As she turns twelve during the summer of 1953, Penny gains new insights into herself and her family while also learning a secret about her father's death. It's1953 and 11-year-old Penny dreams of a summer of butter pecan ice cream, swimming, and baseball. But nothing's that easy in Penny's family. For starters, she can't go swimming because her mother's afraid she'll catch polio at the pool. To make matters worse, her favorite uncle is living in a...

"Dominick Birdsey, a forty-year-old housepainter living in Three Rivers, Connecticut, finds his subdued life greatly disturbed when his identical twin brother Thomas, a paranoid schizophrenic, commits a shocking act of self-mutilation. Dominick is forced to care for his brother as well as confront dark secrets and pain he has buried deep within himself—a journey of the soul that takes him beyond his blue-collar New England town to Sicily’s Mount...

With the help of her wise old grandmother, twelve-year-old Rosie manages to work out some problems in her relationship with her best friend, Bailey, the boy next door.

Jason Mirabella was a young hotshot marketing genius for a medical company until his boss persuaded him to bury the numbers of bad clinical studies for their latest money-making device. Losing everything, Jason heads back home to Rhode Island, where his dad, sister, and brother run the family's faltering bed and breakfast together. As he works out his demons, he struggles to earn the trust of his siblings and to find true happiness in the town he...

EUGENIA PANISPORCHI LIVES WITH HER MOTHER, TEACHES CHAUCER, AND REMEMBERS ALL HER PAST LIVES. SHE IS DESPERATE TO CHANGE HER FUTURE. Born this time around into a South Philadelphia Italian-American family so traditional, she and her siblings are expected to marry in birth order, Eugenia lives a simple life―no love connection, no controversy, no complications. Her hope is that the Blessed Virgin Mary (who oversees her soul's progress) will grant...

Italian-American Evalina and Japanese-American Taichi's vow to be together, although interracial marriage is illegal in 1941 San Francisco, is tested when Taichi's family is sent to Manzanar internment camp. Includes historical notes.

A young woman tells the story behind two elderly sisters' estrangement, unraveling family secrets stretching back a century and across the Atlantic to early 20th century Italy. For Stella Fortuna, death has always been a part of life. Stella's childhood is full of strange, life-threatening incidents--moments where ordinary situations like cooking eggplant or feeding the pigs inexplicably take lethal turns. Even Stella's own mother is convinced that...

It is August 15, 1953, the day of a street carnival in the Italian enclave of Elephant Park, Ohio, when Rocco LaGrassa receives an excruciating piece of news: his son has died in a POW camp in Korea. Against the background of immigration, broken loyalties, and racial hostility, the story presents everything Rocco sees through the eyes of various characters in the crowd.

"When midwife Sarah and detective Frank Malloy's friend and new partner Gino Donatelli is accused of murder, he and Sarah must catch the real killer to keep him alive. . . . A young woman is missing in the upper Manhattan neighborhood called Italian Harlem, and everyone knows who��s responsible--the Black Hand, a notorious group known for terrorizing their own community with violence and kidnappings. Gino and Frank set out to learn more about...

"2019: Andie Figuero has just landed her dream job as a producer on Makeover Mansion, a popular reality show about restoring America's most lavish historical houses. Andie's latest project features the once glorious but now crumbling Sprague Hall in Newport ... But the mansion's reclusive owner, Lucia 'Lucky' Sprague, will only allow the show to go forward on two conditions: One, nobody speaks to her. Two, nobody touches the mansion's ruined boathouse....