The Abandoned Daughter

Will Ella ever find what she's looking for? Voluntary nurse Ella is haunted by the soldiers' cries she hears on the battlefields of Dieppe. But that’s not the only thing that haunts her. When her dear friend Jim breaks her trust, Ella is left bruised and heartbroken. Over the years, her friendships have been pulled apart at the seams by the effects of war. Now, more than ever, she feels so alone. At a military hospital in France, Ella befriends Connie and Paddy. Slowly she begins to heal, and finds comfort in the arms of a French officer called Paulo – could he be her salvation? With the end of the war on the horizon, surely things have to get better? Ella grew up not knowing her real family but a clue leads her in their direction. What did happen to Ella’s parents, and why is she so desperate to find out? The Abandoned Daughter by Mary Wood is the second book in The Girls Who Went To War series.

Why did Clarence and Addie Marshall abandon one of their daughters, then take their other three children and leave Missouri? The Marshall and Potter families had been feuding for generations. Though the original reason had been lost over the years, they found new reasons to keep the fire of hate burning. The elder Marshalls were devout Christians. They did their best to live Godly lives; yet they struggled daily with the hostility caused by generations of hate. They were examp

"Remarkable...mesmerizing...compelling.... An entire world unfolds in Tolstoyan tide of event and detail....Give yourself over to the world Ms. Tan creates for you." —The New York Times Book Review Winnie and Helen have kept each other's worst secrets for more than fifty years. Now, because she believes she is dying, Helen wants to expose everything. And Winnie angrily determines that she must be the one to tell her daughter, Pearl, about the past—including the terrible truth even Helen does not know. And so begins Winnie's story of her life on a small island outside Shanghai in the 1920s, and other places in China during World War II, and traces the happy and desperate events that led to Winnie's coming to America in 1949. The Kitchen God's Wife is "a beautiful book" (Los Angeles Times) from the bestselling author of novels like The Joy Luck Club and The Backyard Bird Chronicles, and the memoir, Where the Past Begins.

This book is about a young girl who was orphaned at a young age. She was an only child with two loving parents who loved her unconditionally. Her parents were killed in a car accident and instead of her accepting it as an accidental death, she took it as though they abandoned her. Even though she was left in the care of the aunt, her mothers sister; her husband; and their two children who were an upscale family, she chose to go the other way by hanging out with the wrong people and doing drugs. That went on until she got pregnant by her childhood boyfriend, and they were married at a young age. After three children together, he was still her stability, until one Sunday, he went to the grocery store and walked in on a robbery and was shot and killed. That sent her over the edge, giving the same sense that she had with her parents that he had abandoned her and the children. That lead her back to the streets and doing drugs until it took her life temporally after having an out-of-body experience with the afterlife. Once she understood the importance of family, she was given a second chance to live with the support of her family.

A Canadian teenager travels to China to explore her ancestry and search for her birth mother in a dramatic and moving YA novel. Throwaway Daughter tells the story of Grace Dong-mei Parker, whose biggest concern is how to distill her adoption from China into the neat blanks of her personal history assignment. Aside from the unwelcome reminders of difference, Grace loves passing for the typical Canadian teen — until the day she witnesses the Tiananmen massacre on the news. Horrified, she sets out to explore her Chinese ancestry, only to discover that she was one of the thousands of infant girls abandoned in China since the introduction of the one-child policy, strictly enforced by the Communist government. But Grace was one of the lucky ones, adopted as a baby by a loving Canadian couple. With the encouragement of her adoptive parents, she studies Chinese and travels back to China in search of her birth mother. She manages to locate the village where she was born, but at first no one is willing to help her. However, Grace never gives up and, finally, she is reunited with her birth mother, discovering through this emotional bond the truth of what happened to her almost twenty years before.

A classic feline fairytale set in England about a boy who transforms into a cat following a tragic incident—from the author of The Snow Goose and Mrs. ‘Arris Goes to Paris London hasn’t been kind to Peter, a lonely boy whose parents are always out at parties, and though Peter would love to have a cat for company, his nanny won’t hear of it. One day, Peter sees a striped kitten in the park across from his house. Crossing the road on his way to the tabby, he is struck by a truck. Everything is different when Peter comes to: He has fur, whiskers, and claws; he has become a cat himself! But London isn’t any kinder to cats than it is to children. Jennie, a savvy stray who takes charge of Peter, knows that all too well. Jennie schools young Peter in the ways of cats, including how to sniff out a nice napping spot, the proper way to dine on mouse, and the single most important tactic a cat can learn: “When in doubt, wash.” Jennie and Peter will face many challenges—and not all of them are from the dangerous outside world—in their struggle to find a place that is truly home.

How Do You Forgive a Parent Who Has Failed You? One summer, Melissa Cistaro’s mother stepped into her baby-blue Dodge Dart and drove away, leaving behind Melissa and her brothers. Rarely seeing their mother as they were growing up, they blamed themselves for her leaving, turning to each other for support and seeking out often destructive ways to cope with living without their mom. Decades later, with children of her own, Melissa finds herself in Olympia, Washington, as her mother is dying. She has just days to find out what happened that summer and to confront the unthinkable fear that a “leaving gene” might be lying dormant inside of her. She knew she came from a long line of mothers who left their children. But when Melissa stumbles across a folder titled “Letters Never Sent” tucked away in her mother’s filing cabinet, she begins to feel the wreckage of her mother’s painful journey, before and after she abandoned her family. Alternating between Melissa’s tumultuous coming-of-age and her mother’s final days, Without My Mother is a haunting yet ultimately uplifting story of one woman’s quest to discover how our parents’ choices impact our own and how we can survive those choices to forge our own paths.