The Tender Years

Continuing the story from Love Comes Softly, the granddaughter of the Davis's experiences a tragedy, she has a crisis of faith.

Tells the story of Virginia, granddaughter of Marty and Clark, who is caught between childhood and adulthood and feeling that she really doesn't fit anywhere. But everything changes when she meets Jenny at school.

Mom, who is your hero? A simple question asked by an innocent child. Hayden Block had no way of knowing that to his mother, he was her greatest hero. A young heart, but spiritually mature beyond his years, Hayden offered life lessons to every person who came in contact with him. He persevered through physical pain and sometimes emotional hurts. He learned to cope with a body that didn't look like other kids. And yet his sensitive loving heart and ebullient spirit attracted many friends and admirers wherever he went. A Child of Tender Years: Hayden's Journey is first Hayden's story - his life's journey from birth until age 14. But it is also a journey for his mother as she watches him grow, learns with him...and from him. It is a story about sacrifice and letting go, of being completely relieant on God and radiantly acquiescing to all that He asks of us. It is a story about faith.

In Girls of Tender Age, Mary-Ann Tirone Smith fully articulates with great humor and tenderness the wild jubilance of an extended French-Italian family struggling to survive in a post-World War II housing project in Hartford, Connecticut. Smith seamlessly combines a memoir whose intimacy matches that of Angela's Ashes with the tale of a community plagued by a malevolent predator that holds the emotional and cultural resonance of The Lovely Bones. Smith's Hartford neighborhood is small-town America, where everyone’s door is unlocked and the school, church, library, drugstore, 5 & 10, grocery, and tavern are all within walking distance. Her family is peopled with memorable characters—her possibly psychic mother who's always on the verge of a nervous breakdown, her adoring father who makes sure she has something to eat in the morning beyond her usual gulp of Hershey’s syrup, her grandfather who teaches her to bash in the heads of the eels they catch on Long Island Sound, Uncle Guido who makes the annual bagna cauda, and the numerous aunts and cousins who parade through her life with love and food and endless stories of the old days. And then there’s her brother, Tyler. Smith's household was “different.” Little Mary-Ann couldn't have friends over because her older brother, Tyler, an autistic before anyone knew what that meant, was unable to bear noise of any kind. To him, the sound of crying, laughing, phones ringing, or toilets flushing was “a cloud of barbed needles” flying into his face. Subject to such an assault, he would substitute that pain with another: he'd try to chew his arm off. Tyler was Mary-Ann's real-life Boo Radley, albeit one whose bookshelves sagged under the weight of the World War II books he collected and read obsessively. Hanging over this rough-and-tumble American childhood is the sinister shadow of an approaching serial killer. The menacing Bob Malm lurks throughout this joyous and chaotic family portrait, and the havoc he unleashes when the paths of innocence and evil cross one early December evening in 1953 forever alters the landscape of Smith's childhood. Girls of Tender Age is one of those books that will forever change its readers because of its beauty and power and remarkable wit.

The Tender Years is a book of wisdom for moms with preschool children. It not only instructs and guides; it also encourages, inspires, and connects. It contains thirty short chapters focused on various aspects of the daily life of moms, with its joys, fears, hopes, and challenges. Interspersed with poignant poems that express and relate to the hearts of moms, this book will bring a smile on one page and a sigh on another. Guaranteed not to overwhelm with what to do and not to do, The Tender Year is a gift of refreshment to sometimes harried, sometimes harassed, and oftentimes happy moms. It offers distilled wisdom and fresh experience.

Virginia must learn the heavenly source of strength through trials in this best-selling novel.

Working at the local processing plant, Marcos is in the business of slaughtering humans—though no one calls them that anymore. His wife has left him, his father is sinking into dementia, and Marcos tries not to think too hard about how he makes a living. After all, it happened so quickly. First, it was reported that an infectious virus has made all animal meat poisonous to humans. Then governments initiated the “Transition.” Now, eating human meat—“special meat”—is legal. Marcos tries to stick to numbers, consignments, processing. Then one day he’s given a gift: a live specimen of the finest quality. Though he’s aware that any form of personal contact is forbidden on pain of death, little by little he starts to treat her like a human being. And soon, he becomes tortured by what has been lost—and what might still be saved.