Akron Public Library

Mercedes, disowned by her father after becoming pregnant at the age of fifteen, leaves her home in Mexico to take a job as a maid in New Orleans where she marries and works to provide a better life for herself and her children.

With no suitors in their nearby small village, Patience O'Connor and Gwenneth Hume set sail on the Merrywinds to find new lives in America. Along the way, Gwenneth takes over the galley when the cook comes down with scurvy and Patience acts as nurse to the cook and their seasick shipmates. They stop at an exotic island for water and fruit, survive a violent storm, and witness a hanging and a burial at sea before they arrive at Nouvelle Orleans. Merrywinds...

"A story of perseverance and the power of convictions from the groundbreaking immigrant scientist whose decades-long research led to the COVID-19 vaccines. Katalin Karikó had an unlikely journey. The daughter of a butcher in postwar communist Hungary, Karikó grew up in a one-room home that lacked running water, and her family grew their own vegetables. She saw the wonders of nature all around her and was determined to become a scientist. That determination...

Li weaves stories of her family with the recipes of her ancestry. The book centers on her relationship with Nai-nai, her grandmother. She celebrates a host of festivals, from the Chinese New Year with good-luck money gifts to the little-known April 4 Festival of Grave Sweeping. In stories and in the nearly 20 recipes, Li reveals the tale of an Asian woman caught between many different worlds and times and places.

Tamila Soroush leaves Iran to join her sister in the United States to enjoy a happily-ever-after with her true love, Ike Hanson, but her request for residency runs into difficulties when her previous attempts to find an American husband are discovered.

"Complete in one volume! The Prairie Trilogy is a thematically linked series of three novels by Willa Cather. - O Pioneers!: Alexandra Bergson inherits the family farm when her father passes away. She decides to make a go of it when so many other immigrant families are giving up at the turn of the twentieth century. - The Song of the Lark: Thea Kronborg is a piano teacher with a voice that came from the heavens. She seeks to use her gift, and in so...

"In 1895, an Italian seamstress in New York was accused of killing the man who had raped her, promised to marry her, and was about to abandon her. Following a sensational trial conducted in a language she could not understand, Maria Barbella, at the age of twenty-two, became the first woman sentenced to die in the newly invented electric chair. Idanna Pucci tells this story with immediacy, passion and authority that no other author could have mustered,...

A graphic novel adaptation of The scarlet letter, a tale of forbidden love, shame, and revenge.