Dandelion Summer

Download or read book Dandelion Summer written by Lisa Wingate and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2011-07-05 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A story beautifully told, with richly drawn characters that will...make you want to laugh and cry”* from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Lost Friends and Before We Were Yours. All her life, Epiphany Salerno has been tossed like a dandelion seed on the wind. Now, at sixteen, she must move to the low-rent side of Blue Sky Hill and work where she's not wanted: in an upscale home on The Hill. J. Norman Alvord's daughter has hired a teenager to stay with him in the afternoons. Widowed and suffering from heart trouble, Norman wants to be left alone. But in Epie's presence, Norman discovers a mystery. Deep in his mind lie memories of another house, another life, and a woman who saved him. As summer comes to Blue Sky Hill, two residents from different worlds will journey through a turbulent past, and find that with an unexpected road trip through sleepy Southern towns comes life-changing friendship...and clues to a family secret hidden for a lifetime. Winner of the 2012 Carol Award for Women's Fiction from the American Christian Fiction Writers

Download or read book Beyond Summer written by Lisa Wingate and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-09-11 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Lost Friends and Before We Were Yours presents an uplifting novel set in a small Texas neighborhood where unexpected challenges and new relationships give deeper meanings to “home.” When eighteen-year-old Tam Lambert learns that her family’s upscale home is in foreclosure, the life she's known is forever changed. Tam and her family must move into a tiny house in a changing Dallas neighborhood called Blue Sky Hill. New resident Shasta Reid-Williams knows nothing of real estate schemes when she and her husband purchase a home in Blue Sky Hill. To her it’s the perfect place to raise her children. Better yet is getting to know Tam, who lives right across the street. When neighbors realize that a corrupt deal could force them from their homes, friendships and loyalties are tested. Over the span of one summer, two young women discover the strength and maturity to do the impossible. They find that even in Blue Sky Hill, life-altering relationships and amazing possibilities can begin to blossom...

Download or read book Dandelion Wine written by Ray Bradbury and published by Spectra. This book was released on 1985-03-01 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The summer of '28 was a vintage season for a growing boy. A summer of green apple trees, mowed lawns, and new sneakers. Of half-burnt firecrackers, of gathering dandelions, of Grandma's belly-busting dinner. It was a summer of sorrows and marvels and gold-fuzzed bees. A magical, timeless summer in the life of a twelve-year-old boy named Douglas Spaulding—remembered forever by the incomparable Ray Bradbury. The only god living in Green Town, Illinois, that Douglas Spaulding knew of. The facts about John Huff, aged twelve, are simple and soon stated. • He could pathfind more trails than any Choctaw or Cherokee since time began. • Could leap from the sky like a chimpanzee from a vine. • Could live underwater two minutes and slide fifty yards downstream. • Could hit baseballs into apple trees, knocking down harvests. • Could jump six-foot orchard walls. • Ran laughing. • Sat easy. • Was not a bully. • Was kind. • Knew the words to all the cowboy songs and would teach you if you asked. • Knew the names of all the wild flowers and when the moon would rise or set and when the tides came in or out. He was, in fact, the only god living in the whole of Green Town, Illinois, during the twentieth century that Douglas Spaulding knew of. “[Ray] Bradbury is an authentic original.”—Time

Download or read book Farewell Summer written by Ray Bradbury and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2013-05-21 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The master of American fiction returns to the territory of his beloved classic, Dandelion Wine—a sequel 50 years in the making Some summers refuse to end . . . October 1st, the end of summer. The air is still warm, but fall is in the air. Thirteen-year-old Douglas Spaulding, his younger brother Tom, and their friends do their best to take advantage of these last warm days, rampaging through the ravine, tormenting the girls . . . and declaring war on the old men who run Green Town, IL. For the boys know that Colonel Quartermain and his cohorts want nothing more than to force them to put away their wild ways, to settle down, to grow up. If only, the boys believe, they could stop the clock atop the courthouse building. Then, surely, they could hold onto the last days of summer . . . and their youth. But the old men were young once, too. And Quartermain, crusty old guardian of the school board and town curfew, is bent on teaching the boys a lesson. What he doesn’t know is that before the last leaf turns, the boys will give him a gift: they will teach him the importance of not being afraid of letting go.

Download or read book A Month of Summer written by Lisa Wingate and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008-07-01 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An ordinary summer brings about an extraordinary change of heart in the first novel in the Blue Sky Hill series from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Lost Friends and Before We Were Yours. Changes aren’t in Rebecca Macklin’s plans when she receives a long-distance call from the Dallas police. Her aging father has been found repeatedly wandering the city streets alone, and his wife has suffered a serious illness and landed in a nursing home. Despite the demands of the busy LA legal practice Rebecca shares with her husband, she must put aside old resentments and return to her childhood home. When Hanna Beth Parker hears about the arrival of her stepdaughter, Rebecca, who has stayed away for decades, she knows something is terribly wrong. Suddenly, the last person she’d ever turn to for help is the only one she can count on. But forging a relationship with Rebecca will require awakening old ghosts. In this moving story of separation and forgiveness, two women will unravel the betrayals of the past, examine the yearnings of the heart, and discover the truest meaning of family.

Download or read book The Summer Kitchen written by Lisa Wingate and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-09-11 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Lost Friends and Before We Were Yours comes an inspiring novel about a lonely woman who finds a connection in the place she least expects. With her adopted son missing and the rest of her family increasingly estranged, SandraKaye Darden is drawn to the little pink house where her Uncle Poppy once provided security. But what begins for Sandra as a simple painting project to help sell the house becomes a secret venture that starts to change everything... Cass Blue is having trouble keeping food on the table since her mother died. When Sandra shows up with sandwiches for the neighborhood kids one day, Cass has no way of knowing that the meeting will lead to the creation of a place of refuge that could reunite a divided community. In this moving story of second chances, two unlikely allies realize their ability to make a difference...and the power of what becomes known as the Summer Kitchen to nourish the soul.

Download or read book Before and After written by Judy Christie and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2019-10-22 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The compelling, poignant true stories of victims of a notorious adoption scandal—some of whom learned the truth from Lisa Wingate’s bestselling novel Before We Were Yours and were reunited with birth family members as a result of its wide reach From the 1920s to 1950, Georgia Tann ran a black-market baby business at the Tennessee Children’s Home Society in Memphis. She offered up more than 5,000 orphans tailored to the wish lists of eager parents—hiding the fact that many weren’t orphans at all, but stolen sons and daughters of poor families, desperate single mothers, and women told in maternity wards that their babies had died. The publication of Lisa Wingate’s novel Before We Were Yours brought new awareness of Tann’s lucrative career in child trafficking. Adoptees who knew little about their pasts gained insight into the startling facts behind their family histories. Encouraged by their contact with Wingate and award-winning journalist Judy Christie, who documented the stories of fifteen adoptees in this book, many determined Tann survivors set out to trace their roots and find their birth families. Before and After includes moving and sometimes shocking accounts of the ways in which adoptees were separated from their first families. Often raised as only children, many have joyfully reunited with siblings in the final decades of their lives. Christie and Wingate tell of first meetings that are all the sweeter and more intense for time missed and of families from very different social backgrounds reaching out to embrace better-late-than-never brothers, sisters, and cousins. In a poignant culmination of art meeting life, many of the long-silent victims of the tragically corrupt system return to Memphis with the authors to reclaim their stories at a Tennessee Children’s Home Society reunion . . . with extraordinary results. Advance praise for Before and After “In Before and After, authors Judy Christie and Lisa Wingate tackle the true stories behind Wingate’s blockbuster Before We Were Yours, of the orphans who survived the Tennessee Children’s Home Society. With a journalist’s keen eye and a novelist’s elegant prose, Christie and Wingate weave together the stories that inspired Before We Were Yours with the lives that were changed as a result of reading the novel. Readers will be educated, enlightened, and enraptured by this important and flawlessly executed book.”—Pam Jenoff, author of The Orphan’s Tale and The Lost Girls of Paris