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Someone to Cook for
by Maiko Seo
A light, humorous, amiably peopled, and tender novel about found families, the people who shape our lives, and the complexities of non-traditional family ties.
Yuko has had four different surnames and been brought up in several families. The parental figures in her life, despite not being related by blood, have always cared deeply for her. Through it all, pragmatic and resilient Yuko has navigated life's changes and its occasional conflicts without bitterness, always managing to find a kind of equilibrium. As an adult, Yuko falls in love with Hayase, a talented pianist she's known since her school years. She embarks on a journey to reconnect with the various parental figures from her past to seek their blessing for her marriage. Along the way, she revisits her former life and the people in it and gains a deeper understanding of what truly defines a family.
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Beginning Middle End
by Valeria Luiselli
A tale of a mother and a daughter starting over, searching for a new story.
A mother and her daughter take off on a trip. It is a summer of rapidly changing winds, volcanic rumbles, and sudden tempests. They arrive in Sicily, near the ancient ruins where the narrator’s grandmother worked long ago on an archaeological dig. How do you begin again, the mother wonders, pondering her family line, and what if the new beginning you're imagining is actually the end? While the mother tries to figure out how to reconstruct their lives together—cooking meals side by side, reading out loud to each other, playing chess, bickering and making-up—her deeply intelligent, inquisitive daughter begins to take the reins of the story. She becomes increasingly curious about her great-grandmother’s past as a digger in archaeological sites and ancient tombs, and urges her mother to leave their enclosed day-to-day in search for answers about their family’s past and future.
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The House Built on Alligator Bones
by Sophia Huneycutt
A story of long-lost relatives with an alligator farming empire that just might be cursed.
After the death of her mother, Dart feels alone. Everything changes when she responds to a letter from her maternal grandmother, Gazzie, who is seeking an heir to the family's alligator farm empire. Dart is invited to visit Greer House, her family's Gilded Age mansion on Amelia Island, FL, built on alligator bones. Her arrival at Greer House isn't everything she hoped. Without warning, Dart finds herself in fierce competition with her grandmother's arrogant heir apparent, and tensions rise as threats escalate on one of the farms. More unsettling is her hostile grandmother's fanatical belief that the danger stems from a curse; according to legend, a larger-than-life alligator hunted down by a bloodthirsty ancestor haunts the family. Dart can't deny that the farm's alligators hiss only at Greers, or that a shadowy figure creeps through the mansion's halls. As Dart uncovers the truth about her violent birthright, she faces a terrible choice: accept her place in her family's grim legacy or forge a new path by slaying a different beast entirely.
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Body Language
by Meg Howrey
A clear-eyed and moving novel exploring choice, change, and power in the bodies and lives of a mother and her adult daughters.
When Barbara's friend and housemate goes on vacation, her adult daughters, Sloane, Laurel, and Nanette, return home to Indiana to care for her, each one approaching a new phase of life. Therapist and former actor Sloane has entered perimenopause. Laurel wants to support her eldest child, newly out as nonbinary, and fears her husband is having an affair. Nanette, a novice at an Episcopalian convent, went viral for having a religious experience at a gun range. The sisters arrive and discover their mother doing worse than they feared. After watching how Alzheimer's affected her mother and sister, Barbara refuses to let herself succumb to the disease. In the small house where Barbara moved after her divorce, the four women fall into their past roles and struggle to find new ones.
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The Great Wherever
by Shannon Sanders
The dead are relentless gossips, or at least these dead are.
A year after her father’s death, Aubrey learns she has inherited a share of a farm on the sun-streaked plains of Tennessee. Seeking a way to erase a mounting pile of debt, she travels South to meet a family she barely knows. Watching her arrival are four ghosts: Aubrey’s ancestors, and the keepers of the farm’s secrets. As Aubrey gets to know her living relatives, the story of the land unfolds - her great-grandfather who bought it, one of the first Black landowners in the community, the four children set to inherit it, their bitter rivalries, and a tragedy that echoes through the decades... With the sale of the farm looming, the ghosts face exile, and Aubrey must decide how much of her future she is willing to sacrifice to the claims of the past.
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Ungodly Rich
by Katharine McGee
Old gods, new rules. Meet the Greek gods as a family of billionaires--with all the messy drama that entails.
When Julia Dodds meets Harry Adams, love hits her like a lightning bolt. He’s adventurous, charismatic, and impossibly handsome. Little does Julia know that her boyfriend has left out a few key details. His name isn’t Harry: it’s Ares, as in the ancient god of war. His mother is Hera, and his father is Zeus. Soon, Julia is caught up in a world of wealth and privilege as she joins Harry at a lavish family reunion. Except these billionaires don’t just have wealth—they have divine powers. And the moment she steps onto their private island, Julia becomes their latest target. It’s no secret that the Gods love to meddle, and when it comes to Julia, Harry’s immortal relatives each have their own agenda. Harry’s mother, Hera, will do anything to protect her own. Harry’s sister-in-law Aphrodite has a deeply personal reason for hating Julia, and tasks Hermes, keeper of family secrets, with digging up dirt. Meanwhile, Hades has spent years trying to upend Zeus’s power—and now he finally sees an opportunity to strike.
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Through Mom's Eyes: Simple Wisdom from Mothers Who Raised Extraordinary Humans
by Sheinelle Jones
From the beloved Today show host Sheinelle Jones comes an inspiring collection of heartfelt life-lessons from hard working moms who raised some of our favorite celebrities.
When Sheinelle Jones launched Through Mom's Eyes, a recurring Today show segment interviewing celebrities' mothers about raising successful kids, she had an ulterior motive--she wanted to bring all their wisdom to bear on raising her own three children. So she asked Lin-Manuel Miranda's mom about staying present with kids while balancing a demanding career, talked with Lady Gaga's mom about how to recognize bullying, and got tips from Steph Curry's mom on making sure even future NBA royalty does his chores. She has since interviewed dozens of remarkable women and gathered a candid, warm, and insightful collection of valuable lessons about life, love, and parenthood. Now in her first book, Through Mom's Eyes, Sheinelle is ready to share even more of those life-changing secrets with the world.
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The Stars Shine Brighter: A Father and Son in Gaza
by Rami Abou Jamous
A unique and priceless testimony about supporting others when everything around you is collapsing
A Palestinian journalist's extraordinary account of family, survival, and resilience amid the ongoing genocide. On the morning of October 7, 2023, Rami Abou Jamous is already packed. A respected francophone journalist from Palestine, he quickly grasps what the scale of the Israeli response will be. His emergency bag containing passports, clothes, medical supplies, and cash is never far away--Rami is the father of a two-year-old son, Walid, whom he must protect at all costs, physically and psychologically. He decides to create a bubble around this little boy that fear, anxiety, and sadness will not be able to penetrate. Explosions are fireworks, drones are birds in full flight, and Walid keeps smiling. Through a series of forced moves from Gaza City to Rafah to Deir al-Balah, from a large, modern apartment to a refugee tent, Rami fights to preserve the safety and dignity of his family and neighbors. A declaration of a father's love for his son, The Stars Shine Brighter plunges the reader into the everyday reality of one of the worst humanitarian disasters of our time.
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Mother Tongue: A Memoir
by Sara Novic
A memoir in which the author retraces her path out of the hearing world and into the deaf community--and seeks to understand what it means to raise children who are different from her.
Sara Novic's early years were steeped in music, Bible study, and a strong desire to fit in. But when she failed her school's mandated hearing test, her worldview was thrown into chaos. Desperate not to be marked as different, she told no one, staying in the hearing world for as long as she could by brute force. Eventually unable to ignore the fact that she was deaf, Novic sought out other deaf people and was welcomed into a tight knit community rooted in the beauty and joy of American Sign Language. Novic realized that rather than maintaining the facade of her old life or trying to straddle two worlds, she would need to cultivate an existence in the space between. Now the mother of two young sons--one, biological and hearing, the other, adopted and deaf--Novic reflects on her life both before and after parenthood.
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History by a Hair: Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings & Solving a 200-Year-Old Mystery
by Richard Kurin
A tale that settles the historical record, deepens our understanding of Jefferson, honors generations of family oral history, and asks America to confront the full complexity of its origins.
In 2011, staff at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History discovered what appeared to be a hair--light red, possibly human--pressed between the pages of the Thomas Jefferson Bible. That hair sparked an unprecedented scientific quest: determining if modern genomics could recover Jefferson's DNA and finally resolve the most divisive and enduring question surrounding his life--the paternity of the children of Sally Hemings, one of hundreds of African Americans enslaved by Thomas Jefferson. In this riveting narrative--part scientific detective story, part historical epic--Richard Kurin, distinguished scholar and museum official, leads readers through the fifteen-year-long genomic investigation conducted with leading DNA scientists, archaeologists, genealogists, forensic experts, and Jefferson and Hemings' descendants across the country.
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Dad, Love, Me: A Memoir
by Matthew Quick
Author of The Silver Linings Playbook explores the complicated burden of caring for an abusive parent who is dying.
On the surface, Matthew Quick seemed to have it all--a loving wife, a thriving career as a novelist, and a beautiful home. He'd traveled all over the world advocating for mental health awareness, standing before crowds as a success story. But secretly, he was depressed and some days, he didn't want to live. Years earlier, when he first told his father he wanted to be a novelist, the response was immediate and brutal: Idiot That voice--angry and belittling--would echo through Quick's mind for years. He channeled his pain into his debut novel, a book that became a New York Times bestseller and was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film. Still, the approval Quick longed for never came. His father remained cold and withholding. The deeper the rift between them grew, the deeper Quick sank into anxiety and addiction. In this book, Quick takes readers deep into his psyche, as he wrestles with both his own mental health and his father's cognitive decline. This beautifully brave and life-affirming memoir is a must read for anyone who has been starved of love but wants to keep loving anyway.
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Why You Never Got to Be a Kid: How to Heal When Your Parents Didn't Parent
by Lauren Dennelly
You were the responsible one. The helper. The fixer. But no one ever asked what you needed.
Parentification occurs when a child is pulled into an inappropriate caretaking role at a young age, taking on responsibility for the health and well-being of the family because of parents who aren't willing or able to do so. Drawing from family systems theory, trauma-informed psychology, and decades of clinical experience, this book helps readers understand their experience and heal from codependency, people pleasing, lack of boundaries, self-doubt, and other mental health conditions stemming from parentification so they can live freely and authentically.
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