An expert on traumatic stress outlines an approach to healing, explaining how traumatic stress affects brain processes and how to use innovative treatments to reactivate the mind's abilities to trust, engage others, and experience pleasure-- Trauma is a fact of life. Veterans and their families deal with the painful aftermath of combat; one in five Americans has been molested; one in four grew up with alcoholics; one in three couples have engaged...

"A girl would be such a blessing... The last time Maeve saw her cousin was the night she escaped the cult they were raised in. For the past two decades, Maeve has worked hard to build a normal life in New York City, where she keeps everything, and everyone, at a safe distance. When Andrea suddenly reappears, Maeve regains the only true friend she's ever had. Soon she's spending more time at Andrea's remote Catskills estate than in her own cramped...

"After the Forest is a dark and enchanting fantasy debut from Kell Woods that explores the repercussions of a childhood filled with magic and a young woman contending with the truth of "happily ever after." Ginger. Honey. Cinnamon. Flour. Twenty years after the witch in the gingerbread house, Greta and Hans are struggling to get by. Their mother and stepmother are long dead, Hans is deeply in debt from gambling, and the countryside lies in ruin, its...

"Why is 14-year-old David struggling to survive in one of the wealthiest countries on earth? We're living in a traumatized and traumatizing society that's dooming our children and families to lives without the basic services for surviving, let alone thriving. In David, Age 14 we explore how many of our vulnerable young people and parents are falling through the cracks in rural and urban America. Change agents and authors Dr. Katherine Ortega Courtney...

Spare and unsparing, God Help the Child -- the first novel by Toni Morrison to be set in our current moment -- weaves a tale about the way the sufferings of childhood can shape, and misshape, the life of the adult. At the center: a young woman who calls herself Bride, whose stunning blue-black skin is only one element of her beauty, her boldness and confidence, her success in life, but which caused her light-skinned mother to deny her even the simplest...

"A deep examination of what happens after life-altering events, from car accidents to incarceration, and how we forge new identities when our lives are cleaved irrevocably into a before and after "What doesn't kill us makes us stronger," the saying goes. But does it really? Tracing the lives of six people who have experienced catastrophic, life-changing events, journalist Mike Mariani explores the nuances of what happens after one's life is cleaved...

"Best friends don't always have the best intentions. On a brisk fall night in a New York apartment, 35-year-old Billie West hears terrified screams. It's her lifelong best friend Cassie Barnwell, one floor above, and she's just realized her infant daughter has gone missing. Billie is shaken as she looks down into her own arms to see the baby, remembering--with a jolt of fear--that she is responsible for the kidnapping that has instantly shattered...

"Nineteen years old, broke, and effectively an orphan, Magnolia doesn't have much to look forward to. She feels stuck and haunted: by her overdrawn bank account, by her predatory landlord, by the ghost of her late grandmother Mama Brown. One night while working at her dead-end gas station job, a mysterious, slick stranger named Cotton walks in and offers to turn Magnolia's luck around. He offers her a lucrative "modeling" job at his family's funeral...

"A devastating story of one family's border-crossing adventure to rescue one another and make peace with the past, set in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, two years after the occupation of South Ossetia by Russia in 2008"-- Having fled conflict in the former-Soviet Republic of Georgia as children, Saba and his brother have fought to make peace with the past. In particular, they struggle with the sacrifices of a mother who remained in a war...

"No one sees the world as Jason Padgett does. Water pours from the faucet in crystalline patterns, numbers call to mind distinct geometric shapes, and intricate fractal patterns emerge from the movement of tree branches, revealing the intrinsic mathematical designs hidden in the objects around us. Yet Padgett wasn't born this way. Twelve years ago, he had never made it past pre-algebra. But a violent mugging forever altered the way his brain works,...