Ocean State Libraries

Land's plans of breaking free from the roots of her hometown in the Pacific Northwest to chase her dreams were cut short when a summer fling turned into an unexpected pregnancy. She turned to housekeeping to make ends meet, took classes online to earn a college degree. And she wrote relentlessly: true stories of overworked and underpaid Americans; of living on food stamps and WIC coupons. Here she explores the underbelly of upper-middle class America...

Traces the rewards and pitfalls of a Chinese mother's exercise in extreme parenting, describing the exacting standards applied to grades, music lessons, and avoidance of Western cultural practices.

"O'Connell is a smart twentysomething who treats her pregnancy like a new project, researching and planning. She envisions a natural birth and a year of wholesome breast feeding. But things do not go as she expects. Life throws curveballs, and after 40 hours of contractions, she opts for a C-section. She manages to nurse for a year but resents her baby's control over her body. This is not a book about the wonders of motherhood but about the tension...

"An intense and emotional epistolary memoir by one of the world's top ice climbers, born at the confluence of motherhood, adventure, career, and marriage"--

"asha bandele has a poignant story to share in Something Like Beautiful. It is the love that comes through that makes this such a compelling tale." -Nikki Giovanni Award-winning journalist, and author of The Prisoner's Wife andDaughter, and performance poet featured on HBO'S Def Poetry Jam, asha bandele once again writes from the heart in her lyrical and intimate memoir Something Like Beautiful-a moving story of love, loss, motherhood, and survival....

A real-life romantic comedy about getting dumped and getting over it Isabel Gillies, the New York Times bestselling author of Happens Every Day, has written another irresistibly moving and funny memoir: A Year and Six Seconds: A Love Story. When our story opens, it's a dark and slushy winter in New York City, where Isabel is arriving by airplane from Ohio, two toddlers in tow, to move in with her parents; her husband has left her for another woman....

When Amber Portwood debuted on MTV's hit reality series 16 & Pregnant, no one could have predicted that the teenager from Anderson, Indiana with the dry sense of humor would go on to become one of the most controversial young celebrities in reality TV history. But soon after the Amber stepped into the public eye, her life spiraled into chaos. From her struggles with anxiety, depression and addiction to her brutal onscreen fights with her boyfriend,...

"Why would a mother ever abandon her child? And is an abandoned child destined to grow up and make the same mistake? These were some of Melissa Cistaro's questions after her mother drove off without explanation one summer. Decades later Melissa finds herself at her dying mother's bedside with 6 days to find answers, fearful that she could do the same to her own little girl. Then she discovers a cache of letters her mother wrote but never sent and...