Bøger udgivet af Regal House Publishing LLC

Just Maria is the story of Maria Romero, a blind sixth-grader who is trying her hardest to be normal. Not amazing. Not inspiring. Not helpless. Not weird. Just normal. Normal is hard enough with her white cane, glass eyes, and bumpy books, but Maria's task is complicated by her neighbor and classmate JJ Munson, an asthmatic overweight oddball known in the halls of Marble City Middle as a double-dork paste-eater. When JJ draws Maria into his latest hare-brained scheme--a series of public challenges to prove their worth as gumshoes for his Twinnoggin Detective Agency--she fears she's lost her last chance to go unnoticed. When a young girl goes missing on the streets of Marble City, Maria's new-found confidence is tested in ways she never anticipated. Use your cane and your brain, and figure it out . . . Aimed at middle-grade readers, Just Maria explores difference and disability without resorting to the saccharine and engages universal themes about the price of popularity and the meaning of independence.

"Weary of rundown motels and long nights sleeping in her mother's truck, Olya wants nothing more than to find a home. It seems she might finally find one with Jack, her mother's cousin who lives in a tumbledown ranch in Southern California's Inland Empire. But safety is not all that it seems. Away to Stay burns with the urgency of its young narrator who bears witness to a world of desperate people flailing inside a broken system. Olya's mother Irina is a Russian âemigrâe and self-serving liar, obsessed with becoming a prima ballerina and stalking Mikhail Baryshnikov. Cousin Jack is haunted by demons from the Afghanistan war--and the oft-absent Irina. Jack turns his obsession onto his untrainable dog named Bird that he kidnapped from the Riverside Police Department. To Olya, Bird is Job on four legs"--Back cover.

It is impossible not to root for Ceti, almost fifteen, who tells her story of growing up in shelters, learning soccer from her Gramps, and sleeping in her Mom's red truck where they listened over and over to Rolling Stones discs someone left behind. Following in the steps of her hero, Lionel Messi, Ceti is a shooting star on the field. A U.S. scout is coming to watch her play in the State Championship; she has Ruby, her best friend since kindergarten rooting for her, and a crush on a boy who lives in her building, Will. But at home, she'll find a spoon in the sink, a ball of tin foil and a needle in the trash. Her Mom, who used to be beautiful with her long honey hair and green eyes is now wasted and track-marked. And she is pregnant. Ceti's life goes up and down with a mother who wants only the next high. Her Mom's menacing and goofy boyfriend Foxface is always hounding Ceti; their junky friends start a fire in Ceti's apartment; and on the day of the semifinals, Ceti finds her Mom bleeding profusely. She steals a new iPhone for her Mom but is caught and disqualified from playing in the Championship game. Then Ruby decides on private school for next year, and Will stops hanging out with Ceti. When her Mom promises they can start over in New Hampshire, Ceti is hopeful. Instead, she finds her Mom has overdosed. Ceti, too, would be one more dream slipping away if she didn't have the courage to hold on to what she loves the most.

Pere is living the life in central Florida. Money is tight, but odd jobs at the marina keep him in mac 'n' cheese and Chesterfields and pay the few bills that can't be put off. His good buddy Clyde, who lives in an identical condo across the street, can always be relied upon for bait and swapping lies. One day is the same as the next, until his girlfriend, Missy, is sentenced to two-years at Lowell Correctional in Ocala for methamphetamine possession. In Ohio, Missy's ex-husband puts their ten-year-old daughter Tammy on a Greyhound direct to Florida. Skinny and blonde and small for her age, Tammy steps off the bus with only a pack of colored markers and a black trash-bag of dirty clothes. Pere is suddenly a reluctant surrogate father, trying to survive on a shrinking income, and struggling to maintain his own fragile sobriety. Together, Pere and Tammy are an accidental family wandering lost in the land of temporary tags and disability checks, where the smell of caustic chemicals and fried food hangs in the air like wet laundry, and in the course of a single day they find out who needs taking care of, and who, exactly, is taking care of them.

"Felix is an 8-year-old boy with a debilitating condition, stuck from birth in a terrifying group home. He and his fellow "freaks"--wheelchair-bound Mila, dermatologically-challenged Klaus, and lethargic Elsa--suffer at the hands of their able-bodied fellow orphans and the cruel, disciplinarian taskmaster called The Wolf. 10 years later, 18-year-old Felix is on the verge of being discharged into the real world when Annika, the flame-haired, fire-eyed rich girl from the mansion across the way blows into the orphanage, upsetting norms, destroying plans, and exposing the very real danger all the kids are in at the hands of an evil genius and his un-killable right hand, whose sinister plans for the Freaks reach back to history's most horrific crimes."--Publisher's description.

More accurately a love triptych than triangle, "The Femme Fatale Hypothesis" is the story of one spring when three people form intimate bonds forged in the fires of their respective tribulations. As Rose Geddes's lung cancer progresses toward its inexorable end and her husband's ability to care for her diminishes, their widowed neighbor, June Danhill, stumbles into the middle of their intersecting crises. June's only son, daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren have recently moved to the west coast. She embraces the opportunity to distract herself from her loneliness by helping to care for the Geddes. It isn't long before June realizes that Rose wants more from her than she is willing to give. Love and loss, family secrets, a long-forgotten keepsake, and the sexual cannibalism of the false garden mantid all fuel this dark drama that tests the thin line between mercy and murder. -- back cover.

The year is 1665. Fourteen-year-old Gwendoline Riston lives in the village of Letchlade on the upper reaches of the River Thames. Her puritan neighbors have long whispered about Gwendoline - her way with animals, her skill with plants, especially her pale skin and white hair. They believe she is a witch. But her father says she looks like an angel here on earth, and her friend Jack is a loyal companion when the village folk shun her. When a terrible plague hits London, threatening the countryside, no one is safe. The villagers blame Gwendoline. "Purge the pale one!" they cry. If that weren't cause enough to be frightened, Gwendoline's friend goes missing and her father sets out to search for him, leaving her hidden away in a secret chamber above the porch at St. Giles Church to keep her safe. With only a meager supply of food, Gwendoline must summon all her courage to survive through the long, hot summer.

The evening of April 12,1979 was clear and warm. Unaware of the danger lurking on the periphery of the French Quarter, Drs. Ronald Banks and John Hakola made a tragic decision - to walk the few blocks from the historic district to the Hyatt Regency. Inches from the safety of their hotel entrance they were accosted by two young men - a scuffle ensued, a shot fired, Dr. Banks lay dead on the sidewalk. Fighting Time tells the story of what happened next - hours, days, weeks and years after those horrible seconds. Isaac Knapper, a sixteen-year-old boy from a nearby housing project was wrongfully convicted of the murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, Angola. As the time passed, Amy, Dr. Banks's middle daughter and now a psychiatrist and trauma specialist, realized it was time to unpack her own family trauma. When Isaac was exonerated and released from prison, Amy traveled to New Orleans to meet the man wrongfully convicted of killing their father. FIGHTING TIME is the powerful true story of two families whose lives became entangled in a moment of trauma and is told with empathy, vulnerability, and grace.

A ghost is not what you think it is, says Raven. A ghost is a commitment. When Laraine Herring receives an unexpected colon cancer diagnosis, her father, thirty years dead, returns to her as a raven, setting off a magical journey into complicated grief, inherited trauma, and ancestral healing. As she struggles with redefining her expectations for her life, she slips further and further underground into the ancestral realm, where she finds herself writing a play directed by her father-as-raven. Raven says, It will be a cast of only four: you and me and my mother and my father, and we will speak until there are no more words between us. And then you can decide the ending. Tick, tock, write. A Constellation of Ghosts takes the reader into the liminal spaces between one world and another, where choices unspool into lives, and the stories we've told ourselves fall apart under the scrutiny of multiple perspectives like flesh from bone, reminding us that grief is the unexpected ferryman who can usher all of us back together again.

In 2000, as Seth Anderson researches his family history, he discovers an unexpected story and "contained within it lies a larger story that might speak not just to Southern history but beyond it." In the late 1800s in rural Alabama, Melinda Anderson struggles to give birth to her tenth child, tended by Annie Mae, a part-Choctaw midwife. When the infant dies, just hours after birth, suspicion falls upon two women--Betsy, Annie Mae's daughter and the mixed-race mistress of Melinda's husband, Rafe; and Melinda herself, worn out by perpetual pregnancies and nurturing a dark anger toward her husband. Seeking to clear her own name and tarnish that of her enemy, Melinda enlists the help of a conjure woman who dabbles in dark magic--with tragic consequences. As Seth's search for his family's truth continues, he must come to terms with their failure in confronting their past and in his own culpability in that failure. Filled with haunts, new and old, Children of Dust is a novel about the relationship between two women allied against a violent man with secrets of his own, and it is also a complex look at race, violence, and the ways in which stories are passed down through generations.

Girlz in the Hood is the unsentimental, moving, and surprisingly humorous account of a girl and her ten siblings who grew up in one of the roughest neighborhoods in Los Angeles. Mary's mother was a fierce matriarch, a single mom who raised eleven children with the help of welfare checks and a fire arm hidden in her bra. Drugs, guns, and pregnancies were everyday occurrences, but Mary and her siblings took it all in stride, spying on the grown-ups, playing in the streets, and helping to take care of the new babies when they were born. The dubious yet colorful cast of characters that came into their lives (the Jehovah Witnesses, the whores, the addicts, the "fathers"), and the never-ending series of hardships (the jail terms, the knife fights, the mental illness, and homicides), couldn't shake the core of the family. This is the story of Mary, but, even more so, it's the story of her mother, a uniquely strong and extraordinary woman who was able to survive moments of pain and disappointment by laughing at the comedy of human missteps, miscalculations, and downright stupidity. This is also a story about race and of poverty and how, over time, it can wear you down and destroy you, because, although Mary got out okay, her sisters and brothers were not so lucky.

From F. Scott Fitzgerald to John Cheever, the swimming pool has long held a unique place in the mythos of the American idyll, by turns status symbol and respite. The fourteen stories that comprise NO DIVING ALLOWED fearlessly plunge the depths of the human condition as award-winning author Louise Marburg freights her narratives with the often unfathomable pressure of what lies beneath. In "Identical," sibling rivalry between brothers exposes lingering resentments of men who never made peace with boyhood animosities; "Let Me Stay With You" follows a man whose innocent attention to a child is gravely misunderstood. The trials of a fractured family come to the fore in the trenchant, unapologetic "Minor Thefts." Siblings, friends, parents, couples, children: the characters in these stories ask how much any of us can bear before we break. Marburg's writing is agile, witty, and crisply spare. These are tales of regret and mercy, of bonds forged and frayed, and most of all our individual capacity to love even that which damns us. As readers of these pages will learn, the difference between swimming and drowning is often nothing more than the will to live.

Eighty-two-year-old Mish Atkinson from Fair Valley, West Virginia, is determined she's going to make something of the time she has left on this earth. When a text message on her new smart phone leads to an encounter with a woman she believes is Jesus, Mish is eager to obey the woman's instructions to follow the love. She knows that Jeff, the gay pastor at her church, think she's lost her marbles, but now that her husband is gone, she's not going to let anyone put a damper on her sunshine. And when a pregnant teen needs her help, it doesn't matter that she doesn't know the difference between STDs and DVDs, she follows the love--in for a penny, in for a dollar, as she always says. Following the love is exciting and meaningful... until it costs much more than dollars and cents.

In 1910, the two sisters, eleven- and twelve-year-old Maud and Addie, are eagerly anticipating their Summer Social in Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia. However, the event does not quite go according to plan, and the two girls are swept out to sea as they are rowing home at the day''s end. They find themselves adrift in the unforgiving North Atlantic with only the contents of a picnic hamper to sustain them and a carriage blanket to keep them warm. Finding their way through stormy seas, the girls finally make landfall on a deserted island. With string and a jackknife recovered from Maud''s pockets and a parasol and novel contributed by Addie, the girls create a world for themselves among the island dunes, keeping company with sea birds and other sea creatures. Their ensuing adventures test their wits and, in the process, forge a bond that enables them to survive.

Thomas has not been dealt the best hand in life: heir to a miserable family funeral business, in the miserable seaside town of Gloomsbury where the sun only shines a few times a year. Then a body arrives on the doorstep of Creeper & Sons Funeral Home with signs of foul play Thomas''s meticulous father overlooks, Thomas is thrust into the middle of a terrifying mystery, one which will reveal the link between his family and the darkest secret of his hometown.

"This well-timed collection is as compelling as it is cathartic." Buzzfeed News, "18 New Books From Small Presses That You Won't Want To Put Down" The collection encompasses the perspectives of women who are: front-line responders and recovering patients; going out to work, staying home to work, and losing their jobs; living with multiple generations and living in isolation; women grieving loved ones and celebrating new love; women preparing to give birth and supporting the dying. Although differing based on location, age, race, and health, they share the unique capacity of women to bring their strength, ingenuity, and love--for others and for self--to an uncertain time. The anthology is inspired by both the risks of the pandemic inherent to women and their tremendous role in the country's response.

As Hurricane Che cuts a swathe through the Gulf, Julia Calaway, a clothing designer for a famous Italian fashion house, prepares for the storm's impact. Together with her daughter, nine-year-old Gracie, Julia intends to hunker down and ride out the storm in her childhood home in Houston--a house which has survived years of hurricanes and witnessed years of violence and desolation, dark secrets that continue to haunt the Calaway sisters. As the coast braces for destruction, Julia's dying father is thrown out of his nursing home and delivered to her doorstep, her abusive ex-husband commits an act of violent vandalism, and her estranged sister confides a terrible secret that sheds further light on their childhood trauma.

In 1910, twelve-year-old Savannah lives with her widowed father on a whaling station in New South Wales, Australia. For generations, the Dawson family has carried on a very unusual way of life there. They use orcas to help them hunt whales. But Savannah believes the orcas hunted something else--her older brothers, who died mysteriously while fishing. Haunted by their deaths, Savannah wants to become a whaler to prove to her father that she's good enough to carry on the family legacy and avenge her slain brothers. Meeting an aboriginal boy, Figgie, changes that. Figgie helps Savannah to hone her whaling skills and teaches her about the Law of the Bay. When she is finally able to join the crew, Savannah learns just how dangerous the whole business is. A whale destroys her boat and Savannah sinks into the shark-infested waters. That's when the mysterious spirit orca Jungay returns to rescue her, and she vows to protect the creatures. That vow tests her mettle when the rapacious owner of a fishing fleet captures the orca pod and plans to slaughter them.

She, along with her unusual mother and sisters, live at the Hospitality Inn. A dilapidated hotel they own and operate which tends to mysteriously attract misfit wayfarers instead of actual paying guests. Trying to keep her family fed and a roof over their heads is hard enough for Darcy without having to fend off the obsessive attentions of the local sinister minister's son. Into Darcy's precarious life steps Luca D'Angeli, a handsome young Italian immigrant with no idea that loving Darcy may well destroy them both...

For parents of young children, homeschool parent-teachers, teachers in training, and for adults interested in discovering a more loving way for children to blossom in school, Beginner's Mind is the how-to book we have been waiting for-a book that describes teaching the way we so passionately wish it for our children, each and every day they go off to school. Told through the eyes of a ten-year-old, Beginner's Mind asks the question, "How do we want teachers to teach, inspire, and guide our children?" The answer is provided through a series of fourth grade classroom scenes that take us back to a shipyard town in New England where a loving teacher opens her students' eyes to all-but-unimaginable dreams and opportunities. This is a book that reminds us of what teaching can look like: daily lessons where standardized and measurable curriculum goals are less prized than the immeasurable blossoming of our children, and a classroom that puts on display the possibilities before us when a teacher's love is combined with the beginner's mind. As the author shares in these classroom stories, a beginner's mind knows that art is not just for artists and music is not just for musicians. Beginner's Mind is a cautionary tale about an enlightened teacher who led the battle and proved the value of educating the whole child: mind, body, and soul. Beginner's Mind is a tender and sometimes heartbreaking field guide for parents and teachers on how to educate our children, with an emphasis on bringing something into the classroom that cannot be explained in mere words; it can only be experienced, chapter by chapter, lesson by lesson.

STUDENT GIVES TEACHER THE FINGER, screams the Post headline after Patrick Lynch slams his classroom door on the hand of Josh Mishkin, the learning-disabled son of two NYU professors. Josh's injury casts Patrick, thirty-year-old son of the Midwest, down a New York City rabbit hole of Board of Ed bureaucracy and union politics. Transformed into an unwilling celebrity by his fellow inmates in that teacher purgatory, the Rubber Room, Mr. Lynch is suddenly more "at risk" than any of his students. Now he must fight his way back to his classroom at Marcus Garvey High School and reclaim the affections of his social worker fiancée, all while wrestling the legend of his late father, Superintendent Lynch, the pride of Peterson's Prairie, Minnesota.

On May 1, 1982, eighteen-year-old Martin Oliphant watches a horse drown off the shore of Lake Michigan--the first of four equine corpses marking the trail that will lead Martin out of the small-minded small town of Pierre, Michigan, onto the open ranges of Elko, Nevada, and into the open arms, or at least open mics, of the cowboy poets who gather there to perform. Along the way, he nurtures a dying mother, who insists the only thing wrong with her is tennis elbow; corrals a demented father, who believes he's Father Christmas; assists the dissolute local newspaper editor; and serves stints as horse rustler and pet mortician. For thirty years, Martin searches for an escape route to the West, to poetry, and to his first love, the cowgirl Ginger, but never manages to get much farther than the city limits of his Midwestern hometown--that is, until a world famous cow horse dies while touring through Pierre, and Martin is tapped to transport its remains to the funeral at the 32nd Annual Elko Cowboy Poetry Confluence.

"Twelve-year-old Georgia Johnson is sure she can win the 'Spirit of Detroit Poetry Contest,' judged by her idol, Gwendolyn Brooks. After moving from her beloved Detroit neighborhood to an unfamiliar suburb on the outskirts of the city, Georgia lies to prevent becoming disqualified from the contest (which is for Detroit residents only) by using her aunt Birdie's address. With her older brother deployed to Vietnam, and her family worried about when--or if--he'll make it home, Georgia tries to settle into her new life. But she misses the old--her friend Ceci, the cracks in the sidewalk that used to catch her skates, the hide-and-seek tree, and the deli on the corner. She wonders if she'll ever make new friends or feel like she belongs"--Back cove

Thirteen-year-old Amy McDougall is worried about Travis, the single gay guy who adopted her when she was a kid. He wants a boyfriend yet isn't having any luck finding one himself. Amy decides the solution is for someone else to do the finding. Someone like her! Amy's first attempts at matchmaking are embarrassing flops, despite advice from her hyper-smart best friend Grace. But then Amy hits the jackpot, getting Travis together with her middle school Spanish teacher, Enrique Diaz. ÆMuy bien! "I'm a master matchmaker," Amy boasts to Grace. Grace isn't impressed. "One measly match does not prove you're a master matchmaker," she insists. Determined to lay claim to the title, Amy makes a match between Edith, Grace's mom, and Brian, a handsome businessman. After that, she even finds Grace a boyfriend, nerdy-but-cute Denry. By now Amy is sure no one can deny that she's Amy McDougall, Master Matchmaker. Still, Amy soon finds there can be a price to pay for meddling in other people's lives. Amy McDougall, Master Matchmaker is a fun and engaging tale which takes a fresh look at important subjects like love and friendship

Malcolm, an orphaned field mouse, is considered a nuisance by his house-mouse relatives who live at 65 Rodent Row, Mouse-Town Estates, in the gloomy basement of Balmoral Castle. He is a misfit who does poorly at school and is bullied by his cousins. While house mice serve as collectors within the castle walls, Malcolm yearns to follow in his daddie's paw-steps and become an explorer of the outside world. While collecting in the royal kitchen one afternoon, Malcolm is discovered by Chief Castle Cook. In his mad dash to escape, Malcolm inadvertently exposes the MI Mouse-Way Ramp 3 to human eyes. Disaster strikes! Royal staff board up mouse holes and bait traps with poison. Mouse-Town Estates is threatened with death and starvation. Malcolm seizes the opportunity to try to save the house-mouse community and to explore the outside world at the same time. Will Malcolm survive four fat royal corgis, being trapped in the royal handbag, arrest, and imprisonment to save the day? Or will Her Majesty the Queen succeed in chopping off his head?

"Fifth grade is proving to be a challenge for ten-year-old Cassidy. There's a new girl at school who's stealing her best friend's heart, an abandoned bird who might not survive the winter, and an older sister whose emotional needs leave Cassidy scrambling to keep the peace. Cassidy will do anything to help prevent her sister's 'Super Sophie Tantrums, ' even if that means pretending life is fine when it one-hundred-percent is not. But pretending has its limits and its costs, even for a sunshiny girl like Cassidy. Will she find a way to embrace the stormy side of her personality before everything falls apart?"--Back cover.

Ollie Tucker, a recent college graduate and student of philosophy, is obsessed with truth and the source of knowledge, questioning the validity of everything he hears from his parents, his girlfriend, and even the voices inside his head. In pursuit of the truth and life's deeper meaning, he invents an alter ego, Oliver, who lives the adventurous and exotic existence Ollie cannot. But Ollie has another problem--a repressed memory of his uncle Scotty that threatens to derail his life, his relationships, and his sexuality. But the memory is a blur. And what he thinks he remembers, he knows is unreliable. The uncertainty is paralyzing. What is the truth? What has his subconscious fabricated? When he learns that his uncle, long-presumed dead, is in fact alive and well, Ollie realizes that to move on with his life and find peace, he must confront his uncle.

In Goodbye, Apostrophe , his first new collection in more than a decade, nationally recognized and prize-winning poet Peter Schmitt has assembled nearly fifty poems notable for their range and emotional power. From the hard lessons of childhood to the loss of parents, these poems confront the challenging issues of our time, including race, religion, abuse of varying kinds, and reflexive political correctness.

West Coast-based Aunt K (the author) writes to niece DeeDee, ostensibly to bring her up to speed on family history and share anecdotes about their North Carolina relatives, past and present. The letters soon evolve into broader discussions of community, loss, love, ambition, leaving the South (in body, if not mind) and what it means to negotiate life as a female. Integral to the correspondence are books and writers (from Burroughs to Woolf), landscapes and cityscapes in North Carolina, California, New Mexico, New York, East Sussex and elsewhere. A persistent theme: the inter-weavings of person and place. It is also, in the sum of its parts, deeply concerned with the question of which elements (genetic and circumstantial) conspire to make us who we are.

While her friends head off to college, Shannon Burke is stuck with a dead-end job and the responsibility of saving her mother's business. The only bright spot is her upcoming birthday and a visit from her eccentric Aunt Rebecca. But before Shannon can blow out her candles, she receives devastating news: Rebecca is dead. When she learns that her aunt has gifted her a beat-up camper, Shannon decides to sell it for cold, hard cash. Then she loses her job and finds a mysterious map in the glove box, and in a moment of desperation, she jumps behind the wheel and hits the road. Following Rebecca's maps, Shannon journeys deep into New York's Adirondack Mountains where she faces her greatest fears and navigates a new reality that is as unpredictable as the wilderness itself. During her scavenger hunt of self-discovery, Shannon experiences the healing power of nature, uncovers a stunning family secret, and comes to realize that a person's path through life is never clearly marked.