raised by Italian-American adopted parents, Michael Satariano (as he’s now named) then returns to America to continue his father’s one-man war on the Capone mob by working his way up inside it. Michael hits it off with Frank Nitti, Al’s successor (played so well by Stanley Tucci in the film version of Perdition that he should be signed immediately for the sequel). Then there’s a touching and frightening flashback to 1922, when Michael Sullivan Sr. covers up a crime by the son of his own mentor, John Looney. Collins ranges over a lot of ground, and his writing is most vivid when he describes visual exteriors rather than mental interiors. But the complete package is so smooth and imaginative that few will find it more graphic than novelistic. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information (See also, Road to Paradise [2005].)

Roots of a Priest. Ken Bowers & John A Frochio. 2007. 256p. Booklocker.com, Inc. Have you ever wondered how your life would be changed if you woke up one day and discovered that everything you had known about yourself had been a lie? Such was the case with a Roman Catholic priest, who discovered as he stood at his mother’s deathbed, that he had been adopted. Later he came to realize that he had been born a Jew. With help from his high school sweetheart, he traces his past, following clues provided by a watch that had been pinned to his clothing, when he had been smuggled into a convent as a baby with a load of produce delivered by a local farmer. This is a warm, heart-tugging tale that follows the priest as he learns his true identity and heritage, meets his newly discovered family, and faces trials he never imagined. The story ties the horrors of the past (the Holocaust) with the atrocities of today’s troubled events. The priest soon determines that he has some important decisions to make in his life.

Rose for the Crown, A. Anne Easter Smith. 2006. 672p. Touchstone. From Kirkus Reviews: Remarkably assured debut spins a romantic yarn around England’s much-maligned King Richard III. Born in 1451 to respectable but simple farmer folk, Katherine Haute is adopted by aristocratic cousins as a child. Her further rise is ensured by her remarkable good looks (she has striking, golden eyes). ... She finds her true match in an adulterous liaison with Richard, Duke of Gloucester, the future king. Contrary to the Shakespearean image of Richard as a hunchbacked and murderous schemer, Smith depicts him as a handsome knight and faithful lover to the headstrong Kate. From his bed, and via the careers of her relatives, she witnesses the turbulent final years of the Wars of the Roses. In Kate, Smith has created a likeable heroine who easily survives the plague of cliches endemic to historical romance. ... The author is perhaps too scrupulously true to her sources in the use of names; every man not called Richard is a Henry, wed to a Margaret or a Katherine, who will inevitably bear a baby Richard. But these are minor deficits in a delightful, confident novel that should be a favorite with lovers of the genre. A strong new voice in the field of historical romance.

Rose Cottage. Mary Stewart. 1997. William Morrow & Co. For the frazzled Anglophile, the countryside-enamored reader, here’s a bit of romance, light mystery, and the reassuring stability of a timeless English village—in short, another Stewart comforter (The Stormy Petrel, 1991, etc.). Here, a young widow returns in 1947 to her childhood home and the enigma of her parentage. Kate Herrick, née Welland, who lost her husband in the war, is summoned to Scotland by her beloved grandmother, formerly a cook in the household of Sir James Brandon. She asks Kate to return to their native village in the north of England, where Kate was raised by Gran and severe Aunt Betsy. Kate’s mother Lilias, who’d become pregnant while serving at the Brandons’ estate, had left Kate at six, never to return. Gran had told Kate that she had “gone with the gipsies,” but some years later Kate learned that her mother and new husband had been killed in Ireland in a bus accident. Now, Kate is to come again to Gran’s Rose Cottage, long shuttered, charged with shipping some of Gran’s belongings to her in Scotland and with locating a neatly hidden safe containing family items of sentimental value. But someone has broken into the cottage, ripped out the safe, and removed its contents. Then there are strange rumors of odd appearances, generated mainly by the “Witches Corner”—comprised of two gossipy ladies, as well as a feathery individual who’s sure she has “the sight” and has seen a dead woman digging in the cottage yard and piling flowers on the grave of mean Aunt Betsy. With the help of young Davey, son of old family friends, and scraps of information from neighbors, Kate will at last discover an absent mother and a name for an unknown father. Soothing as a warm brew on a cold night are Stewart’s satisfying denouements—and environs: “... willows and wild roses, cuckoo-pint and king cups, and a wood pigeon crooning in the elm.” Mild doings in enchanting surroundings. — Kirkus

Rowhani. Clara W Whalen. 1995. 240p. Noble House. Seventeen-year-old Rowhani Charles’s idyllic life, one filled with affection from a loving mother & father & the closeness of many friends, suddenly comes to a halt when her father leaves her mother. Rowhani will teach you invaluable lessons about the strength & endurance of the love between a parent and child, a man and a woman.

Royal Poinciana: A Novel of Old Palm Beach & New York. Thea C Douglass. 1988. 428p. Dutton. Set amidst the ostentatious glamour of turn-of-the-century luxury hotels and gambling casinos of Palm Beach and New York, this novel traces the ten-year bittersweet liaison between a pair of social misfits: Madeleine Memory, who has borne and given up an illegitimate child, is head housekeeper at Henry Flagler’s new Royal Poinciana Hotel; and Harry Loring is a professional gambler.

Rubyfruit Jungle. Rita Mae Brown. 1973. 217p. Daughters, Inc. Rubyfruit Jungle is the first milestone novel in the extraordinary career of one of this country’s most distinctive writers. Bawdy and moving, the ultimate word-of-mouth bestseller, Rubyfruit Jungle is about growing up a lesbian in America—and living happily ever after. Born a bastard, Molly Bolt is adopted by a dirt-poor southern couple who want something better for their daughter. Molly plays doctor with the boys, beats up Leroy the tub and loses her virginity to her girlfriend. In no time she mesmerizes the head cheerleader of Ft. Lauderdale heiress. But the world is not tolerant. Booted out of college for moral turpitude, an unrepentant, penniless Molly takes New York by storm, sending not a few female hearts aflutter with her startling beauty, crackling wit and fierce determination. Since it was first published, Rubyfruit Jungle has only grown in reputation as it has reached new generations of readers who respond to its feisty and inspiring heroine.

U.S. First Edition

Rule Britannia. Daphne du Maurier. 1972. 318p. Victor Golancz (UK). England drops out of the Common Market and forms an alliance with the USA. Marines land to “protect” the English but they encounter a retired actress with her brood of adopted boys and Cornish locals she urges to civil disobedience.

Run. Ann Patchett. 2007. 204p. Harper. From Kirkus Reviews: A family-of-man fable that reads a little too pat to ring true. Like the popular previous novel by Patchett (Bel Canto, 2001), this one finds an unexpected incident connecting and affecting a seemingly disparate cast of characters, isolating them within their own microcosm. The setting is Boston—very Catholic, very political, very racially divided—on the snowiest evening in more than two decades, when a large group gathers to hear a speech by the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Among them is widower Bernard Doyle, once the city’s mayor until a scandal involving his oldest son compromised his career (one of the underdeveloped subplots here). Still a political junkie, Doyle wants his two adopted, college-age African-American sons to express more interest in his passion. Though he’d had high political aspirations for these two-even going so far as to name them Tip and Teddy—both are pursuing different paths. Tip wants to be a scientist studying fish; Teddy hears the call of the priesthood, likely inspired by his adoptive mother’s uncle, the elderly Father Sullivan. The priest has reluctantly gained notoriety as a faith healer (another underdeveloped subplot), though he doesn’t believe he has extraordinary powers, and his own faith has become shaky. Leaving the Jackson speech, Tip steps amid the swirling snow into the path of an SUV. A woman with her young daughter pushes him out of the way, letting the SUV hit her. Is the woman Tip’s real mother? (And Teddy’s?) Is the young daughter their sister? Why do she and her mother seem to know so much more about the Doyles than they know about her? What do we make of the statue of the Virgin Mary that looks so much like the only mother Tip and Teddy have known? And what about that significant plot twist revealed in conversation between a dead woman and one who may be dying? By the time the extended family converges on the hospital, it has become plain that neither these people nor this family can ever be the same. Compelling story but thematically heavy-handed. About the Author: Ann Patchett was born in Los Angeles but raised in Nashville, TN. While at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, she studied with such notable authors as Russell Banks and Grace Paley before getting her first short works published. She labored long and hard in the trenches of Seventeen magazine (where her talents went largely unrecognized), before striking gold with her ambitious first novel, The Patron Saint of Liars, which was named a New York Times Notable Book of 1992 and subsequently made into a major motion picture.

Runaway Soul, The. Harold Brodkey. 1991. 835p. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. From Kirkus Reviews: Brodkey’s long, long, long-awaited first novel that could not possibly live up to expectations—and yet, largely, does. One must forgive Brodkey or oneself for not being able to take in every page of this 800-page novel with equal thirst. Tedious passages, reread later, spring to life—and some remain tiresome (for now). The story focuses on the childhood, youth, and first marriage (not in that order!) of Wiley Silenowicz, a Missouri genius, and the role of his hideously vile-tempered sister Nonie as a shadow in all people Wiley meets or marries. Earlier sketches seen in Stories in an Almost Classical Mode (1988) are mere charcoal prefigurings of what appears here—and seem pared and objective set beside the bathyspheric subjectivity of the novel. The plot?—a psychic web of small electrical events feeding and racing everywhere, and never stated formally. Nothing happens now: every action arrives through a veil, often at merciless length. Wiley, at two, has been adopted by S.L. and Lila of St. Louis, who have a blood-daughter, Nonie, 11 years older than Wiley. Nonie, who must give pain to be alive, rules the roost, and we follow her demonic life until her death by fire in her early 40s (Wiley tells this story, a hugely askew elegy, nearly 20 years after her death). Events include baby sensations as S.L. lifts up Wiley and walks about filling him with fatherly advice; Lila’s fabulous car accident as she forgetfully drives her Buick into a bus, flees on three-inch heels wearing a fox neckpiece; masturbation solo and in tandem; vast sex scenes, one at 14, his first coupling (almost), which is forever interrupted by Nonie, and a later sexfest with his deliberately inorgasmic wife Ora; trips with a homosexual older cousin; and separate death-scenes for S.L. and Lila, which spread all over the novel. Forget the Proust comparison. Brodkey is himself, and many pages here have the deep-rolling profound thrust, painterly originality, and lightning-bolt flash of great art. But many readers will fade early.—Copyright © 1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. By the Same Author: Stories in an Almost Classical Mode (1988).