Akron Public Library

Lily is haunted by memories--of who she once was, and of a person, long gone, who defined her existence. She has nothing but time now, as she recounts the tale of Snow Flower, and asks the gods for forgiveness. In nineteenth-century China, when wives and daughters were foot-bound and lived in almost total seclusion, the women in one remote Hunan county developed their own secret code for communication: nu shu ("women's writing"). They painted letters...

When she learns that her children will not be joining her for Christmas, innkeeper Edith Ryan decides to open her large house to strangers, including a cantakerous old woman and a young couple with a baby on the way.

"From the author of Good Morning, Midnight comes a hopeful, sweeping story of survival and resilience spanning one extraordinary woman's lifetime as she navigates the uncertainty, brutality, and arresting beauty of a rapidly changing world. Florida as we know it is slipping away. As devastating weather patterns and rising sea levels wreak gradual havoc on the state's infrastructure, a powerful hurricane approaches a small town on the southeastern...

During World War II, while his father is in Europe fighting and his mother is working in Chicago, a five-year-old boy goes to live with his grandmother in a rural Norwegian American community in Minnesota. Based on events from the author's life.

A novelist attempts to write a book about Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, a mother and artist whose harrowing pregnancies reveal the cost of human reproduction. Soon, however, the novelist’s own painful experiences of pregnancy and childbirth, as well as her increasing awareness of larger threats from climate change to pandemic, force her to give up on the book and turn instead to writing a contemporary Frankenstein, based on the story of...

Rhymed text describes the excitement of a little girl awaiting the arrival of her new sister.

A mother tells her child about its first day of life from the moment of birth through the end of the birth day.

A young girl eagerly awaits the birth of her baby cousin, while growing more and more confused by the way her relatives answer her questions. When exactly is cousin Gregory going to be born? asks little Iris. Each family member has a different answer to her question. While she's waiting for what seems like forever, Iris thinks about all the exciting things she and her new cousin will someday do together. And given Iris' vibrant imagination, there's...

"An ordinary day in an ordinary neighborhood turns out to be extraordinary in this story about new life, death, and family"--

"This celebration of twins posits the magical idea that twins are made of stardust, floating sweetly in the celestial heavens until they find each other and are called to Earth to meet their family"--