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Fugitives from a man as alluring as he is violent, Andrea Jarrell and her mother develop a powerful, unusual bond. Once grown, Jarrell thinks she’s put that chapter of her life behind her―until a woman she knows is murdered, and she suddenly sees that it’s her mother’s choices she’s been trying to escape all along. Without preaching or prescribing, I’m the One Who Got Away is a life-affirming story of having the courage to become both safe enough and vulnerable enough to love and be loved.

Mothers are supposed to love their children unconditionally, but what if they can’t? “Your own mother doesn’t love you—what makes you think anyone else will?” These words haunted the author and affected every decision she made. If she wasn’t good enough for her mother’s love, what was she worthy of?

In The Monster That Ate My Mommy, Jessica Aiken-Hall takes the reader on her quest to find love and uncover the root of her suffering. In this courageous memoir, we learn the importance of love and belonging, and the price paid when it’s out of reach.

“This is one of the most moving and brave memoirs I have ever read—on par with The Liar’s Club (Mary Karr) and The Glass Castle (Jeannette Walls). I was sucked in from the first sentence and remained riveted throughout. Aiken-Hall’s raw exploration and recounting of highly traumatic life events is tempered with the gentleness of hope and the strength of perseverance. This is a book of extreme importance in the canon of women’s memoir. Read it for the compelling story of survival: savor it for its lessons of grace and resilience.” —Sarah Felix Burns author of Jackfish, The Vanishing Village

Zara is eight years old, her father, in a drunken rampage, accidentally shoots himself dead.
Her childhood memories leave her struggling with romantic attachments and hinder her from developing healthy relationships.
Seeking answers, She meets a monk for wisdom, and a gypsy for insight.
The journeys Adalina Mae takes us on are interspersed with heartbreaking moments as well as hilarious escapades.
This is life and nothing is predictable. The story keeps you on your toes and offers mysteries to solve:
Why does Zara have recurrent nightmares of her last night with her father?
Why does she struggle with love?

In 1994, Lizbeth Meredith said good-bye to her four- and six year-olddaughters for a visit with their non-custodial father only to learn days later that they had been kidnapped and taken to their father's homecountry of Greece.

Twenty-nine and just on the verge of makingher dreams of financial independence for her and her daughters cometrue, Lizbeth now faced a $100,000 problem on a $10 an hour budget. Forthe next two years fueled by memories of her own childhood kidnappingLizbeth traded in her small life for a life more public, traveling tothe White House and Greece, and becoming a local media sensation inorder to garner interest in her efforts. The generous community ofAnchorage becomes Lizbeth's makeshift family one that is replicated by a growing number of Greeks and expats overseas who help Lizbeth navigatethe turbulent path leading back to her daughters.

Did you and your parent ever keep a secret that lasted a lifetime? When Hanna Perlstein and her mother, Sidonia, come to Springfield, Massachusetts from a displaced persons camp after World War II, they know no one in America. With no other family, except each other, they build a world that revolves around Sidonia’s extraordinary talent with a needle and thread to create beautiful garments while Hanna serves as her dutiful model. As Sidonia becomes well-known in western Massachusetts and northern Connecticut for her remarkable sewing talent, she continues to keep her inner secrets about her past hidden not only from her daughter but from everyone else. Determined to craft a life of pride, self-reliance and perseverance, Sidonia teaches her daughter to “stand up straight” in fashion and in life. Sidonia’s Thread uses sewing metaphors to tell the tale of these two women as though stitched together like a handmade garment. Why did Sidonia keep these significant life secrets, and why was Hanna so afraid to ask about them? When Sidonia moves to elderly housing, Hanna steals some of her old letters and photographs hoping to find clues to her paternity, her mother’s reclusive behavior, and her heritage. Combined with a trip to her mother’s Hungarian homeland and a phone conversation with her father, Hanna’s surprising discoveries inspire a revised view of her life with her mother, replacing her conflicting emotions toward her mother with true reverence.

Long before she became a museum curator, Jan Krulick-Belin curated memories... photographs and mementos of her father, who died in 1960 when she was just six. Her mother rarely spoke about him again, until a year before her own death in 2002, when she gave Jan a box of nearly one hundred love letters he had written between January 1942 and September 1944 while he served in the Army Air Corps in North Africa and Italy. Not reading them until five years later, they revealed a treasure trove of information about her parents' relationship years before they eventually married... and brought back to life the father she thought she'd lost forever.

What follows is the true story of the author's emotional and life-changing pilgrimage of the heart to find and reclaim the father she barely knew.

The letters lead Jan on an extraordinary journey following her father's actual footsteps during the war years. Each letter evokes another time and place, while a series of amazing twists, turns, uncanny coincidences, and the kindness of strangers lead to unexpected discoveries from Morocco to Paris to upstate New York. The adventure comes full circle when Jan reconnects with the Jewish-Moroccan family that provided a lonely soldier a feeling of home, fulfilling a wish unearthed in one of his letters.

Along the way, she learns about her parents' great love story... about the war in North Africa... about the horrific fate of the Jews in Morocco, Germany, and France while connecting with her own Jewish roots. She makes a lasting connection with a family a continent away. And most importantly, she discovers the man she thought she would never have the opportunity to know.

Love, Bill: Finding My Father through Letters from World War II brings a bygone era to life, but is also a testament to the enduring power of determination, love, family, and the unbreakable bond between fathers and daughters.

The book's design and organization took its cue from the letters written by the author's father. Each "chapter" heading begins as the letters begin, with a place and date. The theme of "letters" is carried out throughout the book--from the letters she carried home from school on the day her father died, to the love letters written by her father to her mother, to the varied correspondence that traces her extensive research and resulting friendships around the world, and finally, the letter written to her father at the end of the book.

The quotes introducing each "Part" of the book were drawn from the author's favorite books, movies, and inspirational sayings. They were carefully chosen to set the scene for the following section.

The book is also about journeys--the ones we travel physically as well as the ones we make within ourselves. The book is also about getting to know our parents and about understanding our own family legacy. The author also encourages us to trace our own family's military history by including resources in the Appendix, or exploring the reader's own family memorabilia, like love letters, journals or photo albums. They are rich in clues to who we are.

One of the unexpected outcomes of the author's journey was in the process of finding her own family legacy she wound up touching the lives of complete strangers, who have not only become like family to her now, but helped put their broken families back together.

The book shows us that sometimes we learn more about our own heritage, in this case, Jewish heritage, by learning the stories of our parents and grandparents. Only then, do they become our own reality.

Growing up during the Depression and forced to live in coal mining camps throughout Appalachia, Virgie Hopkins is subjected to child molestation, the KKK, murder, homelessness, starvation, and ridicule for being the daughter of the town whore.Virgie grows up hating her mother who was taken away when she was nine years old and while she was gone, she and her brother were put into foster care, starved, and abused.When her mother returned, she did not know her husband or her children and Virgie could not understand why she had changed.At 16, Virgie made the decision to leave Kentucky and the only life she had ever known after discovering her prostitute mother was having an affair with the young boy Virgie loved.Filled with hatred, resentment, and shame for the woman she called Mom, it was not until her mother’s funeral, did she learn the horrible truth, the reason for her change and the reason why she became the town whore, a weedmonkey.A haunting true story…Special note about Weedmonkey from the author: "My mother Victoria started writing this book when I was a little girl and the recollection is from her memory of her childhood. In 2006, she was diagnosed with terminal cancer and given three months to live. I was not only heartbroken because my mother was dying, but because her dream of writing the book was dying with her. On her deathbed, she asked me to finish writing it for her. I hope I've made her proud."

One of the 20 Best Books of 2016, Redbook Magazine


Readers’ Favorite Award: Honorable Mention


Millions of people watched sportscaster George Michael each week on the Sports Machine, including his daughter Cindi. Cindi Michael appears to live a charmed life: she’s happily married, has a successful career, and is a loving mom to two wonderful children. Yet she longs for a father who hasn’t spoken to her in twenty years, and even secretly watches him on TV when the longing becomes unbearable.



When Cindi was eleven, her father fought for sole custody of her and her siblings, raising three children on his own despite being a bachelor and rock ’n’ roll DJ in New York in the 1970s. But with his rising fame as the host of the popular show Sports Machine, his 80-hour-a-week work schedule, and his second marriage, the close relationship Cindi shared with her father began to crack; she did everything to earn his love and attention, but for perfectionist George, it was never enough―and when she was eighteen and a freshman in college, in a burst of anger he told her never to come home again. As the years went on, Cindi struggled to steel her heart while still remaining hopeful that they would one day reconcile, just as her father did with his own dad, and transcend painful family patterns that span generations. Candid, moving, and ultimately hopeful, The Sportscaster’s Daughter is a family story of forgiveness, faith, and strength.

Shortlisted for the Rubery Book Award (2019)Kindle Book Award for NonFiction (2018)Reader's Favorite Book Award Nominee for NonFiction/Memoir (Bronze) (2017) Eric Hoffer Book Award for NonFiction/Memoir (Honorable Mention) (2017) Heartfelt and spare, The Butcher's Daughter: A Memoir is a riveting account of what it means to be the daughter of Holocaust survivors.

Florence Grende knew from childhood on that something evil resided in her household, separate from the rages and tears that gripped her parents--that evil an entity her parents called Der Melchome, The War. It rested in the thick silences surrounding her as her parents forged on creating a new life all the while ignoring the impact of the past. A past that, while sheltered in shadow, nonetheless haunted them all.

In short chapters divided into three sections, Grende leads the reader on a journey of discovery and beyond. She begins (Outside America Waits) by vividly recounting her 1950's and 1960's Bronx life. Events come alive as she describes in graphic, sensual detail her experiences and conflicts while straddling an immigrant Jewish life in a post-War American world. Section two (Der Melchome) shifts to her family's survival in the frozen Polish forests of WWII. Using her father's post-War testimonial outlining his partisan activities, as well as research and bits of stories told her, Grende reimagines, with gripping imagery, both of her parents' survival struggle. Section three (Afterwards) recounts her parents' post-War attempts to rebuild their lives, first in Poland, then in Germany. It describes the years after her father died and her ongoing troubled relationship with her mother. This section also describes Grende's week in Wannsee, Germany, where, with other descendents of survivors and perpetrators of the Third Reich, she seeks to confront the past and lay demons to rest.

Written with brutal honesty and compassion The Butcher's Daughter embraces the beauty, complexity and resilience of the human spirit.

2015-2016 Sarton Story Circle: Memoir Winner

2016-2017 Readers Views Award: Memoir/Autobiography/Biography Winner, West Pacific Regional Winner

2017 Independent Press Award: Relationships Winner

2017 Northern California Publishers and Authors Second Place in Book Cover

2017 Northern California Publishers and Authors Second Place in Memoir

2017 Readers' Favorite Book Award Bronze Winner

2017 International Book Awards: Autobiography/Memoir Finalist

2016 National Indie Excellence Awards: Memoir Finalist

Everyone has or had a mother. Dr. Virginia A. Simpson did too. She thought they had a wonderful relationship and had worked out all of their issues when a life-threatening illness necessitated her mother, Ruth, come live with her. When her mother moved in, she brought with her all their old issues and during the six years they lived together, they added more. Although an expert in the field of death, dying, and bereavement, Virginia often found herself overwhelmed by her caregiving role as her mother’s health continued to decline. She also felt herself on a race against time to heal their relationship before her mother died. Described as “stunning, beautiful, and honest,” The Space Between: A Memoir of Mother-Daughter Love at the End of Life offers an intimate window into the challenges of being a caregiving while also providing important information about the realities of end of life care. The Space Between gives us hope that even the most contentious relationship can be healed. By the end of Ruth’s life, the only space between Virginia and her mother was filled with love.