Catalog Search Results
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.6 - AR Pts: 15
Language
English
Description
"Folksy and fresh, endearing and affecting, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe is a now-classic novel about two women: Evelyn, who’s in the sad slump of middle age, and gray-headed Mrs. Threadgoode, who’s telling her life story. Her tale includes two more women—the irrepressibly daredevilish tomboy Idgie and her friend Ruth—who back in the thirties ran a little place in Whistle Stop, Alabama, offering good coffee, southern barbecue,...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.9 - AR Pts: 13
Language
English
Description
Documenting his grandparents' experiences during the siege of Leningrad, a young writer learns his grandfather's story about how a military deserter and he tried to secure pardons by gathering hard-to-find ingredients for a powerful colonel's daughter's wedding cake.
3) Gilead
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6.4 - AR Pts: 14
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
In 1956, toward the end of Rev. John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. This is also the tale of wisdom forged during his solitary life and how history lives through generations, pervasively present even when betrayed and forgotten.
Author
Language
English
Description
The setting of Family Matters is Bombay, mid-1990s. Nariman Vakeel, suffering from Parkinson's disease, is the elderly patriarch of a small, discordant family. In a building called Chateau Felicity, he and his two middle-aged stepchildren - Coomy, bitter and domineering, and her just-younger brother, Jal, mild mannered and acquiescent - occupy a once-elegant apartment whose ruin is progressing as rapidly as Nariman's disease. Coomy has "rules to govern...
Author
Language
English
Description
"John and Ella Robina, a couple married 50+ years--she has stopped her cancer treatments, he has Alzheimer's-- kidnap themselves from the adult children and the doctors who seem to run their lives, and steal off on a forbidden vacation determined to prove that, when it comes to life, you can go back for seconds and sneak a little extra time."
Author
Language
English
Description
In 1945 on the outskirts of Salzburg, victorious American soldiers capture a train filled with unspeakable riches: piles of fine gold watches; mountains of fur coats; crates filled with wedding rings, silver picture frames, family heirlooms, and Shabbat candlesticks passed down through generations. Jack Wiseman, a tough, smart New York Jew, is the lieutenant charged with guarding this treasure - a responsibility that grows more complicated when he...
Author
Series
Alexander Cleave trilogy volume 3
Language
English
Description
An actor in the twilight of his career reflects on a poignant first love affair at the age of fifteen with his best friend's mother and inexplicably lands a role opposite a famous but fragile actress who helps him come to an astonishing realization.
8) Tinkers
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
An old man lies dying. As time collapses into memory, he travels deep into his past where he is reunited with his father and relives the wonder and pain of his impoverished New England youth.
Author
Language
English
Description
At the bar of a grand hotel in a small Irish town sits 84-year-old Maurice Hannigan. He's alone, as usual, though tonight is anything but. Pull up a stool and charge your glass, because Maurice is finally ready to tell his story. Over the course of this evening, he will raise five toasts to the five people who have meant the most to him. Through these stories - of unspoken joy and regret, a secret tragedy kept hidden, a fierce love that never found...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Gentle, sensitive...sometimes funny, occasionally sad, and ultimately life-affirming."
-Winston-Salem Journal
The Sweet By and By is the story of five southern women of different ages and from very different backgrounds whose lives come together in a journey of courage, hope, and humor. First-time author Todd Johnson-who was a co-producer with Oprah Winfrey of Broadway's The Color Purple-makes an indelible literary mark with a debut novel that...
Author
Language
English
Description
Lillian's rise to fame and fortune spans seventy years and is inextricably linked to the course of American history itself, from Prohibition to the disco days of Studio 54. Yet Lillian Dunkle is nothing like the whimsical motherly persona she crafts for herself in the media. Conniving, profane, and irreverent, she is a supremely complex woman who prefers a good stiff drink to an ice cream cone. And when her past begins to catch up with her, everything...
12) The Bird sisters
Author
Language
English
Description
When a bird flies into a window in Spring Green, Wisconsin, sisters Milly and Twiss get a visit. Twiss listens to the birds' heartbeats, assessing what she can fix and what she can't, while Milly listens to the heartaches of the people who've brought them. These spinster sisters have spent their lives nursing people and birds back to health. But back in the summer of 1947, Milly and Twiss knew nothing about trying to mend what had been accidentally...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6.4 - AR Pts: 10
Language
English
Description
"An extraordinary debut, a deeply lovely novel that evokes with uncommon deftness the terrible, heartbreaking beauty that is life in wartime. Like the glorious ghosts of the paintings in the Hermitage that lie at the heart of the story, Dean's exquisite prose shimmers with a haunting glow, illuminating us to the notion that art itself is perhaps our most necessary nourishment. A superbly graceful novel." - Chang-Rae Lee, New York Times Bestselling...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6.5 - AR Pts: 16
Language
English
Description
Lily is haunted by memories–of who she once was, and of a person, long gone, who defined her existence. She has nothing but time now, as she recounts the tale of Snow Flower, and asks the gods for forgiveness.
In nineteenth-century China, when wives and daughters were foot-bound and lived in almost total seclusion, the women in one remote Hunan county developed their own secret code for communication: nu shu (“women’s...
In nineteenth-century China, when wives and daughters were foot-bound and lived in almost total seclusion, the women in one remote Hunan county developed their own secret code for communication: nu shu (“women’s...
15) The tin horse
Author
Language
English
Description
A rich multigenerational story about the intense, often fraught bond sisters share and the dreams and sorrows that lay at the heart of the immigrant experience. It has been more than sixty years since Elaine Greenstein's twin sister, Barbara, ran away, cutting off contact with her family forever. While sifting through old papers as she prepares to move to Rancho Mañana, Elaine is stunned to find a possible hint to Barbara's whereabouts. It pushes...
16) The bungalow
Author
Language
English
Description
"In the summer of 1942, twenty-one-year-old Anne Calloway, newly engaged, sets off to serve in the Army Nurse Corps on the Pacific island of Bora-Bora. More exhilarated by the adventure of a lifetime than she ever was by her predictable fianc, she is drawn to a mysterious soldier named Westry, and their friendship soon blossoms into hues as deep as the hibiscus flowers native to the island. Under the thatched roof of an abandoned beach bungalow, the...
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.7 - AR Pts: 14
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, gather to play mah jong, remember the past, and gossip into the night. United in unspeakable loss and new hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, memories that reveal these women's strength, worries, and determination, which their American-born daughters reject as irrelevant. The daughters, in turn,...
19) Sarah's song
Author
Series
Red gloves series volume 3
Accelerated Reader
IL: MG - BL: 4.8 - AR Pts: 4
Language
English
Formats
Description
Best-selling author Karen Kingsbury has been a RWA Rita finalist and Gold Medallion Award finalist. Sarah's Song is book three in The Red Gloves Series. For years Sarah Lindeman, now in her 80s, has carried out a special tradition over the 12 days of Christmas. This year, Sarah notices a young nurse listening, and in her recognizes pain and longing. Sarah prays that through her story, she can ease this young woman's sorrow and help her realize the...
20) An American type
Author
Language
English
Description
Discovered posthumously, this final novel by the author of the greatest American immigrant novel, Call It Sleep, reintroduces us to its protagonist, Roth's alter ego, Ira, who abandons his controlling lover, Edith, in favor of a blond, aristocratic pianist at Yaddo. The ensuing conflict between his Jewish ghetto roots and his high-flown, writerly aspirations forces Ira to abandon his family temporarily for the sun-soaked promise of the American West....