A warm and wry family drama with a witchy twist about four generations of Black women living under one roof and the family curse that stems back to a voodoo sorceress in 1950s New Orleans.

For generations, the Montrose women have lived alone with their secrets, their delicate peace depending on the unspoken bond that underpins their family life - Voodoo and hoodoo magic, and a decades-old curse that will kill anyone they fall for.

When seventeen-year-old Nickie Montrose brings home a boy for the first time, this careful balance is thrown into disarray. For the other women have been keeping the curse from Nickie, and revealing it means that they must reckon with their own choices and mistakes.

As new truths emerge, the Montrose women are set on a collision course that echoes back to New Orleans' French Quarter, where a crumbling book of spells may hold the answers that all of them have been looking for...

Rich in its sense of character and place, Black Candle Women is a haunting and magical debut from a talented new storyteller.

In 2017, DNA tests revealed to the collective shock of many scholars that a Viking warrior in a high-status grave in Birka, Sweden, was actually a woman. The Real Valkyrie weaves together archaeology, history and literature to reinvent her life and times, showing that Viking women had more power and agency than historians have imagined. Nancy Marie Brown links the Birka warrior, whom she names Hervor, to Viking trading towns and to their great trade route east to Byzantium and beyond. She imagines Hervor's adventures intersecting with larger-than-life but real women, including Queen Gunnhild Mother-of-Kings, the Viking leader known as the Red Girl, and Queen Olga of Kyiv. Hervor's short, dramatic life shows that much of what we have taken as truth about women in the Viking Age is based not on data but on nineteenth-century Victorian biases. Rather than holding the household keys, Viking women in history, the sagas, poetry and myth carry weapons. In this compelling narrative, Brown brings the world of those valkyries and shield-maids to vivid life.

In the early 1800's, on a Hebridean beach in Scotland, the sea exposed an ancient treasure cache: 93 chessmen carved from walrus ivory. Norse netsuke, each face individual, each full of quirks, the Lewis Chessmen are probably the most famous chess pieces in the world. Harry played Wizard's Chess with them in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Housed at the British Museum, they are among its most visited and beloved objects. Questions abounded: Who carved them? Where? Ivory Vikings explores these mysteries by connecting medieval Icelandic sagas with modern archaeology, art history, forensics, and the history of board games. In the process, Ivory Vikings presents a vivid history of the 400 years when the Vikings ruled the North Atlantic, and the sea-road connected countries and islands we think of as far apart and culturally distinct: Norway and Scotland, Ireland and Iceland, and Greenland and North America. The story of the Lewis chessmen explains the economic lure behind the Viking voyages to the west in the 800s and 900s. And finally, it brings from the shadows an extraordinarily talented woman artist of the twelfth century: Margret the Adroit of Iceland.

As the Revolution of 1848 ravages Europe, in Berlin, many young people take to the streets with other revolutionaries to oppose the Prussian soldiers waiting for them. Seething with resentment over the choking restrictions of press and speech, embargoes, taxation, over-population and lack of opportunities, ownership of land and enactment of laws by and for the nobility, these fearless revolutionaries take a stand to break away from the established government.

Hell-bent on controlling their own lives, Ernst von Kohl and Henri Ordeneaux, cousins and students at the University of Leipzig, fight together, side-by-side, protecting each other as they narrowly escape Berlin with their lives. They bring fehdegeist, the German spirit of endurance and constancy with them as they embark upon a long ship ride to Texas, where they are pioneers in a new land. Can their relationship survive the personal trials that await them?

As war rears its ugly head with the Civil War in the United States, the cousins must once again ardently defend their choices. Will Ernst, a leader in the community and opponent of slavery, consent to fight for the freedoms desired by the Confederacy, as he did in his homeland? Will Henri oppose his cousin?

Marie Browning pushes the envelope of Zentangle into the living dimension of color. Using easy to follow steps, Marie illustrates over 40 new tangles. More than simply coloring regions of a tangle design, this book offers lessons which enable even the novice artist to use a Tombow Dual Brush pen to color delightful Zentangle animals, plants and flowers.