Emma And I

Eight-year-old Carrie Parker is determined to keep her younger sister Emma safe from a life of neglect at the hands of their drunken stepfather. After the sisters' plans to run away from home unravel, Carrie's world soon takes a shocking turn--with devastating results.

As a girl, Sheila never let her gradual descent into blindness prevent her from trying to do everything a sighted person could do. Then at 17, unable to see to find her way around the house she grew up in, she found herself dreading her future in an 'ever darkening vacuum'. But then the remarkable Emma enters her life, and Sheila begins a journey that brings her the independence, love and happiness she never dreamed possible. Emma and I is the moving and inspirational story of the unique bond between Sheila and her dog, and shows that, sometimes, miracles do happen.

Winner of the 2019 Foreword INDIES Award Bronze Medal, When Charley Met Emma teaches kids about disability, empathy, and the beauty of friendships with people who are different from you. When Charley goes to the playground and sees Emma, a girl with limb differences who gets around in a wheelchair, he doesn't know how to react at first. But after he and Emma start talking, he learns that different isn't bad, sad, or strange--different is just different, and different is great! This delightful book will help kids think about disability, kindness, and how to behave when they meet someone who is different from them.

Kidnapped as a teenage girl, Ma has been locked inside a purpose built room in her captor's garden for seven years. Her five year old son, Jack, has no concept of the world outside and happily exists inside Room with the help of Ma's games and his vivid imagination where objects like Rug, Lamp and TV are his only friends. But for Ma the time has come to escape and face their biggest challenge to date: the world outside Room.

I love being me, because me is an awesome thing to be! Emma has limb differences, but different isn't bad, sad, or strange. It's just different! But when some accessibility problems get in the way at the local art museum, it ruins the fun of a class trip...and then Emma's friend Charley makes things even worse! In the middle of a really bad day, Emma has to call upon her sense of inner awesome to stand up for herself and teach everyone a lesson about the transformative power of feeling awesome in your own skin. Amy Webb's follow-up to When Charley Met Emma, Awesomely Emma will have all kids cheering as they learn to see the inner awesome in themselves and those around them.

In this lyrical picture book with subtle conservation themes, a girl helps rescue a whale who has washed ashore. Here is a beautifully written, moving story that will appeal to all animal lovers, and to those interested in protecting our oceans and marine life. Emma lives in a crooked house in an old whaling town, and often takes her dog, Nemo, to the beach. On their walks, they find amazing treasures, like shells and stones and sea glass—and even a loggerhead turtle. But one day, they find something completely unexpected: a baby whale, washed ashore. Emma empathizes with the animal’s suffering, imagining what the whale is thinking and feeling. When the tide starts to come in, Emma pushes as the water swirls and rises, and eventually the whale swims free, back to her mother.

Six-year-old Emma’s having a tough time. Her mum and dad are both too busy to pay much attention to her, and Emma feels really lonely sometimes. When she finds a tabby cat sitting outside her window, she takes it in without her parents’ permission. Soon the secret becomes more and more difficult to keep, but armed with her spunkiness and a newfound independence, Emma and her new companion find much joy in tiptoeing around her parents, and soon become the best of friends. When her parents finally discover her secret, Emma tells them about how her cat has been there for her, and they realise that they haven’t been giving Emma the time and attention she needs.

“Masterly deftness, funny sentence by funny sentence...a moving and intricately braided story of two mothers.”—JONATHAN FRANZEN, The Guardian This “beguiling, addictive read” (People, Book of the Week) and Belletrist Book Club pick about a blue-blooded single mother raising her daughter in rarefied New York City is a “carefully observed family story [that] rings true to life” (The New York Times Book Review). Laura hails from the Upper East Side of Manhattan, born into old money, drifting aimlessly into her early thirties. One weekend in 1981 she meets a man. The two sleep together. He vanishes. And Laura realizes she’s pregnant. Enter: Emma. “Unputdownable” (Library Journal) and “wryly observed” (Vogue), Laura & Emma follows Laura as she raises Emma in New York City over the next fifteen years. With wit and compassion, Kate Greathead explores the many flaws and quirks that make us human. Laura’s story hosts a cast of effervescent and original characters, including her eccentric mother, who informs her society friends and Emma herself that she was fathered by a Swedish sperm donor; her brother, whose childhood stutter reappears in the presence of their forbidding father; an exceptionally kind male pediatrician; and her overbearing best friend, whose life has followed the Park Avenue script in every way except for childbearing. “Kate Greathead’s debut novel gamely takes on class conflict, single motherhood, and the discreet pretension of the 1980s Upper East Side” (New York magazine) and is a “layered story about mothers and daughters and identity” (Entertainment Weekly). Told in vignettes whose every “restrained and understated sentence has been polished to glittering brightness” (Vox), Laura & Emma is “an incisive comedy of manners about class divides and the ‘burdens’ of being born privileged” (Esquire) and “a thoughtful novel of trying to find oneself despite an assigned place in the world” (Publishers Weekly).