Ruby Sisson Library

"White Ivy begins as many coming-to-America stories do: Ivy Lin, a Chinese immigrant, grows up in a low-income apartment complex in Massachusetts desperate to assimilate with her American peers. She develops a crush on the golden boy Gideon Speyer, whose patrician New England family is the paragon of the WASP ideal. Ivy's mother is a Tiger Mom, berating Ivy regularly when she disapproves of her grades, her looks, her attitude. But that's where the...

"From the winner of the 2016 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction comes a tender and funny debut novel, set over one emotionally charged weekend at an animal sanctuary in western Kansas, where maternal, romantic, and community bonds are tested in the wake of an estranged daughter's homecoming"--

When 11-year-old Kimberly Chang and her mother emigrate from Hong Kong to Brooklyn squalor, she quickly begins a secret double life: exceptional schoolgirl during the day, Chinatown sweatshop worker in the evenings. Disguising the more difficult truths of her life, like her secret love for a factory boy who shares none of her talent or ambition, Kimberly learns to constantly translate not just her language but herself back and forth between the worlds...

Raised in a conservative and emotionally volatile Palestinian family in Brooklyn, Yara thought she would finally feel free when she married a charming entrepreneur who took her to the suburbs. She's gotten to follow her dreams, completing an undergraduate degree in art and landing a good job at the local college. As a traditional wife, she also raises their two school-aged daughters, takes care of the house, and has dinner ready when her husband gets...

A polio victim and her 13-year-old daughter work miracles from their Tupelo, Miss., home during the summer of 1964. Having contracted polio at 22 while pregnant, Paige Dunn delivers her baby from an iron lung, and ends up raising her daughter, Diana, alone after her husband divorces her. Able to move only her head, Paige requires round-the-clock nursing care that social services barely cover. Now 13, Diana has taken over the night shift to save them...

A "family saga featuring three generations of women who struggle to find freedom and happiness in a small Midwestern college town"-- In A Cloud in the Shape of a Girl we see three women and their trials, small and large: social slights and heartbreaks; marital disappointments and infidelities; familial dysfunction; mortality. Spanning from World War II to the present, Thompson reveals a matrilineal love story that is so perfectly grounded in our...

I have three deadly problems: 1. I've seriously offended a maniacal killer. 2. I just had a bullet removed from my brain. 3. My new daughter is growing up too fast--and she's in the line of fire. Living on an obscure, technology-free island off California means safety from the murderer who hunts Kellen Adams and her new family.... Or does it? Family time becomes terror-time, and at last, alone, Kellen faces a killer playing a cruel game. Only one...

On a blustery day in London, the dark secrets and troubled past of Maryam Mazar surface violently with tragic consequences for her daughter Sara and her newly orphaned nephew Saeed.

"After twenty years, Leo Pizzola has come back to his native village of Santo Fico, still single and still looking for a way to get rich. Sitting high above the sea in a remote part of Tuscany, the town is as poor as it was on the day Leo left. No tourist buses stop there. No guidebooks mention the Miracle and the Mystery of their blessed little church, which once held so much promise as a tourist attraction. Instead the broken fountain in the center...

In 1950s Quebec, French and English tolerate each other with precarious civility-much like Maggie Hughes' parents. Maggie's English-speaking father has ambitions for his daughter that dont include marriage to the poor French boy on the next farm over. But Maggie's heart is captured by Gabriel Ph�nix. When she becomes pregnant at fifteen, her parents force her to give baby Elodie up for adoption and get her life 'back on track'. Elodie is raised...