Author: Diane Hammond Publisher: Ballantine Books ISBN: 030742362X Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 314
Book Description
Diane Hammond’s beautifully rendered description of life in the fictional small town of Hubbard, Oregon, won her plaudits for Going to Bend, her debut novel. In Homesick Creek, Hammond returns to Hubbard and captivates us once again with a cast of characters so vivid we feel like we’ve known them all our lives. Anita and Bunny have been friends since high school, when Anita was a beauty queen runner-up and Bunny a sweet single mother with average looks. They were both taken by surprise when the handsome, charismatic Hack Neary chose Bunny to be his wife. A natural-born salesman, Hack now works his charms at the local car dealership, and he and Bunny enjoy a very comfortable life. But after sixteen years of excusing Hack’s white lies, Bunny is more shaken than she’d like to be by his dangerous new flirtation and her rising suspicions that Hack never meant to put down roots in Hubbard. Anita has also married, but unlike Hack and Bunny, she and her husband are barely scraping by. Bob isn’t ambitious enough to properly support his wife and daughter. He is, however, constant in his love: for Anita, still beautiful in his eyes despite the toll of age, work, and poverty; for his daughter and granddaughter, who need more than the couple can provide; and for Warren, his best friend since they were poor and unwanted children in the same trailer park. Facing a future that seems increasingly difficult, the friends turn to one another and find reserves of love and strength that help heal the wounds they inadvertently inflict on each other. At the deepest point of her grief, Bunny realizes, “If you loved somebody once, no matter how long ago, that had to be worth something.”
Author: Alexandra Edwards Publisher: LSU Press ISBN: 0807180327 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 189
Book Description
Before Fanfiction investigates the overlapping cultures of fandom and American literature from the late 1800s to the mid-1940s, exploding the oft-repeated myth that fandom has its origins in the male-dominated letter columns of science fiction pulp magazines in the 1930s. By reexamining the work of popular American women writers and their fans, Alexandra Edwards recovers the literary history of American media fandom, drawing previously ignored fangirls into the spotlight.
Author: Diane Hammond Publisher: Ballantine Books ISBN: 0345460987 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 338
Book Description
In the small coastal town of Hubbard, Oregon, your man may let you down, your boss may let you down, life may let you down . . . but your best friend never will. Welcome to Hubbard, where Petie Coolbaugh and Rose Bundy have been best friends since childhood. Now in their early thirties, both are grappling to come to terms with their age and station in life. As they struggle to make ends meet and provide for their children and the good-hearted but unreliable men in their lives, they take jobs cooking for a brand-new upscale restaurant, Souperior's Cafe, starting from scratch every morning to produce gallons of fresh soup from local recipes. The proprietors of the cafe, Nadine and Gordon, are fraternal twins from Los Angeles with adjustments of their own to make, but Rose’s warmth and the quality of the women’s soups quickly make them indispensable despite Petie’s abrupt manner and prickly ways. The strains of daily life are never far, however, and the past takes its toll on the women. Petie’s childhood as the daughter of the town drunk—a subject she won't talk about—keeps her at a distance from even her best friend, until an unexpected romance threatens to crack her tough exterior. And despite Rose's loving personality, the only man in her life is a loner fisherman who spends only a few months of the year in town. In this fishing village, friends are for life and love comes in the most unexpected ways. As the novel draws together lovers, husbands, employers, friends, and family, each woman finds possibilities for love and even grace that she had never imagined.
Author: Jean Reynolds Page Publisher: Ballantine Books ISBN: 0345482115 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 354
Book Description
Someone once told me that groupings of objects should be displayed in threes. Three provides both tension and balance among items of varying size and heft. My sister’s accident made me an only child; my husband’s accident made me a widow. Part of me will always believe that Angel was the third, the one that left me with hope. After her husband’s unexpected death at the age of thirty-six, Gina Melrose becomes a “live-aboard” on his boat, docked at a marina in coastal South Carolina, near the home she and Ben once shared. In this temporary, borrowed existence on the water, she settles into numb survival. But Gina finds her life taking yet another dramatic turn late one night when a woman named Reese disrupts her quiet world. With Reese comes a daughter: a charming girl named Angel. After a rough start, Gina realizes that, strange as it may seem, she’s drawn to both Reese and Angel. Their sudden appearance shatters the stillness–and Gina is remade. She is fascinated by Reese, who seems both invincible and vulnerable–and whose past may hold the key to Gina’s future. Gina begins to realize that for the first time since Ben’s death, she’s getting her senses back. As both pain and joy reenter her world, Gina discovers that she is able to accept feeling in order to live fully once more. But the biggest surprise for Gina is her relationship with Angel. After the painful loss of her sister during childhood, Gina had decided that she would never have children of her own. Struggling through conflicted emotions, Gina’s finds her life unexpectedly transformed by the precocious little girl who may be Ben’s daughter. This tender, poignant novel movingly explores the bonds of family and the resilience of hope. In the accomplished tradition of the novels of Elizabeth Berg and Anita Shreve, Jean Reynolds Page’s Accidental Happiness is a lyrical, enthralling drama unafraid to examine complex relationships with a clear eye and an honest heart.
Author: Susan J. Matt Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0199707448 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 356
Book Description
Homesickness today is dismissed as a sign of immaturity, what children feel at summer camp, but in the nineteenth century it was recognized as a powerful emotion. When gold miners in California heard the tune "Home, Sweet Home," they sobbed. When Civil War soldiers became homesick, army doctors sent them home, lest they die. Such images don't fit with our national mythology, which celebrates the restless individualism of colonists, explorers, pioneers, soldiers, and immigrants who supposedly left home and never looked back. Using letters, diaries, memoirs, medical records, and psychological studies, this wide-ranging book uncovers the profound pain felt by Americans on the move from the country's founding until the present day. Susan Matt shows how colonists in Jamestown longed for and often returned to England, African Americans during the Great Migration yearned for their Southern homes, and immigrants nursed memories of Sicily and Guadalajara and, even after years in America, frequently traveled home. These iconic symbols of the undaunted, forward-looking American spirit were often homesick, hesitant, and reluctant voyagers. National ideology and modern psychology obscure this truth, portraying movement as easy, but in fact Americans had to learn how to leave home, learn to be individualists. Even today, in a global society that prizes movement and that condemns homesickness as a childish emotion, colleges counsel young adults and their families on how to manage the transition away from home, suburbanites pine for their old neighborhoods, and companies take seriously the emotional toll borne by relocated executives and road warriors. In the age of helicopter parents and boomerang kids, and the new social networks that sustain connections across the miles, Americans continue to assert the significance of home ties. By highlighting how Americans reacted to moving farther and farther from their roots, Homesickness: An American History revises long-held assumptions about home, mobility, and our national identity.
Author: Ute Frevert Publisher: Emotions in History ISBN: 0199684995 Category : Education Languages : en Pages : 321
Book Description
This volume demonstrates how children, through their reading matter, were provided with learning tools to navigate their emotional lives, presenting this in the context of changing social, political, cultural, and gender agendas, the building of nations, subjects and citizens, and the forging of moral and religious values.
Author: Mark Cloutier Publisher: Affirm Press ISBN: 1925972410 Category : Nature Languages : en Pages : 240
Book Description
Every fisherman has a special stretch of water, where the fish are always plentiful and the memories flow. River Song revels in each of celebrated fishing writer Mark Cloutier?s special locations, discovered over four decades fishing the mountain streams and lakes of Australia and New Zealand. Each tale conjures the romance of days spent chasing the perfect catch, and the insight that only quiet hours spent in the wild can bring. With gorgeous black-and-white photography from Mark?s adventures, River Song is a loving ode to fishing?s power to soothe the soul, and the perfect gift for anglers and nature lovers alike.
Author: Violet June Richardson Publisher: AuthorHouse ISBN: 1449042031 Category : Languages : en Pages : 130
Book Description
From the beautiful green mountains of Tumbling Creek, Virginia to the coalmines of West Virginia, came a man, strong, as if carved from granite, with a wife and ten children. They survived the everpresent stench of coal dust; the loud rumble of freight trains loaded with fresh dug coal that spewed billowing black smoke throughout the coal camps night and day. Some will say they lived a gypsy life, but those who lived through the Great Depression will remember the struggles that had to be made in order to survive to keep food on the table and clothes on their backs. Later Tom moved his family several times in order to make a living. These included Cedar Bluff, Tumbling Creek, and then on to Meadowview Farm where the family settled down to farming. Their last move was to Indiana where Tom retired to live among his children who had moved there earlier. You will get to know each child as they grow into adults; laugh at the antics of a large and boistrous family, and cry when tragedy strikes. This is the continuing story of Tom and Dolly and the sequel to Mountain Blossoms.
Author: Diane Hammond
Author: Alexandra Edwards
Author: Diane Hammond
Author: Jean Reynolds Page
Author: Susan J. Matt
Author: Oregon. State Engineer
Author: Ute Frevert
Author: 
Author: Mark Cloutier
Author: Violet June Richardson