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A beautiful and touching memoir of Allison Glock's grandmother,
this is both an extraordinary portrait of a truly remarkable woman
and a engaging history of 20th century Appalachia. '"Beauty before
comfort," she would say as she trimmed her brows and cinched her
belts corset-tight. My grandmother is so beautiful she has never
once been comfortable, a cross she bears with the subtlety of
Liberace.' So writes Allison Glock at the start of her remarkable
memoir, the story of her maternal grandmother, Aneita Jean Blair,
and the extraordinary life she led growing up in Chester, West
Virginia, a sooty factory town wedged between the unforgiving
Appalachians and the Ohio River. As a girl, a young woman, and even
late in life as a grandmother, Aneita Jean had a magnetism that
attracted and enchanted all she came into contact with. Allison
Glock takes us through the stages of her life, capturing not only
the irrepressible vitality of a woman born ahead of her time, but
also the eccentricities of a small-town, working-class West
Virginia family, trying to survive the Great Depression and the
Second World War. Aneita, blessed with 'the body of Miss America'
was determined that she would escape the town that was holding her
back. That she never made it, and the pattern that her life ended
up taking, is just another small-town tragedy of the vanished
dreams of one extraordinary person. Allison Glock writes with
humour, lyricism and beauty to create a truly unforgettable
portrait of a remarkable person.
Changers Book Two: Oryon finds our hero Ethan/Drew on the eve of
her second metamorphosis - into Oryon, a skinny African American
skater boy with more swagger than he knows what to do with. Enter a
mess of trouble from the Changers Council, the closed-minded
Abiders, the Radical Changers, and his best friend Audrey - at
least she was his best friend when Oryon was Drew - and now, it's
complicated. But that's life for Changers, an ancient race of
humans who must live out each year of high school as a completely
different person. Before next summer, Oryon will learn what it
means to be truly loved, scared spitless, and at the centre of a
burgeoning national culture war. Most of all, he will learn again
how much the eyes of the world try to shape you into what they see
- and how only when you resist do you clearly begin to see
yourself.
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