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"A magical island. A dangerous task. A burning secret. Linus Baker leads a quiet, solitary life. At forty, he lives in a tiny house with a devious cat and his old records. As a Case Worker at the Department in Charge Of Magical Youth, he spends his days overseeing the well-being of children in government-sanctioned orphanages. When Linus is unexpectedly summoned by Extremely Upper Management he's given a curious and highly classified assignment: travel...
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In 1960 North Carolina, Ivy Hart is a fifteen-year-old girl whose family are tenants on a small tobacco farm. After her parents die, she is left with the overwhelming task of caring for several family members. Jane Forrester is Grace County's newest social worker, and she quickly becomes emotionally invested in her clients' lives, straining her personal and professional relationships. Jane's relationship with the Hart family tests her resolve to fight...
3) Caught
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Finding and exposing sexual predators on television, reporter Wendy prompts the arrest of a man who worked as an advocate for abused children and tackles the case of a missing girl before a group of vigilante fathers makes Wendy fear that she accused an innocent man.
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In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and...
5) Dumplin'
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Sixteen-year-old Willowdean wants to prove to everyone in her small Texas town that she is more than just a fat girl, so, while grappling with her feelings for a co-worker who is clearly attracted to her, Will and some other misfits prepare to compete in the beauty pageant her mother runs.
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Moving from the industrial riots of discontented millworkers through to the unsought passions of a middle-class woman, and from religious crises of conscience to the ethics of naval mutiny, it poses fundamental questions about the nature of social authority and obedience. Through the story of Margaret Hale, the middle-class southerner who moves to the northern industrial town of Milton, Gaskell skilfully explores issues of class and gender in the...
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The lives of middle-aged women struggling with jobs and family, friendship and romance, are captured to perfection in this collection of humorous and touching stories set in the contemporary Southwest. Mary Sojourner writes about hardworking, hard-living, blue-collar women who fight quietly and fiercely to make their way in the world, find love and beauty, and hold on to their hopes. The heroines, most of them over forty, include single moms, aging...
8) The jungle
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Upton Sinclair's dramatic and deeply moving story exposed the brutal conditions in the Chicago stockyards at the turn of the nineteenth century and brought into sharp moral focus the apalling odds against which immigrants and other working people struggled for their share of the American dream. Denounced by the conservative press as an un-American libel on the meatpacking industry, the book was championed by more progressive thinkers, including then...
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"A dynamic, gripping collection of short stories from "America's best novelist" (Denver Post), the New York Times-bestselling James Lee Burke. Harbor Lights is a story collection from one of the most popular and widely acclaimed icons of American fiction, featuring a never-before-published novella. These eight stories move from the marshlands on the Gulf of Mexico to the sweeping plains of Colorado to prisons, saloons, and trailer parks across the...
10) Minding Frankie
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Noel agrees to take responsibility when he learns that his terminally ill former flame is pregnant with his child, and while the members of the town help the single father, he must prove to Moira, the nosy social worker, that the arrangement is best for baby Frankie.
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The Dolans live by their wits, jumping freight trains and lining up for day work at crooked job agencies. Rye yearns for a steady job and a home; his older brother, Gig, dreams of a better world, fighting alongside other union men for fair pay and decent treatment. Enter Ursula the Great, a vaudeville singer who performs with a live cougar and introduces the brothers to a far more dangerous creature: a mining magnate determined to keep his wealth...
12) The eye of Zeus
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"Meet Phoebe Katz, a twelve-year-old foster kid from New York City who's been bounced around the system her entire life. Things happen around Phoebe, but it's not like they're her fault! But when a statue of Athena comes to life, Phoebe gets the stunning news she's the daughter of Zeus, has a twin brother named Perseus--and was sent away from ancient Greece as a baby to stop a terrible prophecy that predicted she would one day destroy Olympus. Athena...
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"When Dahlia decided to become a foster mother, she had a few caveats: no howling newborns, no delinquents, and above all, no girls. A harrowing incident years before left her a virtual prisoner in her own home, forever wary of the heartbreak and limitation of a girl's life. Eleven years after they began fostering, Dahlia and Louie consider their family complete, but when the social worker begs them to take a young girl who has been horrifically abused...
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"Inspired by the real-life experiences of his grandfather, J. R. R. Tolkien, during World War I, Simon Tolkien delivers a perfectly rendered novel rife with class tension, period detail, and stirring action, ranging from the sharply divided society of northern England to the trenches of the Somme. Adam Raine is a boy cursed by misfortune. His impoverished childhood in turn-of-the-century London comes to a sudden and tragic end when his mother is...
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"Handsome, widowed, sophisticated, utterly charming, Paul Parker won the heart of a wealthy young Frenchwoman--the daughter of an American financier, the granddaughter of a major French art connoisseur--as his second wife. In two marriages, he has fathered a challenging son and three very different daughters. But as irresponsible as he was irresistible, he ultimately shrugged off the demands of marriage and parenting to pursue life as an international...
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Examines the American obsession with self-reliance and how it has led to inequality, self-blame, and shifted the responsibility for survival onto the backs of ordinary people.
"The promise that you can "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" is central to the story of the American Dream. It's the belief that if you work hard and rely on your own resources, you will eventually succeed. However time and again we have seen how this foundational myth,...
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Based on extensive interviews with Claudette Colvin and many others, Phillip Hoose presents the first in-depth account of an important yet largely unknown civil rights figure, skillfully weaving her dramatic story into the fabric of the historic Montgomery bus boycott and court case that would change the course of American history.
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"In her first new novel since The Perfect Nanny launched her onto the world stage and won her acclaim for her "devastatingly perceptive character studies" (The New York Times Book Review), Leila Slimani draws on her own family's inspiring story for the first volume in a planned trilogy about race, resilience, and women's empowerment. Mathilde, a spirited young Frenchwoman, falls in love with Amine, a handsome Moroccan soldier in the French army during...
20) Precious
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In 1987, obese, illiterate, black 16-year-old Claireece 'Precious' Jones lives in Harlem with her dysfunctional family. She has been raped and impregnated twice by her father, Carl. She suffers constant physical, mental and sexual abuse from her unemployed mother, Mary. After getting pregnant for the second time, Precious is suspended from her school. Her principal arranges to have her attend an alternative school where her new teacher, Ms. Rain,...
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