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Redwood court / by Dameron, DéLana R. A.,author.;
""Mika, you sit at our feet all these hours and days, hearing us tell our tales. You have all these stories inside you: all the stories everyone in our family knows and all the stories everyone in our family tells. You write 'em in your books and show everyone who we are." So begins DéLana R.A. Dameron's stunning novel-in-stories, Redwood Court. The baby of the family, Mika Mosby spends much of her time in the care of loved ones, listening to their stories and secrets, witnessing their struggles. Growing up on Redwood Court, the cul-de-sac in the working-class suburb of Columbia, South Carolina where her grandparents live, Mika learns important, sometimes difficult lessons from the people who raise her: Her exhausted parents, who work long hours at multiple jobs while still making sure their kids experience the adventure of family vacations; her older sister, who, in a house filled with Motown would rather listen to Alanis Morrisette, and can't wait to taste real independence; her retired grandparents, children of Jim Crow, who realized their own vision of success when they bought their house on Redwood Court in the 1960s, imagining it filled with future generations; and the many neighbors on the Court who hold tight to the community they've built, committed to fostering joy and love in an America so insistent on seeing Black people stumble and fall"--
Subjects: Bildungsromans.; Historical fiction.; Novels.; Families; Nineteen sixties; Women, Black;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Skull water / by Fenkl, Heinz Insu,1960-author.;
"Growing up outside a US military base in South Korea in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, Insu--the son of a Korean mother and a German father enlisted in the US Army--spends his days with his "half and half" friends skipping school, selling scavenged Western goods on the black market, watching Hollywood movies, and testing the boundaries between childhood and adulthood. When he hears a legend that water collected in a human skull will cure any sickness, he vows to find some in order to heal his ailing Big Uncle, a geomancer who has been exiled by the family to a mountain cave to die. Insu's quest takes him and his friends on a sprawling, wild journey into some of South Korea's darkest corners, opening them up to a world beyond their grasp. Meanwhile, Big Uncle has embraced his solitude and fate, and as he recalls his wartime experiences of betrayal and lost love, he attempts to teach his nephew that life is not limited to what we can see--or think we know. Largely autobiographical and deeply rooted in time and place, Skull Water is the story of a boy coming into his own--and the ways the past continues to haunt the present in a country struggling to confront its troubled history as it moves into modernity."--
Subjects: Autobiographical fiction.; Bildungsromans.; Novels.; Folklore; Racially mixed people; Traditional medicine; Uncles; Vietnam War, 1961-1975;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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The romantic : the real life of Cashel Greville Ross : a novel / by Boyd, William,1952-author.;
"From the award-winning, internationally bestselling author, a romp of a novel, at once intimate and panoramic, about the adventures and misadventures of a 19th-century zelig. One man, many lives ... Cashel Greville Ross experiences more of everything than most, from the rapturous to the devastating, from surprising good luck to unexpected loss. Born in 1799, Cashel seeks his fortune across the turbulence of multiple continents, from County Cork to London, from Waterloo to Zanzibar, embedded with the East Indian Army in Sri Lanka, sunning himself alongside the Romantic poets in Pisa. He travels the world as a soldier, a farmer, a felon, a writer, even a father. And he experiences all the vicissitudes of existence, including a once-in-a-lifetime love that will haunt the rest of his days. In the end, his great accomplishment is to discover who he truly is-which is the romance of life itself, and the beating heart of The Romantic"--
Subjects: Bildungsromans.; Historical fiction.; Humorous fiction.; Novels.; Authors; Ethical problems; Man-woman relationships; Men; Self-actualization (Psychology); Voyages and travels;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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The sea elephants / by Akella, Shastri,author.;
"For fans of Shuggie Bain and A Burning, a queer coming-of-age novel set in 1990s India, about a young man who joins a traveling theater troupe. Shagun knows he will never be the kind of son his father demands. After the sudden deaths of his beloved twin sisters, Shagun flees his own guilt, his mother's grief, and his father's violent disapproval by enrolling at an all-boys boarding school. But he doesn't find true belonging until he encounters a traveling theater troupe performing the Hindu myths of his childhood. Welcomed by the other storytellers, Shagun thrives, easily embodying mortals and gods, men and women, and living on the road, where his father can't catch him. When Shagun meets Marc, a charming photographer, he seems to have found the love he always longed for, too. But not even Marc can save him from his lingering shame, nor his father's ever-present threat to send him to a conversion center. As Shagun's past begins to engulf him once again, he must decide if he is strong enough to face what he fears most, and to boldly claim his own happiness. Utterly immersive and spellbinding, The Sea Elephants is both dark and beautiful, harrowing and triumphant. An ode to the redemptive joys of art, Shastri Akella's debut novel is a celebration of hard-won love-of others and for ourselves"--
Subjects: Bildungsromans.; Gay fiction.; Novels.; Boarding schools; Fathers and sons; Gay men; Traveling theater;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Shy creatures : a novel / by Chambers, Clare,author.;
"The London suburb of Croydon, 1964: Helen Hansford is unmarried and in her thirties. Something of a disappointment to her middle-class parents, she's an art therapist at the Westbury Park psychiatric hospital, where she has been having a rebellious love affair with her colleague Gil, a dashing but married doctor. One spring afternoon they receive a call about a disturbance at a derelict, vine-covered Victorian house a few miles up the road. There the police find a mute, thirty-seven-year-old man called William Tapping, his hair and beard down to his waist. It appears he lives in the old house with his elderly, frail aunt, who expires as soon as she's admitted to the hospital. No one knows why William has been shut away for decades, unseen by neighbors, with only his two now-deceased aunts for company. Westbury Park becomes his refuge. When it emerges that William is not only sane but a talented artist, Helen comes to see him as something of a personal project. But as she tries to solve the puzzle of the Hidden Man's past, Helen's own carefully constructed life of secrets begins to unravel ... "--
Subjects: Historical fiction.; Bildungsromans.; Novels.; Adultery; Art teachers; Artists; Man-woman relationships; Psychiatric hospital patients; Psychiatric hospitals; Secrecy; Social isolation;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Earthlings : a novel / by Murata, Sayaka,1979-author.; Takemori, Ginny Tapley,translator.; translation of:Murata, Sayaka,1979-Chikyu seijin.English.;
"As a child, Natsuki doesn't fit into her family. Her parents favor her sister, and her best friend is a plush toy hedgehog named Piyyut who has explained to her that he has come from the planet Popinpobopia on a special quest to help her save the Earth. Each summer, Natsuki counts down the days until her family drives into the mountains of Nagano to visit her grandparents in their wooden house in the forest. One summer, her cousin Yuu confides to Natsuki that he is an extraterrestrial, and Natsuki starts to wonder if she might be an alien too. Later, as a married woman, Natsuki feels forced to fit in to a society she deems a "baby factory" but wonders if there is more to the world than the mundane reality everyone else seems to accept. The answers are out there, and Natsuki has the power to find them. Dreamlike, sometimes shocking, and always strange and wonderful, Earthlings asks what it means to be happy in a stifling world, and cements Sayaka Murata's status as a master chronicler of the outsider experience and our own uncanny universe"--
Subjects: Bildungsromans.; Magic realist fiction.; Psychological fiction.; Cousins; Extraterrestrial beings; Families; Identity (Psychology); Imaginary companions; Imagination in children;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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On rotation : a novel / by Obuobi, Shirlene,author.;
Ghanaian-American Angela Appiah has checked off all the boxes for the "Perfect Immigrant Daughter." Enroll in an elite medical school, Snag a suitable lawyer/doctor/engineer boyfriend, Surround self with a gaggle of successful and/or loyal friends. But then it quickly all falls apart: her boyfriend dumps her, she bombs the most important exam of her medical career, and her best friend pulls away. And her parents, whose approval seems to hinge on how closely she follows the path they chose, are a lot less proud of their daughter. It's a quarter life crisis of epic proportions. Angie, who has always faced her problems by working "twice as hard to get half as far," is at a loss. Suddenly, she begins to question everything: her career choice, her friendships, even why she's attracted to men who don't love her as much as she loves them. And just when things couldn't get more complicated, enter Ricky Gutierrez--brilliant, thoughtful, sexy, and most importantly, seems to see Angie for who she is instead of what she can represent. Unfortunately, he's also got "wasteman" practically tattooed across his forehead, and Angie's done chasing mirages of men. Or so she thinks. For someone who's always been in control, Angie realizes that there's one thing she can't plan on: matters of her heart.
Subjects: Bildungsromans.; Novels.; African American women; Children of immigrants; Man-woman relationships; Women medical students;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Nosy Parker / by Crewe, Lesley,1955-author.;
"It's 1967 in Montreal, the Expo is in full swing, and Audrey Parker has just moved with her dad to Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, a whole new neighbourhood full of different kinds of people to spy on. Audrey is a lot of things: articulate, disarming, forthright. And, as her father reminds her often, indecently nosy. Audrey scribbles every observation down in her notebooks -- from which foods her new teacher eats for lunch, to how blue the water is in Greece, to what time the one-legged man across the street gets home. She is certain she will soon root out a murderer or uncover a mystery. But there's only one mystery that really matters to her: her mother. Who was she? How did she die? Why won't her father ever talk about her? Over a year of Audrey's life, we bike with her through the streets of NDG, encountering stray animals, free-range kids, and adults both viciously cruel and wonderful. And we walk with Audrey across the threshold from childhood to adolescence, where she will discover the truth about her mother. Balancing humour and sadness as expertly as ever, author Lesley Crewe -- who has so often captured Cape Breton perfectly on the page -- turns her incisive observations for the first time to the NDG of the 1960s, where she grew up."--Publisher.
Subjects: Bildungsromans.; Historical fiction.; Humorous fiction.; Novels.; Coming of age; Family secrets; Fathers and daughters; Mothers and daughters; Nineteen sixties; Preteen girls;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Demon Copperhead : a novel / by Kingsolver, Barbara,author.;
Demon Copperhead is set in the mountains of southern Appalachia. It's the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities. Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens' anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can't imagine leaving behind.
Subjects: Bildungsromans.; Novels.; Opioid abuse; Orphans; Teenage boys;
Available copies: 0 / Total copies: 1
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Honey and spice : a novel / by Babalola, Bolu,author.;
"A young black British woman with a popular student radio show that dishes out relationship advice finds her show and her reputation on the line after she makes out with a man she publicly denounced"--Sharp-tongued (and secretly soft-hearted) Kiki Banjo has just made a huge mistake. As an expert in relationship-evasion and the host of the popular student radio show Brown Sugar, she's made it her mission to make sure the women of the African-Caribbean Society at Whitewell University do not fall into the mess of "situationships", players, and heartbreak. But when the Queen of the Unbothered kisses Malakai Korede, the guy she just publicly denounced as "The Wastemen of Whitewell," in front of every Blackwellian on campus, she finds her show on the brink. They're soon embroiled in a fake relationship to try and salvage their reputations and save their futures. Kiki has never surrendered her heart before, and a player like Malakai won't be the one to change that, no matter how charming he is or how electric their connection feels. But surprisingly entertaining study sessions and intimate, late-night talks at old-fashioned diners force Kiki to look beyond her own presumptions. Is she ready to open herself up to something deeper?
Subjects: Bildungsromans.; Novels.; Advice columnists; Man-woman relationships; Reputation; Women, Black;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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