After Astrid tells her father that she wants to be an astronaut, he tells her of all the things that astronauts have to do.

Eighteen years ago the town accused Dolores Claiborne of murdering her husband in cold blood. Now a woman lies dead and a witness finds Dolores standing over the body. Her daughter is the only one who can save her life and the only thing that stands between guilt and innocence is the evil secret that made the daughter run away ten years ago.

After a woman, Clarisse, is murdered on a trip to visit her mother in Bordeaux, her daughter tries to uncover what happened to her with the help of a brown dog who appears to have taken in the spirit of the deceased.

For Sally Diamond, people are confusing, unpredictable, and hard to read. She has always preferred routines to spontaneity, silence to noise, and forthright communication to small talk. Adopted at the age of seven by a psychiatrist, she cannot remember any details of her childhood before that age. Now forty-three, Sally finds the truth coming into sharp focus when her past becomes headline news: she endured something unthinkable as a child, and now...

The author explores her own conflicting feelings as a mother as she protects her offspring and probes the roots and tendrils of the girlie-girl movement and concludes that parents who think through their values early on and set reasonable limits, encourage dialogue and skepticism, and are canny about the consumer culture can combat the 24/7 "media machine" aimed at girls and hold off the focus on beauty, materialism, and the color pink somewhat.

"Attending summer camp as a boy, Erik Schroder -- a first generation East German immigrant -- adopts the name of Eric Kennedy, a fateful white lie that will set him on an improbable and ultimately tragic course" -- Jacket flap. A lyrical and deeply affecting novel recounting the seven days a father spends on the road with his daughter after kidnapping her during a parental visit. Eric Schroder brings his daughter, Meadow, to Lake Champlain, Vermont,...

"Marlinchen and her two sisters live with their wizard father in a city shifting from magic to industry. As Oblya's last true witches, she and her sisters are little more than a tourist trap as they treat their clients with archaic remedies and beguile them with nostalgic charm. Marlinchen spends her days divining secrets in exchange for rubles and trying to placate her tyrannical, xenophobic father, who keeps his daughters sequestered from the outside...