Seven Children. Five Mothers. One idyllic commune. What could go wrong?

Annabel Cooper wants to save the world. Her story begins in 1964 with her journey to Freedom Summer in Mississippi, where the disappearance of her first love ignites a lifelong fight for justice. Years later, she, her husband, and four other couples form a Boston political collective where they live together with their children in a rambling Boston house. As the era's social upheaval intensifies, they move their children to a Vermont Eden, where they can remain safe from the world's threats; their parents continue their political work, taking turns traveling to Vermont to care for the children.

But not all danger comes from the outside.

Annabel's daughter, Ivy, yearns for normalcy, not the patchouli-soaked, natural-food-laden confines of Vermont. But mostly, she longs for Annabel's attention-until a cataclysmic event alters the course of all their lives and she learns the limits of her many mothers and fathers.

The Many Mothers of Ivy Puddingstone delves into the intricate and nuanced dance of familial love and communal ties through the lens of sociopolitical upheaval from the 1960s to the present day, examining which sacrifices are worth the price.

This text contains essays on writers from the 1840s to the 1890s, and includes well-known writers such as Anne Bronte, Wilkie Collins, and Bram Stoker, as well as lesser known writers such as Geraldine Jewsbury, Charles Reade, Margaret Oliphant, George Moore, Sarah Grand and Mary Ward. The contributors explore important thematic concerns such as the relationship between private and public realms, gender and social class, sexuality and the marketplace, and male and female cultural identity.

Victorian literature has been an important critical focus for feminist scholarship, but feminist criticism has also established its own canon of central authors-most frequently focusing on the rich accomplishments of Emily Bront', Charlotte Bront', and George Eliot, and the disappointments of Charles Dickens and Henry James. This collection of essays expands the canon to include works not frequently accorded attention either in literary criticism broadly conceived, or in feminist literary scholarship.
The book includes essays on writers from the 1840s to the 1890s, investigating some authors in whom readers are already interested (Anne Bront', Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker), and those to whom they wish to gain access (Geraldine Jewsbury, Charles Reade, Margaret Oliphant, George Moore, Sarah Grand, Mary Ward, and others). The essays explore important thematic concerns: the relation between private and public realms, gender and social class, sexuality and the marketplace, and male and female cultural identity.
This collection facilitates interpretation of key underread texts for scholars who seek new information and insights. Additionally, the biographical headnote and brief bibliographic survey that accompany each essay are helpful to students and teachers of 19th-century literature, feminist literature and criticism, and cultural studies. Most importantly, the volume offers a richer conception of 19th-century literature and thus contributes both to literary history and classroom instruction.

Every day, everywhere, babies are born. They're kissed and dressed and rocked and fed--and completely adored by the families who love them. With an irresistible rhyming text and delightfully endearing illustrations, here is an exuberant celebration of playing, sleeping, crawling, and of course, very noisy babies doing all the wonderful things babies do best.

Most contemporary public managers will work in some type of collaborative or networked arrangement at some time in their professional careers. More and more work in public administration and policy is now being done in collaborative formats, and while there are many studies, articles, and cases describing successful endeavors, a good deal of confusion persists about what, exactly, makes them work. What are the best practices? This book focuses on the processes, protocols, and incentives needed for successful collaborative endeavors. Moving beyond new public governance theories and the limits of new public management, Chandler uniquely focuses on the facilitative skills and tools that members and facilitators need for success in collaborative work. Written by an author with both academic and practical experience in organizing, developing, leading, and facilitating public-private collaboratives, this book has both an academic thrust and an action focus, drawing on case studies from the fields of health and human services to highlight important theoretical and/or practice points. Making Collaboratives Work is required reading for undergraduate and graduate public-administration students of collaborative management, nonprofit administration, organizational theory and practice, communications, public policy, and leadership. The book is also ideally suited to public administrators and nonprofit managers asked to work in public-private partnerships and collaboratives to solve complex problems.

Maddy is a social worker trying to balance her career and three children. Years ago, she fell in love with Ben, a public defender, drawn to his fiery passion, but now he's lashing out at her. She vacillates between tiptoeing around him and asserting herself for the sake of their kids - until the rainy day when they're together in the car and Ben's volatile temper gets the best of him, leaving Maddy in the hospital fighting for her life. RS Meyers takes us inside the hearts and minds of her characters, alternating among the perspectives of Maddy, Ben, and their fourteen-year-old daughter. Accidents of Marriage is a provocative and stunning novel that will resonate deeply with women from all walks of life, ultimately revealing the challenges of family, faith, and forgiveness.

Seven Children. Five Mothers. One idyllic commune. What could go wrong?

Annabel Cooper wants to save the world. Her story begins in 1964 with her journey to Freedom Summer in Mississippi, where the disappearance of her first love ignites a lifelong fight for justice. Years later, she, her husband, and four other couples form a Boston political collective where they live together with their children in a rambling Boston house. As the era's social upheaval intensifies, they move their children to a Vermont Eden, where they can remain safe from the world's threats; their parents continue their political work, taking turns traveling to Vermont to care for the children.

But not all danger comes from the outside.

Annabel's daughter, Ivy, yearns for normalcy, not the patchouli-soaked, natural-food-laden confines of Vermont. But mostly, she longs for Annabel's attention-until a cataclysmic event alters the course of all their lives and she learns the limits of her many mothers and fathers.

The Many Mothers of Ivy Puddingstone delves into the intricate and nuanced dance of familial love and communal ties through the lens of sociopolitical upheaval from the 1960s to the present day, examining which sacrifices are worth the price.

Describes babies and the things they do from the time they are born until their first birthday.

With an irresistible rhyming text and delightfully endearing illustrations, here is an exuberant celebration of playing, sleeping, crawling, and of course, very noisy babies doing all the wonderful things babies do best. Every day, everywhere, babies are born. They're kissed and dressed and rocked and fed-and completely adored by the families who love them. New York magazine's The Strategist chose Everywhere Babies as one of the "Best (Nonobvious) Baby Books to Bring to a Shower." As The Strategist stated: "Babies love looking at other babies, and this book is filled with all kinds of adorable ones." Plus the book's art is "really layered and thoughtful in representing all kinds of babies and parents." The Strategist's kids loved the "really pleasing cadence and rhyme structure." Marla Frazee's popular books include two Caldecott Honor winners, the Clementine series, and The Boss Baby, among many others.

Every day, everywhere, babies are born. They're kissed and dressed and rocked and fed - and completely adored by families that love them. With an irresistible rhyming text and delightfully endearing illustrations, this book is an exuberant celebration of playing, sleeping, crawling, and, of course, very noisy babies doing all the wonderful things babies do best. This is a lap board book edition and includes a 'Baby on Board' window cling.

Check This Box If You Are Blind is the story of one man's journey into blindness. Andy, 42, loves dogs, Dracula, vintage cars, unicorns, and Olivia Newton-John. He's sensitive. Stubborn. And blind. Andy disagrees about the blind part. His lost sight, he says, will be back any minute now. He has decided to pass as sighted until his vision returns. "Because my true self is my sighted self," he explains. But Andy's sight is fading fast. He's making more mistakes these days: at work, at home, losing things, bumping into things. He's putting his job, many friendships, and even his personal safety at risk. When is it wrong to talk someone you love out of a wish that can't come true? Susan Meyers is Andy's older sister and protector. She used to hold his fat little hand in hers every morning and walk him to school when they were small. She lives far away now, but she can't stop picturing Andy feeling for the smoothness of walls with his hands, for the suddenness of stairs with his feet. She's supposed to save her brother, to swoop in and perform some sort of rescue, right here, right now. But how? And she has questions. Why is blindness so frightening? What is her brother losing, exactly, and why can't he find a way to live without it? This is the wonderful, engaging story of a sister's struggle to protect her brother, a man who calls her his guardian angel but refuses to be guarded. Beautifully written and sensitively told, it takes up questions that brothers, sisters, and caregivers of all stripes must ask.

Lulu and Merry's childhood was never ideal, but on the day before Lulu's tenth birthday their father drives them into a nightmare. He's always hungered for the love of the girls' self-obsessed mother; after she throws him out, their troubles turn deadly.

Lulu had been warned to never to let her father in, but when he shows up drunk, he's impossible to ignore. He bullies his way past Lulu, who then listens in horror as her parents struggle. She runs for help, but discovers upon her return that he's murdered her mother, stabbed her five-year-old sister, and tried, unsuccessfully, to kill himself.

Lulu and Merry are effectively orphaned by their mother's death and father's imprisonment, but the girls' relatives refuse to care for them and abandon them to a terrifying group home. Even as they plot to be taken in by a well-to-do family, they come to learn they'll never really belong anywhere or to anyone--that all they have to hold onto is each other.

For thirty years, the sisters try to make sense of what happened. Their imprisoned father is a specter in both their lives, shadowing every choice they make. One spends her life pretending he's dead, while the other feels compelled, by fear, by duty, to keep him close. Both dread the day his attempts to win parole may meet success.

A beautifully written, compulsively readable debut, The Murderer's Daughters is a testament to the power of family and the ties that bind us together and tear us apart.

Keep and Give Away was selected by Terrance Hayes as the inaugural winner of the South Carolina Poetry Book Prize sponsored by the South Carolina Poetry Initiative. In her first full-length collection, Susan Meyers guides us through her examination of life's ordinary moments and the seemingly ordinary images that abide in them to reveal the extraordinary. From minutia to marriage, crumbs to crows, nothing is too commonplace to escape her attention as she traverses terrains of childhood, loss, relationships, and death. Mostly lyrical and often elegiac, the poems of Keep and Give Away move along the rifts between the past and present, the lived and desired. The dominant emotions of the verses are deepened by observations rooted in our natural world, where birds are "yeses quickening the air" and the sky can "lap you up, and up." In the book's final section, marriage poems turn to fishing and gardening for their truths, contemplations that recognize the realities of a world governed by luck, imperfection, contraries, and-most of all-love.

The implicit link between white women and "the dark races" recurs persistently in nineteenth-century English fiction. Imperialism at Home examines the metaphorical use of race by three nineteenth-century women novelists: Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and George Eliot. Susan Meyer argues that each of these domestic novelists uses race relations as a metaphor through which to explore the relationships between men and women at home in England. In the fiction of, for example, Anthony Trollope and Charles Dickens, as in nineteenth-century culture more generally, the subtle and not-so-subtle comparison of white women and people of color is used to suggest their mutual inferiority. The Bronte sisters and George Eliot responded to this comparison, Meyer contends, transforming it for their own purposes. Through this central metaphor, these women novelists work out a sometimes contentious relationship to established hierarchies of race and gender. Their feminist impulses, in combination with their use of race as a metaphor, Meyer argues, produce at times a surprising, if partial, critique of empire. Through readings of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, The Mill on the Floss, Daniel Deronda, and Charlotte Brontë's African juvenilia, Meyer traces the aesthetically and ideologically complex workings of the racial metaphor. Her analysis is supported by careful attention to textual details and thorough grounding in recent scholarship on the idea of race, and on literature and imperialism.

The implicit link between white women and "the dark races" recurs persistently in nineteenth-century English fiction. Imperialism at Home examines the metaphorical use of race by three nineteenth-century women novelists: Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and George Eliot. Susan Meyer argues that each of these domestic novelists uses race relations as a metaphor through which to explore the relationships between men and women at home in England. In the fiction of, for example, Anthony Trollope and Charles Dickens, as in nineteenth-century culture more generally, the subtle and not-so-subtle comparison of white women and people of color is used to suggest their mutual inferiority. The Bronte sisters and George Eliot responded to this comparison, Meyer contends, transforming it for their own purposes. Through this central metaphor, these women novelists work out a sometimes contentious relationship to established hierarchies of race and gender. Their feminist impulses, in combination with their use of race as a metaphor, Meyer argues, produce at times a surprising, if partial, critique of empire. Through readings of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, The Mill on the Floss, Daniel Deronda, and Charlotte Brontë's African juvenilia, Meyer traces the aesthetically and ideologically complex workings of the racial metaphor. Her analysis is supported by careful attention to textual details and thorough grounding in recent scholarship on the idea of race, and on literature and imperialism.