Books with category đź©ą Emotional Healing
Displaying 7 books

Like Mother, Like Daughter

From the New York Times best-selling author of Reconstructing Amelia, Like Mother, Like Daughter is a thrilling novel of emotional suspense that questions the damaging fictions we cling to and the hard truths we avoid. Above all, it's a love story between a mother and a daughter, each determined to save the other before it's too late.

When Cleo, a student at NYU, arrives late for dinner at her childhood home in Brooklyn, she finds food burning in the oven and no sign of her mother, Kat. Then Cleo discovers her mom's bloody shoe under the sofa. Something terrible has happened. But what?

The polar opposite of Cleo, whose "out of control" emotions and "unsafe" behavior have created a seemingly unbridgeable rift between mother and daughter, Kat is the essence of Park Slope perfection: a happily married, successful corporate lawyer. Or so Cleo thinks. Kat has been lying. She’s not just a lawyer; she’s her firm’s fixer. She’s damn good at it, too.

Growing up in a dangerous group home taught her how to think fast, stay calm under pressure, and recognize a real threat when she sees one. And in the days leading up her disappearance, Kat has become aware of multiple threats: demands for money from her unfaithful soon-to-be ex-husband; evidence that Cleo has slipped back into a relationship that’s far riskier than she understands; and menacing anonymous messages from her past—all of which she’s kept hidden from Cleo.

No One Talks About This Stuff: Twenty-Two Stories of Almost Parenthood

2024

by Kat Brown

No One Talks About This Stuff is a support group for almost-parents. It's a place to share their journeys of loss and limbo, to confront social pressure, and to find courage in the darkness of tragedies which happen every day yet are brushed under the carpet.

We hear from a stepmother who wrestles with infertility. A husband and wife each tell their experience of losing their baby. A lesbian comes of age at a time when gay people rarely become parents. A father finds loss to be his unlikely superpower. Complex post-traumatic stress disorder impacts a person’s choices about having a family. A black woman unpacks ancestral shame while finding renewed purpose.

And each person shares how they lived through it. This captivatingly beautiful, profound, and honest anthology opens a much-needed conversation about society, family, and honoring the missing children we will never forget.

The Second Coming

A luminous new novel from the best-selling author of City on Fire, The Second Coming plunges us deep into the lives of a teenage girl and her father as they navigate love, grief, addiction, resurrection, and the restless pull of other people.

When 13-year-old Jolie Aspern drops her phone onto the subway tracks in 2011, her estranged dad, Ethan, seems like the furthest thing from her mind. A convicted felon and recovering addict, Ethan has always struggled to see past himself. But then a call from his ex makes him fear their daughter's in deeper trouble than anyone realizes. Believing he's the only one who can save her, he decides to return to New York with a gift: the whole of his life, its hard-won triumphs and harrowing mistakes...

So begins the intimate epic of Jolie and Ethan: child and adult, apart and together, different yet the same. Their journey toward each other will face opposition from grandparents and siblings and friends. It will strain connections with roommates and benefactors and a probation officer desperate to help. It will push Jolie out past her depth with a mysterious admirer, and Ethan in over his head with his first love, Jolie's mom.

But as father and daughter struggle to find their footing, new vistas beckon: from a surf break in mid-'90s Delaware to group therapy during the Great Recession, from an encampment at Occupy Wall Street to a HoJo on Maryland's Eastern Shore, from the heights of the Brooklyn Bridge to horizons seldom seen in fiction. The Second Coming is at once an incandescent feat of storytelling and an exploration of an enduring mystery: Can we ever really outrun the past, stay true to ourselves while still chasing something new? Full of music and pathos and passion—full of blues—this beautifully attuned work of fiction renews the extraordinary promise of this writer's boundless and unflagging talents.

Long Island

Long Island unfolds as an intensely moving narrative of secrecy, misunderstanding, and love. We re-encounter Eilis Lacey, the complex and enigmatic protagonist of Brooklyn, now navigating life twenty years later. Eilis, an Irish native, is intertwined with the life of Tony Fiorello, an Italian American plumber. Together, they have forged a life amidst the sprawling family dynamics of Tony's relatives on Long Island.

The year is 1976, and Eilis, in her forties with two teenage children, finds herself without a support system in this still-foreign land. Her connections to Ireland are palpable and potent, yet she has not revisited her homeland in decades. A startling encounter occurs when an Irishman arrives at her door, claiming his wife is pregnant with Tony's child, and intends to leave the baby with Eilis upon its birth.

The narrative masterfully explores Eilis's response to this shocking revelation. Long Island is a tale of unspoken longings and the perilous silences that pervade Eilis's existence. TĂłibĂ­n's skillful storytelling gives voice to these silences, weaving a poignant story of a woman's solitary struggle within her marriage and the profound connections she reestablishes upon her inevitable return to her origins, rediscovering past ways of life and love once thought lost.

Counting Feminicide

Why grassroots data activists in Latin America count feminicide—and how this vital social justice work challenges mainstream data science. What isn’t counted doesn’t count. And mainstream institutions systematically fail to account for feminicide, the gender-related killing of women and girls, including cisgender and transgender women. Against this failure, Counting Feminicide brings to the fore the work of data activists across the Americas who are documenting such murders—and challenging the reigning logic of data science by centering care, memory, and justice in their work.

Drawing on Data Against Feminicide, a large-scale collaborative research project, Catherine D’Ignazio describes the creative, intellectual, and emotional labor of feminicide data activists who are at the forefront of a data ethics that rigorously and consistently takes power and people into account. Individuals, researchers, and journalists—these data activists scour news sources to assemble spreadsheets and databases of women killed by gender-related violence, then circulate those data in a variety of creative and political forms. Their work reveals the potential of restorative/transformative data science—the use of systematic information to, first, heal communities from the violence and trauma produced by structural inequality and, second, envision and work toward the world in which such violence has been eliminated.

Specifically, D’Ignazio explores the possibilities and limitations of counting and quantification—reducing complex social phenomena to convenient, sortable, aggregable forms—when the goal is nothing short of the elimination of gender-related violence. Counting Feminicide showcases the incredible power of data feminism in practice, in which each murdered woman or girl counts, and, in being counted, joins a collective demand for the restoration of rights and a transformation of the gendered order of the world.

The Alternatives

2024

by Caoilinn Hughes

The Alternatives is a tale about sisterhood, a novel of ideas, and a chronicle of our collective follies. It unfolds in prose full of gorgeous surprises and glows with intelligence, compassion, and beauty.

From the writer Anthony Doerr calls "a massive talent," comes the story of four brilliant Irish sisters, orphaned in childhood, who scramble to reconnect when the oldest disappears into the Irish countryside.

The Flattery sisters were plunged prematurely into adulthood when their parents died in tragic circumstances. Now in their thirties—all single, all with PhDs—they are each attempting to do meaningful work in a rapidly foundering world. The four lead disparate, distanced lives, from classrooms in Connecticut to ritzy catering gigs in London’s Notting Hill.

One day, their oldest sister, a geologist haunted by a terrible awareness of the earth’s future, abruptly vanishes from her work and home. Together for the first time in years, the Flatterys descend on the Irish countryside in search of a sister who doesn’t want to be found. Sheltered in a derelict bungalow, they reach into their common past, confronting both old wounds and a desperately uncertain future.

Warm, fiercely witty, and unexpectedly hopeful, The Alternatives is an unforgettable portrait of a family perched on our collective precipice, told by one of Ireland’s most gifted storytellers.

A Good Happy Girl

2024

by Marissa Higgins

A Good Happy Girl is a poignant, surprising, and immersive novel that delves into the complexities of relationships and the human psyche. We meet Helen, a jittery attorney with a self-destructive streak, who is grappling with the aftermath of a crime of neglect committed by her parents. She has historically coped by compartmentalizing her life—engaging in casual hookups with lesbian couples, caring for her grandmother, and flirting with a young administrative assistant.

Everything changes when Helen encounters Catherine and Katrina, a married lesbian couple whose sexual and emotional intensity begins to unravel the tightly wound fabric of her life. As they prod into Helen's past, they unearth a childhood tragedy she has long been repressing. Facing her father's pleas for help with parole, Helen seizes an opportunity to confront her history and seek answers she has long avoided.

Author Marissa Higgins explores themes of queer domesticity, the effects of incarceration on families, and intergenerational poverty, extending empathy to characters often deprived of it, leading to unsettling and thought-provoking results.

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