Kirjahaku

Newly orphaned, Doshmisi, Denzel, Maia, and Sonjay discover a carefully guarded secret about their family. Travel with them and their pesky parrot to the distant land of Faracadar, where they must attempt to retrieve the powerful Staff of Shakabaz and free the land from the clutches of the malevolent enchanter Sissrath. Their dangerous mission takes them over the ocean, under the ground, and into the deepest dungeons of the Final Fortress. Only if they discover how to use their individual gifts can the children fulfill their destiny in the ultimate confrontation with Sissrath.

What happens in a future that runs out of gas? Six diverse women friends meet for the weekend at a beach house to celebrate the year in which they all turn forty. Two weeks later, a petroleum-eating bacteria unleashed in the Gulf of Mexico to contain a spill goes rogue and devours all the raw petroleum products in the world. After the Systems Collapse, each of these women follows her own path to try to survive in a previously unimaginable altered life. From a Washington, D.C. suburb to a survivalist community in Kentucky, from Manhattan to a working class neighborhood in a town in upstate New York, from Oakland to a Native Rancheria in rural northern California, these women, their families, and their communities summon extraordinary ingenuity, resilience, and vision in the hopes of forging a viable future. A genre-bending work of speculative fiction, Guardians of Water is combination eco-fiction, humanistic sci-fi, and disaster fiction told from women's perspectives.

What happens in a future that runs out of gas? This humanistic, ecological, science-fiction exploration begins with six diverse women friends meeting for the weekend at a beach house to celebrate the year in which they all turn forty. Two weeks later, a petroleum-eating bacteria unleashed in the Gulf of Mexico to contain a spill goes rogue and devours all the raw petroleum products in the world. After the subsequent Systems Collapse, each of these women follows their own path to try to survive in a previously unimaginable altered life. From a Washington, D.C. suburb to a survivalist community in Kentucky, from Manhattan to a working class neighborhood in a town in upstate New York, from Oakland to a Native Rancheria in rural northern California, these women, their families, and their communities summon extraordinary ingenuity, resilience, and vision in the hopes of forging a viable future.

"When I remember Russia, I ache with longing for the village of my birth, where the beloved grandparents magically produced candy in a handshake and told stories of long ago when God spoke to humans and enchantments filled the world." So begins Amy Wachspress's historical novel, spanning 70 years and five continents, Memories from Cherry Harvest. Two Jewish sisters, born in Russia shortly before the Communist Revolution, are forced to flee the pogroms and persecution and travel with their parents to British-occupied Palestine. The girls' parents befriend a widower with two children and join forces, creating a blended family. When the girls are teenagers, World War II tears the family apart, sending the girls separately to France and America. Their lives unfold in tandem: babies are born, friendships forged, and cherry pies baked, despite the brutal backdrop of the Holocaust. The family grows into the next generation, with one of the daughters, an artist drawn to a bohemian lifestyle, who surrounds herself with a multicultural, colorful circle of friends the likes of which her ancestors could not have imagined.Subsequently, the artist's daughter is even more evolved and attuned to the world's unfair oppressions. She turns her passion to providing aid to Salvadoran refugees fleeing the torture and death squads in their homeland, just as her own grandmother once fled the pogroms of Russia. As she follows her vocation of reversing the damage that torturers inflict on their victims, she must overcome a past-life trauma that haunts her very core. Memories from Cherry Harvest explores the physics of memory, and shows how the tenacity of good can ultimately withstand and overcome the memory of tragedy.