An Ordinary Girl S Book

One of the Must-Read Books of 2019 According to O: The Oprah Magazine * Time * Bustle * Electric Literature * Publishers Weekly * The Millions * The Week * Good Housekeeping “There is more life packed on each page of Ordinary Girls than some lives hold in a lifetime.” —Julia Alvarez In this searing memoir, Jaquira Díaz writes fiercely and eloquently of her challenging girlhood and triumphant coming of age. While growing up in housing projects in Puerto Rico and Miami Beach, Díaz found herself caught between extremes. As her family split apart and her mother battled schizophrenia, she was supported by the love of her friends. As she longed for a family and home, her life was upended by violence. As she celebrated her Puerto Rican culture, she couldn’t find support for her burgeoning sexual identity. From her own struggles with depression and sexual assault to Puerto Rico’s history of colonialism, every page of Ordinary Girls vibrates with music and lyricism. Díaz writes with raw and refreshing honesty, triumphantly mapping a way out of despair toward love and hope to become her version of the girl she always wanted to be. Reminiscent of Tara Westover’s Educated, Kiese Laymon’s Heavy, Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club, and Terese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries, Jaquira Díaz’s memoir provides a vivid portrait of a life lived in (and beyond) the borders of Puerto Rico and its complicated history—and reads as electrically as a novel.

“The book's teenage protagonists and their bravery will enthrall young adults, who may find themselves inspired to take up their own causes.” —Washington Post An astonishing World War II story of a trio of fearless female resisters whose youth and innocence belied their extraordinary daring in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands. It also made them the underground’s most invaluable commodity. May 10, 1940. The Netherlands was swarming with Third Reich troops. In seven days it’s entirely occupied by Nazi Germany. Joining a small resistance cell in the Dutch city of Haarlem were three teenage girls: Hannie Schaft, and sisters Truus and Freddie Oversteegen who would soon band together to form a singular female underground squad. Smart, fiercely political, devoted solely to the cause, and “with nothing to lose but their own lives,” Hannie, Truus, and Freddie took terrifying direct action against Nazi targets. That included sheltering fleeing Jews, political dissidents, and Dutch resisters. They sabotaged bridges and railways, and donned disguises to lead children from probable internment in concentration camps to safehouses. They covertly transported weapons and set military facilities ablaze. And they carried out the assassinations of German soldiers and traitors–on public streets and in private traps–with the courage of veteran guerilla fighters and the cunning of seasoned spies. In telling this true story through the lens of a fearlessly unique trio of freedom fighters, Tim Brady offers a fascinating perspective of the Dutch resistance during the war. Of lives under threat; of how these courageous young women became involved in the underground; and of how their dedication evolved into dangerous, life-threatening missions on behalf of Dutch patriots–regardless of the consequences. Harrowing, emotional, and unforgettable, Three Ordinary Girls finally moves these three icons of resistance into the deserved forefront of world history.

Ordinary Girl is legendary singer-songwriter Donna Summer's delightfully candid memoir about her journey from signing in a Boston church to her unexpected reign as the Queen of Disco, and the tragedy and spiritual rebirth that followed.

*A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2019* *A Booklist Editors' Choice for Books for Youth 2019* Perfect for fans of Sarah Mlynowski and Jenny Han, this heartfelt and humorous contemporary take on Sense and Sensibility follows two sisters—complete opposites—who discover the secrets they’ve been keeping make them more alike than they’d realized. For siblings as different as Plum and Ginny, getting on each other’s nerves is par for the course. But when the family’s finances hit a snag, sending chaos through the house in a way only characters from a Jane Austen novel could understand, a distance grows between them like never before. Plum, a self-described social outcast, finally has something in her life that doesn’t revolve around her dramatic older sister. But what if coming into her own means Plum isn’t there for Ginny when she, struggling with a hard secret of her own, needs her most?

Hoping to live "over the rainbow" on Maui, a successful career woman in her fifties abandons her home in Toronto to realize her long-awaited dream. The new life she has sought seems strewn with roadblocks to her happiness that ultimately drive her to seek the healing of her own ancient pain as a pathway to achieving her heart's desire: The stable loving relationship that has always eluded her. This contemporary, poignant memoir follows the intrepid author on her worldwide travels seeking the grail of her heart's desire while learning to integrate her losses and life lessons with joy in her heart and ever a good tale to tell. While adventuring across Europe she takes us on her journey of self -discovery, magically connecting everywhere she goes like a modern-day wizard.

A shattering, utterly immersive work of investigative journalism, The Good Girls slips behind political maneuvering, caste systems and codes of honour in a village in northern India to tell the real story behind the tragic deaths of two teenage girls and an epidemic of violence against women. In the early dawn one day in 2014, a man discovered the dead bodies of 14-year-old Lalli Shakya and 16-year-old Padma Shakya hanging from a mango tree on the edge of their village in Uttar Pradesh. When the inseparable cousins hadn't returned from a walk to the fields to relieve themselves the evening before, their families had begun searching for them. Upon hearing of the discovery and reaching the bodies, the grief-stricken women of the family formed a protective shield around the tree. They knew that if their girls were taken down immediately, they would be forgotten, lost in a brutally inefficient and prejudiced system; but if media arrived, and photos of the bodies went viral, those in power could not ignore the deaths and justice would be served. Dramatic images of the Shakya girls spread across India and the world, inciting horror and despair. Padma and Lalli died two years after the Delhi bus rape, and many saw the cousins as victims of an ongoing epidemic of violence, one that was emerging in rural villages. The reality that Sonia Faleiro deftly illuminates,wrapped in pressures of caste, gender, technology and teenage desire, proves to be more complicated, and just as devastating. Intimate, mesmerizing, based on years of meticulous reportage, The Good Girls uncovers the heartbreaking truth of what happened that night through the voices of the girls' families, those who saw them last and the legal and medical officials who touched the case.

15 Views of Miami is a literary portrait of the Magic City told in fifteen loosely linked stories by fifteen award-winning authors. The stories sprawl from Hialeah to Homestead and reflect the diversity of a large and often misunderstood city. Contributors include John Dufresne, Patricia Engel, Jennine Capó Crucet, Phillippe Diederich, and more.

When best friends, Cleo, Emma and Rikki find themselves accidentally stranded on a mysterious island something very strange happens. While swimming through an eerie underwater channel, the moon has a magical effect on the water changing the three girls forever. One by one the three friends discover that when they come into contact with water they grow a fishtail and become mermaids! Cleo, Emma and Rikki just want to be normal teenage girls and live normal lives, but as they start to come to terms with their new tails, not to mention their magical powers over H20, they begin to realise that they may never be normal again!