When I tell people who don’t speak Spanish what prieta means–dark or the dark one–their eyes pop open and a small gasp escapes . . . How do I tell them that now, even after the cruelty of children, Prieta means love? That each time Prieta fell from Ita’s lips, I learned to love my dark skin.
No one calls me that anymore. I miss how her words sounded out loud.
My Ita called me Prieta. When she died, she took the name with her.
Anchored by the tough grandmother who taught her how to stand firm and throw a punch,
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In 1917, Madeline Fairbanks is an herbalist healer devoted to the people of Jamesville, a dying town in the Southern Appalachians. Renetta Morgan—with whom it is taboo to fraternize because of race—is her apprentice. Maddie’s precocious granddaughter, Hannah Tillman, is mesmerized by an ancestral box in Maddie’s possession that contains hints of a mystical heritage.
On a cold September wind, charismatic Carl Howard blows into town astraddle a stallion of near-mythic proportions. With no reason to doubt him, the town accepts him as their new pastor. But Carl casts a wider net, claiming power, leadership, and much more than he has a right to.
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They were German and English, Anishinaabe and French, born in the north woods and Midwestern farm country. They moved again and again, and they fought for each other when men turned mean, when money ran out, when babies—and there were so many—added more trouble but even more love. These are the aunties: Faye, who lived in California, and Lila, who lived just down the street; Doreen, who took on the bullies taunting her “mixed-blood” brothers and sisters; Gloria, who raised six children (no thanks to all of her “stupid husbands”); Betty, who left a marriage of indenture to a misogynistic southerner to find love and acceptance with a Norwegian logger;
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Two women. Many aliases.
Meg Williams. Maggie Littleton. Melody Wilde. Different names for the same person, depending on the town, depending on the job. She’s a con artist who erases herself to become whoever you need her to be–a college student. A life coach. A real estate agent. Nothing about her is real. She slides alongside you and tells you exactly what you need to hear, and by the time she’s done, you’ve likely lost everything.
Kat Roberts has been waiting ten years for the woman who upended her life to return. And now that she has,
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The surprising, often fiercely feminist, always fascinating, yet barely known, history of home economics.
The term “home economics” may conjure traumatic memories of lopsided hand-sewn pillows or sunken muffins. But common conception obscures the story of the revolutionary science of better living. The field exploded opportunities for women in the twentieth century by reducing domestic work and providing jobs as professors, engineers, chemists, and businesspeople. And it has something to teach us today.
In the surprising, often fiercely feminist and always fascinating The Secret History of Home Economics, Danielle Dreilinger traces the field’s history from Black colleges to Eleanor Roosevelt to Okinawa,
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Multi-award-winning actor Juliet Stevenson narrates this heartwarming audiobook from the internationally bestselling author of The Jane Austen Society. Natalie Jenner returns with a compelling story of postwar London, a century-old bookstore, and three women determined to find their way in a fast-changing world in Bloomsbury Girls.
Bloomsbury Books is an old-fashioned new and rare book store that has persisted and resisted change for a hundred years, run by men and guided by the general manager’s unbreakable fifty-one rules. But in 1950, the world is changing, especially the world of books and publishing,
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