A quiet coastal village in post-World War II America is shaken when the secrets of the past and present collide in a riveting novel by the bestselling author of Under a Gilded Moon. Five years after the war, Amie Stilwell, a photo interpreter for an Allied unit in England, returns to her hometown in Maine. Jobless and discouraged but stubbornly resourceful, she's starting over in the same coastal village where her life once went so wrong. Waiting for her is Shibby Travis, the surrogate mother with whom Amie never lost touch. But the unexpected also awaits... A silent, abandoned boy is found with a note from a stranger pleading that he be watched over. Amie and Shibby take him in, but the mysteries multiply when a Boston socialite is found dead in a nearby barn and an old friend, believed to be a casualty of war, suddenly reappears. Trained to see what others cannot, to scan for clues, and to expose enemies, Amie uses her skills to protect a child, solve a crime, and find the motive behind a veteran's masquerade. But through the hazy filter of a town's secrets, Amie must also confront her own painful past.

A quiet coastal village in post-World War II America is shaken when the secrets of the past and present collide in a riveting novel by the bestselling author of Under a Gilded Moon. Five years after the war, Amie Stilwell, a photo interpreter for an Allied unit in England, returns to her hometown in Maine. Jobless and discouraged but stubbornly resourceful, she's starting over in the same coastal village where her life once went so wrong. Waiting for her is Shibby Travis, the surrogate mother with whom Amie never lost touch. But the unexpected also awaits... A silent, abandoned boy is found with a note from a stranger pleading that he be watched over. Amie and Shibby take him in, but the mysteries multiply when a Boston socialite is found dead in a nearby barn and an old friend, believed to be a casualty of war, suddenly reappears. Trained to see what others cannot, to scan for clues, and to expose enemies, Amie uses her skills to protect a child, solve a crime, and find the motive behind a veteran's masquerade. But through the hazy filter of a town's secrets, Amie must also confront her own painful past.

The magical story of how a boy with a disability who is bullied finds the hero within. As Drake gets ready for bed, his mother entertains his questions about tyrants, pirates, and dragons-which are really questions about the power of bullies. Their conversation reminds us all that "Not even kings are allowed to be mean." Targeted for young children and their caregivers, Sir Drake the Brave is a declaration of ethics, integrity and faith: that kindness and courage ultimately are stronger than any sort of small-minded bullying or hate. Fun and entertaining, the story teaches lessons of accepting others, and welcoming others, including those who are different.

Jesus offers grace and mercy but he's also ratcheted up all the rules. Nice as it would be to frame Jesus as fun-loving, or a mercy-dispensing friend, the stories we have about him are a lot more disturbing than that. We hear about celebrations that began as a wake, and about people who didn't use their talents well being bounced clear out of the club. Jesus clearly thought that following the way of truth involved a lot more than simply avoiding things like murder, stealing, committing adultery or telling lies. When Jesus truly makes you nervous, he is worth living and dying for, and becomes the greatest source of meaning and purpose in life imaginable. "Holiness. Abundance. Forgiveness. Hope. In these musings about 'ten stained-glass words of faith,' Joy Jordan-Lake strips away the cliches and church-bulletin nostrums and exposes the honest, challenging, comforting, and yes, sometimes alarming claims that are at the center of Jesus' life and teaching. This book is downright restorative." --Lauren F. Winner, author of Girl Meets God and Mudhouse Sabbath

Few books have had more impact on U.S. history than Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. The first American novel to sell more than a million copies, it provoked an entire reading public to extol it, debate it, weep over it, excoriate it. Fighting fire with fire, slavery apologists from North and South responded with their own fiction, producing over three dozen novels in direct response to Stowe's work. Interestingly, a key portion of that fiction was written by women. In Whitewashing Uncle Tom's Cabin, Joy Jordan-Lake examines those women-authored novels to produce compelling insights into both antebellum American culture and a proslavery ideology rife with internal tensions. Jordan-Lake begins by considering the male plantation literary tradition and then demonstrates how white women novelists of the anti-Uncle Tom school adopted characteristics from sentimental fiction, emulating Stowe's own strategies more than those of their male allies. Like Stowe, these women writers tried to appeal to maternal sensibilities and offered motherhood as a means of redemption for an admittedly fallen society. But contrary to their intent, Jordan-Lake shows, their works succumb to evasions, displacements, and contradictions that disrupt their surface narratives and reveal even their most noble women characters as mere pawns in a patriarchal game in which white society's pursuit and maintenance of wealth are made to appear humane, even holy. Ultimately, these texts dismantie themselves to expose a profit-driven chattel slavery as savage as any envisioned by Stowe. Including a discussion of twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels that revisit plantation mythology, Whitewashing Uncle Tom's Cabin casts new light on the ethical and moral disaster of securing one group's economic strength at the expense of other groups' access to dignity, compassion, and justice.

Few books have had more impact on U.S. history than Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. The first American novel to sell more than a million copies, it provoked an entire reading public to extol it, debate it, weep over it, excoriate it. Fighting fire with fire, slavery apologists from North and South responded with their own fiction, producing over three dozen novels in direct response to Stowe's work. Interestingly, a key portion of that fiction was written by women. In Whitewashing Uncle Tom's Cabin, Joy Jordan-Lake examines those women-authored novels to produce compelling insights into both antebellum American culture and a proslavery ideology rife with internal tensions. Jordan-Lake begins by considering the male plantation literary tradition and then demonstrates how white women novelists of the anti-Uncle Tom school adopted characteristics from sentimental fiction, emulating Stowe's own strategies more than those of their male allies. Like Stowe, these women writers tried to appeal to maternal sensibilities and offered motherhood as a means of redemption for an admittedly fallen society. But contrary to their intent, Jordan-Lake shows, their works succumb to evasions, displacements, and contradictions that disrupt their surface narratives and reveal even their most noble women characters as mere pawns in a patriarchal game in which white society's pursuit and maintenance of wealth are made to appear humane, even holy. Ultimately, these texts dismantie themselves to expose a profit-driven chattel slavery as savage as any envisioned by Stowe. Including a discussion of twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels that revisit plantation mythology, Whitewashing Uncle Tom's Cabin casts new light on the ethical and moral disaster of securing one group's economic strength at the expense of other groups' access to dignity, compassion, and justice.