Kimberly and the Captives (The Colonial Captives Book 1)

May Amelia Jackson captured readers’ hearts in the Newbery Honor Book Our Only May Amelia. Now, after over ten years, Jennifer Holm is bringing this beloved character back in a beautiful way. The Trouble with May Amelia is a gorgeously written story that’s as heartbreaking as it is funny. May Amelia lives in pioneer Washingon State in 1900, and she just can’t act the part of a proper young lady. Working a farm on the rainy Nasel River isn’t easy – especially when you have seven brothers and a Pappa who proclaims that Girls Are Useless. May Amelia thinks she may have finally earned her father’s respect when he asks her to translate for a gentleman who’s interested in buying their land and making them rich. But when the deal turns out to be a scam, Pappa places all the blame on May. It’s going to take a lot of sisu – that’s Finnish for guts – to make things right.

From Jonathan Weiner, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Beak of the Finch, comes His Brother’s Keeper — the story of a young entrepreneur who gambles on the risky science of gene therapy to try to save his brother’s life.

Stephen Heywood was twenty-nine years old when he learned that he was dying of ALS — Lou Gehrig’s disease. Almost overnight his older brother, Jamie, turned himself into a genetic engineer in a quixotic race to cure the incurable. His Brother’s Keeper is a powerful account of their story, as they travel together to the edge of medicine.

The book brings home for all of us the hopes and fears of the new biology. In this dramatic and suspenseful narrative, Jonathan Weiner gives us a remarkable portrait of science and medicine today. We learn about gene therapy, stem cells, brain vaccines, and other novel treatments for such nerve-death diseases as ALS, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s — diseases that afflict millions, and touch the lives of many more.

It turns out that the author has a personal stake in the story as well. When he met the Heywood brothers, his own mother was dying of a rare nerve-death disease. The Heywoods’ gene therapist offered to try to save her, too.

“The Heywoods’ story taught me many things about the nature of healing in the new millennium,” Weiner writes. “They also taught me about what has not changed since the time of the ancients and may never change as long as there are human beings — about what Lucretius calls ‘the ever-living wound of love.’

“The Heywoods mean the whole story to me now: an allegory from the edge of medicine. A story to make us ask ourselves questions that we have to ask but do not want to ask. How much of life can we engineer? How much is permitted us?

“What would you do to save your brother’s life?”

Master storyteller Robin McKinley here spins two new fairy tales and retells two cherished classics. All feature princesses touched with or by magic. There is Linadel, who lives in a kingdom next to Faerieland, where princesses are stolen away on their seventeenth birthdays-and Linadel’s seventeenth birthday is tomorrow. And Korah, whose brother is bewitched by the magical Golden Hind; now it is up to her to break the spell. Rana must turn to a talking frog to help save her kingdom from the evil Aliyander. And then there are the twelve princesses, enspelled to dance through the soles of their shoes every night. . . . These are tales to read with delight!

Wild Animus includes a novel, three original music CDs—The Ram, The Wolves and Animus—and primal Art Brut art. Experienced as a whole, the music expresses the emotional core of the story and the novel serves as its narrative shell.

Wild Animus tracks the reckless quest of Ransom Altman, a young Berkeley graduate who—roused by his literary heroes and love for his girlfriend, Lindy—resolves to live in a new world of “inexhaustible desire.” Ransom’s deepening identification with the wild mountain ram, whose passion and wisdom he seeks, drives the young lovers north—first to Seattle, then to the remote Alaskan wilderness. Alone on the unforgiving ridges of Mt. Wrangell, his imagination increasingly unhinged, Ransom begins to devise and act out a dangerous animal mythos, which he documents in a first-person manuscript, and in songs or “chants” that detail his transformation and pursuit by a pack of strangely familiar wolves.

The feverish hunt leads from the wilds to civilization and back again. And when the lovers return to brave the perilous mountain together, the truth behind Ransom’s imagined transformation emerges. What they discover in those frozen heights threatens their love as well as their sanity and their lives.

Is Ransom inspired by a transcendent truth, or prey to a misguided fantasy? As his grip on reality weakens, the reader shares Ransom’s fears, his hopes, and his extraordinary discoveries.

Wild Animus is a search for the primordial and a journey to the breaking point. It is a story of love and surrender, of monomania—of striving, at all costs, for a bliss beyond fear.