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Bestselling author Lisa Wingate brings to life startling stories from actual "Lost Friends" advertisements that appeared in Southern newspapers after the Civil War, as newly freed slaves desperately searched for loved ones who had been sold away. Louisiana, 1875: In the tumultuous era of Reconstruction, three young women set off as unwilling companions on a perilous quest: Hannie, a freed slave; Lavinia, the pampered heir to a now destitute plantation; and Juneau Jane, Lavinia's Creole half sister. Each carries private wounds and powerful secrets as they head for Texas, following roads rife with vigilantes and soldiers still fighting a war lost a decade before. For Lavinia and Juneau Jane, the journey is one of stolen inheritance and financial desperation, but for Hannie, torn from her mother and siblings before slavery's end, the pilgrimage west reignites an agonizing question: Could her long-lost family still be out there?
When it comes to law and order, East Texas plays by its own rules -- a fact that Darren Mathews, a black Texas Ranger, knows all too well. Deeply ambivalent about growing up black in the lone star state, he was the first in his family to get as far away from Texas as he could. Until duty called him home. When his allegiance to his roots puts his job in jeopardy, he travels up Highway 59 to the small town of Lark, where two murders -- a black lawyer from Chicago and a local white woman -- have stirred up a hornet's nest of resentment. Darren must solve the crimes -- and save himself in the process -- before Lark's long-simmering racial fault lines erupt.
The poignant odyssey of a tenacious young girl who braves the dangers of the Texas frontier to avenge her mother's death. Early one morning in the remote hill country of Texas, a panther savagely attacks a family of homesteaders, mauling a young girl named Samantha and killing her mother, whose final act is to save her daughter's life. Samantha and her half brother, Benjamin, survive, but she is left traumatized, her face horribly scarred. Narrated in Benjamin's beguilingly plainspoken voice, The Which Way Tree is the story of Samantha's unshakeable resolve to stalk and kill the infamous panther, rumored across the Rio Grande to be a demon, and avenge her mother's death. In their quest she and Benjamin, now orphaned, enlist a charismatic Tejano outlaw and a haunted, compassionate preacher with an aging but relentless tracking dog. As the members of this unlikely posse hunt the panther, they are in turn pursued by a hapless but sadistic Confederate soldier with troubled family ties to the preacher and a score to settle. In the tradition of the great pursuit narratives, The Which Way Tree is a breathtaking saga of one steadfast girl's revenge against an implacable and unknowable beast.
For every reader who grew up loving R.J. Palacio's Wonder comes a hilarious, heartbreaking, and magical YA debut about what it means to accept the body you're given. What if the empty space was what made you whole? Morgan Stone was born with a hole in her middle: a perfectly smooth, sealed, fist-sized chunk of nothing near her belly button. After seventeen years of hiding behind lumpy sweaters and a smart mouth, she decides to bare all. At first she feels liberated . . . until a few online photos snowball into a media frenzy. Now Morgan is desperate to return to her own strange version of normal--when only her doctors, her divorced parents, and her best friend, Caro, knew the truth. Then a new doctor appears with a boy who may be both Morgan's cure and her destiny. But what happens when you meet the person who is--literally--your perfect match? Is being whole really all it's cracked up to be?
Julie has an obsession with fire that began after her parents died when she was twelve years old. Her pyromania leads her to take an unlikely job as a forest firefighter on an elite, Type 1 "Hotshot" crew of forest firefighters who travel the American West battling wildfires. The only woman on the twenty person crew, Julie struggles both to prove her worth and find a place of belonging in the dangerous, insular, and very masculine world of fire. As her season "on the line" progresses so do her relationships with the strange and varied cast of characters that make up her hotshots team--and she learns what it means to put your life on the line for someone else. Wildfire is a tough, gritty, and fascinating story from an exciting new voice in American fiction.
This collection of essays explores the life of the author, from her Depression-era childhood in Tennessee to her adolescence in the Hill Country of Texas, from life as a small town cheerleader to life as a world-traveling author, from the child of a hard scrabble farmer to that of a semi-retired rancher. Like the main character in her interconnected and often autobiographical short stories, Osborn is extremely curious about her occasionally eccentric family, yet she must continually accept the mysteries of reality -- a mother locked away for clinical depression, country neighbors who appear to live on nothing, the eternal balance of caring deeply for an unforgiving Texas Hill Country landscape while traveling the world from Europe to the Galapagos. Aware of the need for family mythology, she often mines family history (one of her forebears followed Daniel Boone over the Cumberland Gap and was an early settler in Tennessee, and his flintlock rifle hangs in Osborn's living room) and her own distinctly Southern background that witnesses a fading 19th-century morality, readily accepts individual eccentricity, and celebrates storytelling as a way of understanding the world.
Are your thoughts holding you captive? I'll never be good enough. Other people have better lives than I do. God couldn't really love me. Jennie Allen knows what it's like to swirl in a spiral of destructive thoughts, but she also knows we don't have to stay stuck in toxic thinking patterns. As she discovered in her own life, God built a way for us to escape that downward spiral. Freedom comes when we refuse to be victims to our thoughts and realize we have already been equipped with power from God to fight and win the war for our minds. In Get Out of Your Head, Jennie inspires and equips us to transform our emotions, our outlook, and even our circumstances by taking control of our thoughts. Our enemy is determined to get in our heads to make us feel helpless, overwhelmed, and incapable of making a difference for the kingdom of God. But when we submit our minds to Christ, the promises and goodness of God flood our lives in remarkable ways. It starts in your head. And from there, the possibilities are endless.