Showing results for "My Lives" in Coming of Age

“A painful truth of family life: the most tender emotions can change in an instant. You think your parents love you but is it you they love, or the child who is theirs?” --Joyce Carol Oates, My Life as a Rat Which should prevail: loyalty to family or loyalty to the truth? Is telling the...

Aleksy still remembers the last summer he spent with his mother in Northern France. At eighteen, eager to fly the nest and escape a family still grief-stricken by the death of his sister years earlier, these lazy months in the countryside are akin to torture. And then, his mother tells him she’s dying.

In this sassy and sweet coming-of-age story full of laughs, tears, and everyday strangeness, an unusual child finds a home—and love—with her feisty Great-great-aunt Magnolia Rose McClellan.

For nine-year-old Ruby, travelling the country with her charismatic father Mitch and busking for a living is the only life she's ever known. Mitch has been the centre of Ruby's world since she was a baby, and much as she's curious about her mother who died soon after Ruby was born, talk of her is taboo. When repairs to their ageing Kombi strand them in a small coastal town, Ruby is drawn to the town and its people and gains a glimpse of family life starkly different to her own.

It’s 1965, and life has taken a turn for eighteen-year-old Anton Addison-Rice. Nearly a year after his brother died in a tragic accident, Anton is still wounded - physically and emotionally. Alone for the holidays, he catches a glimpse of his neighbor Edith across the street one evening and realizes that she’s in danger. Anton is determined to help Edith leave her abusive marriage. Frightened and fifteen years Anton’s senior, Edith is slow to trust. But when she needs a safe place to stay, she lets down her guard, and over the course of ten days an unlikely friendship grows.

Five-year-old Clara Bynum is dead, drowned in the Potomac River in the shadow of a seemingly haunted rock outcropping known locally as the Three Sisters. River, Cross My Heart weighs the effect of Clara's absence on the people she has left behind: her parents; the friends and relatives of the Bynum family; and, most especially, Clara's sister, 10-year-old Johnnie Mae, who must come to terms with the powerful and confused emotions stirred by her sister's death as she struggles to decide what kind of woman she will become.

In this riveting, heartfelt debut, a young woman assumes a new name to escape her dark past and find the redemption she desperately seeks. “It’s impossible not to root for this strong, willful girl as she finds her place in the world and for her brother as he tries to make sense of it...

Belleville, dans les années 90 : chez Grand-Maman dans la cité HLM de la rue Piat, Naëlle porte des robes à col Claudine, apprend qu'il faut dire "les intempéries" et non "un temps de merde", s'arrête tous les jours devant chez Mme Ah, qui expose des canards sans tête dans son restaurant chinois.

With some thematic overlap with Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm or what Mad Men would have been like if Sally Draper got to tell her side of the story, Little Miseries is set in Iowa and Minnesota in the '60s and '70s, a time and place when parents didn’t talk much to their children but certainly talked around them—while dipping into whiskey or rum punch, whether on a long drive, on the beach, or in the comfort of their own home. Little Miseries is a tribute to what it means to come into awareness, to be a part of a family unit, and to bear responsibility for those you loved.

In this haunting short story of loyalty and betrayal, a young woman in early 1900s Massachusetts discovers that in navigating her treacherous coming-of-age, she must find her voice first. For fatefully observant Adeline, growing up carries an ominous warning from her adulterous mother: don’t say a word. Adeline vows to never speak again. But that’s not her only secret. After her mother takes a housekeeping job at a lighthouse off the tip of Cape Ann, a local woman vanishes. The key to the mystery lies with Adeline, the silent witness.