Catalog Search Results
Author
Language
English
Description
As a little girl, Teressa's father dotes on her and little sister, Karen, while mercilessly mocking her older sister, Debbie. Teressa thinks its Debbie's fault-until she gets a little older and he begins tormenting her, too. Soon enough, his verbal abuse turns physical. Her sergeant father brings his military life home, meeting each of his daughters' infractions with extreme punishment for them all. Meanwhile, their mother watches silently, never...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
From the outside, Vanya's childhood looked idyllic: she rode horses with her father in the solitude of the Sierra Nevada Mountains and attended flamboyant operas with her mother in the city. But life for Vanya and her family turned dark when ghosts from her father's service on a Pacific destroyer in World War II tore her family apart.
Set in postwar California, this is the story of a girl who tried to make sense of her parents' unpredictable actions-from...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
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...
Author
Language
English
Description
"Who do you thank you are, the Quane of Anglund?" That's what Grace Marie's father used to say to her whenever he thought she was getting out of her place. In her fifties now, Grace Marie is a college professor living in a beach town in California, and when she gets a phone call telling her that her father is dead, she is glad. She hopes her return for his funeral will be her "last trip home."
As a young girl Grace Marie struggled to escape from...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
The Parrot's Perch opens in 2013, when Karen Keilt, age sixty, receives an invitation to testify at the Brazilian National Truth Commission at the UN in New York. The email sparks memories of her "previous life"-the one she has kept safely bottled up for more than thirty-seven years. Hopeful of helping to raise awareness about ongoing human rights violations in Brazil, she wants to testify, but she anguishes over reliving the horrific events of her...
Author
Language
English
Description
When Leah Reinhart was six years old, her family moved to an unlikely neighborhood on a hill much like the country-a place where everyone dressed and lived like they were living a real-life Little House on the Prairie. Yet their new home was in Oakland, California, and everything surrounding Leah's neighborhood was the polar opposite of their old-fashioned lifestyle.
As an already scared little white girl in a predominantly African American city,...
Author
Language
English
Description
For three decades, Laurie Kahn has treated clients who were abused as children-people who were injured by someone whom they believed to be trustworthy, someone who professed to love them. Their abusers-a father, stepfather, priest, coach, babysitter, aunt, neighbor-often were people who inhabited their daily lives.
Love is why they come to therapy. Love is what they want, and love is what they say is not going well for them.
Kahn, too, had to learn...
Author
Language
English
Description
Kathy is a virgin in her twenties trying to navigate the blurred lines between sex and love even as outside forces attempt to detach her from her sexual autonomy. At home, her adoptive mother's eyes investigate her body for evidence of sexual promiscuity and, despite her protests, she is called a putana, a whore, for her perceived sexual debauchery. At work, meanwhile, she is sexually harassed by male managers who slap her butt, tell her they want...
Author
Language
English
Description
An only child, Deborah Burns grew up in prim 1950s America in the shadow of her beautiful, unconventional, rule-breaking mother, Dorothy-a red-haired beauty who looked like Rita Hayworth and skirted norms with a style and flare that made her the darling of men and women alike. Married to the son of a renowned Italian family with ties to the underworld, Dorothy fervently eschewed motherhood and domesticity, turning Deborah over to her spinster aunts...
Author
Language
English
Description
Linda I. Meyers was twenty-eight and the mother of three little boys when her mother, after a lifetime of threats, killed herself. Staggered by conflicting feelings of relief and remorse, Linda believed that the best way to give meaning to her mother's death was to make changes to her own life. Bolstered by the women's movement of the seventies, she left her marriage, went to college, started a successful family acting business, and established a...
Author
Language
English
Description
What could be cooler, thinks teen Elizabeth Garber in 1965, than to live in a glass house designed by her architect dad? Ever since childhood, she's adored everything he loves-his XKE Jaguar, modern art, and his Eames black leather chair-and she's been inspired by his passionate intensity as he teaches her about modern architecture. When Woodie receives a commission to design a high-rise dormitory-a tower of glass-for the University of Cincinnati,...
Author
Language
English
Description
Ever since she was a child, Linda Joy Myers felt the power of the past. As the third daughter in her family to be abandoned or estranged by a mother, she observed the consequences of that heritage on the women she loved as well as herself. But thanks to the stories told to her by her great-grandmother, Myers received a gift that proved crucial in her life: the idea that everyone is a walking storybook, and that we all have within us the key to a deeper...
Author
Language
English
Description
At age fifty, Susan Morris is diagnosed with breast cancer-and she's floored. Desperate to pinpoint the cause, one night she decides to type a question into her search engine: "What are the risk factors of getting breast cancer?" She's surprised to discover research showing that long-term exposure to stress and traumatic childhood experiences can both increase the risk of breast cancer.
The Sensitive One is, a braided memoir that alternates between...
Author
Language
English
Description
"Intricate and affecting, Kasdan's debut finds hope in the saddest of stories."
-Kirkus Reviews STARRED REVIEW
What happens to sibling relationships when your older sister, the budding poet you loved and admired as a child, falls prey to severe mental illness? When Deborah Kasdan's sister returns from a gap year in Israel, she dazzles friends and family with her sophistication and beauty. In three years, however, Rachel is committed to a psychiatric...
Author
Language
English
Description
In Bowing to Elephants, a woman seeking love and authenticity comes to understand herself as a citizen of the world through decades of wandering the globe. During her travels she sees herself more clearly as she gazes into the feathery eyes of a 14,000-pound African elephant and looks for answers to old questions in Vietnam and the tragically ravaged landscape of Cambodia.
Bowing to Elephants is a travel memoir with a twist-the story of an unloved...
Author
Language
English
Description
Tuni's father began sexually abusing her when she was just four years old. Her mother, though aware of the abuse, was a silent witness, one either incapable or unwilling to intervene, and the abuse continued until Tuni was eleven. Three years later, when Tuni was fourteen, she was raped by an adult actor who was part of her cast in a professional theater production. These traumas would go on to shape much of her life.
“Underwater Daughter” follows...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
In 1957, when Amy Turner was four years old, her father had to be talked down from a hotel ledge by a priest. The story of his attempted suicide received nationwide press coverage, and he spent months in a psychiatric facility before returning home. From then on, Amy constantly worried about him for reasons she didn't yet fully understand, triggering a pattern of hypervigilance that would plague her into adulthood.
In 2010, fifty-five years after...
Author
Language
English
Description
After her parents' divorce, seven-year-old Sophia is, raised by her paternal grandmother and, later, her father's second wife. She visits her mother on weekends, until she finishes her high school, after which she moves to the US to complete her post-secondary studies and launch a career in child welfare.
Decades later, Sophia travels back to Greece, determined to find her mother's grave and finally learn about the reasons for her parents' divorce....
Author
Language
English
Description
Should Rica invite her mother to her wedding?
In her early early forties and about to remarry, Rica Ramos realizes that starting over could mean leaving her mother behind. She longs to heal the relationship, but her mother still refuses to acknowledge the sexual abuse Rica suffered at the hands of her stepfather, or her own culpability throughout the years. With old traumas resurfacing and a new life unfolding before her, Rica grasps the power of...
Author
Language
English
Description
In this wry memoir, a Harvard-educated CPA with debilitating chemical intolerance digs deep in her family history to uncover the childhood trigger for her illness. Tackling themes of truth, loss, acceptance, and empowerment, Pookie Sekmet interweaves her personal story with timely guidance on the importance of avoiding toxic chemicals in cars, consumer products, and indoor environments; overcomes family trauma and mysterious chronic health struggles...
In Interlibrary Loan
Didn't find what you need? Items not owned by Penticton Public Library can be requested from other Interlibrary Loan libraries to be delivered to your local library for pickup. Items must be over 1 year old.
Didn't find it?
Can't find what you are looking for? Try our Materials Request Service for new books published this year. Submit Request