Under The Weeping Willow

Lynette is sick and tired of being sick and tired. Faced daily with a verbally abusive brother, an alcoholic father still grieving for his deceased wife and overbearing siblings, the only light that seems to shine in Lynettes life is the love of her daughter. Little does she know that lies, deceit and jealousy will challenge that love, test her strength and force her to face her family in ways she never imagined. Ayanna is carefree and spunky but longs for a better life for her and her mother. She is not oblivious to how her mother is treated and is fiercely protective. However, her world is turned upside down when shes introduced to a stranger and she learns she belongs to a family completely different from what shes known all her life. In this stirring tale, readers are introduced to Lynette and Ayanna, who demonstrate the complexity of love, parenting, maturing and navigating relationships with people who make bad choices. Filled with vivid details and relatable characters, the books themes of endurance, strength and wanting a better life for ones children draw readers in and keep them turning pages until the end as they follow a mother and daughters journey.

"Secrets of the Weeping Willow" is a gripping tale of romance, suspense, manipulation, and self-discovery. The book tells the story of a girl named Elizabeth, who at the age of twelve wakes up bruised and bloodied with no memory of herself or the troubled woman who claims to be her mother. Nine years later, while watching a documentary on New Orleans, Elizabeth gets flashes of Deja vu. Elizabeth starts to believe that things might have been hidden from her by her eccentric mother, who claimed they had never been to New Orleans. Elizabeth secretly plans a trip to New Orleans with a good friend, with a cautiously optimistic belief that her lost memories are linked to this city. Unaware, of the pandora's box she is on the verge of opening. When Elizabeth arrives in New Orleans for Mardi Gras, her lost memories start to assault her confirming her gut instinct that the origin of her lost memories are far from what she had been told, unaware that an ominous presence has discovered her return to New Orleans. Along the way, Elizabeth comes across influential people and embarks on a journey of finding herself, while corruption sits on the fringe of Elizabeth awakening memories. The book is filled with suspense, romance, and evil as Elizabeth's journey uncovers a troubling past of dark truths that reveal a life lost and deceptions that kept her childhood years in the dark. As everything becomes clearer, Elizabeth's life intensifies, as she struggles to accept what has been done to her, as her memories return to reveal a hazardous past. While a current danger escalates. The answers to Elizabeth's past, bring her and a sadistic con artist closer together as the secrets long buried illuminate the true nature of evil and the sacrifice and love of the woman who brought her into this world.

"Fortunately for the reading public, Linda Madison is a poetic survivor, bringing pictures of old-fashioned sweat and tears to life in modern- day America. Under the Weeping Willow Tree gave me permission to feel the horror and clarity of courage, the confusion from physical and emotional frailty, not from one's own choosing.... Learning and seeking for her is living today for tomorrow, though, not just any old day of the week. Linda knows that on any given day as a single mother of four she might have enough bread on the table, and another day she might not; she knows that one day you take your baby to the doctor for care, and another day they take you. Imagine yourself sitting beneath a weeping willow tree, listening, embraced by its shimmering, gray-green leaves and drooping summer branches, enveloped in Linda Madison's tale, true and not to be believed.... Beautifully rooted, reading Under the Weeping Willow Tree will nourish you day and your week. Give yourself the opening to deepen to your own wonder." -Roma Guy, MSW; health commissioner, City and County of San Francisco; California Chair, Health Committee, California Women's Agenda San Francisco

Most of Shorty's time was spent galloping through fields and jumping fences. That was the only world he knew and he was quite content with it. Then a tragic accident happened, leaving him lame and scarred, which turned his world upside down. Abandoned, he was left outside, cold and hungry, feeling sad and lonely. He endured a heartbreaking and abusive life until it got to the point where he didn't want to continue this life he was living any more. It was at that point when a strange man came and rescued Shorty and took him to a home of a family with children who loved him and thought he was beautiful, regardless of his scars and lame leg. His life would now be filled with all kinds of friends, of love, laughter, sadness and tears. This is the story about Shorty's life on the farm.

From the passenger seat of Sean Singer’s taxicab, we witness New York’s streets livid and languid with story and contemplation that give us awareness and aliveness with each trip across the asphalt and pavement. Laced within each fare is an illumination of humanity’s intimate music, of the poet’s inner journey—a signaling at each crossroad of our frailty and effervescence. This is a guidebook toward a soundscape of higher meaning, with the gridded Manhattan streets as a scoring field. Jump in the back and dig the silence between the notes that count the most in each unique moment this poet brings to the page. “Sean Singer’s radiant and challenging body of work involves, much like Whitman’s, nothing less than the ongoing interrogation of what a poem is. In this way his books are startlingly alive... I love in this work the sense that I am the grateful recipient of Singer’s jazzy curation as I move from page to page. Today in the Taxi is threaded through with quotes from Kafka, facts about jazz musicians, musings from various thinkers, from a Cathar fragment to Martin Buber to Arthur Eddington to an anonymous comedian. The taxi is at once a real taxi and the microcosm of a world—at times the speaker seems almost like Charon ferrying his passengers, as the nameless from all walks and stages of life step in and out his taxi. I am reminded of Calvino’s Invisible Cities, of Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn... Today in the Taxi is intricate, plain, suggestive, deeply respectful of the reader, and utterly absorbing. Like Honey and Smoke before it, which was one of the best poetry books of the last decade, this is work of the highest order.” —Laurie Sheck

When he discovers that his wife is in love with another man, Lee Harris, a Chicago accountant, packs everything into his SUV and leaves town. He finds himself in a quirky place called River Bend where he is forced to re-examine everything as he starts over.

Johanne and Knud lived close to the town of Kjöge, where there are many gardens that extend as far as the river. There is not much else, but it is charming in summer! It was under the willow-tree in one of these gardens that Johanne and Knud spent a great deal of their time and theirs was a beautiful friendship. But everything would change when Johanne had to leave for Copenhagen with her father! Would they remain friends? Or even, as Knud hoped, could they become more than friends? Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875) was a Danish author, poet and artist. Celebrated for children’s literature, his most cherished fairy tales include "The Emperor's New Clothes", "The Little Mermaid", "The Nightingale", "The Steadfast Tin Soldier", "The Snow Queen", "The Ugly Duckling" and "The Little Match Girl". His books have been translated into every living language, and today there is no child or adult that has not met Andersen's whimsical characters. His fairy tales have been adapted to stage and screen countless times, most notably by Disney with the animated films "The Little Mermaid" in 1989 and "Frozen", which is loosely based on "The Snow Queen", in 2013. Thanks to Andersen's contribution to children's literature, his birth date, April 2, is celebrated as International Children's Book Day.