In 1930s Alabama, twelve-year-old Hoodoo Hatcher is the only member of his family who seems unable to practice folk magic, but when a mysterious man called the Stranger puts the entire town at risk from his black magic, Hoodoo must learn to conjure to defeat him.

"Bill Geist reflects on his coming of age in the American heartland of the Midwest and traces his evolution as a man and a writer, in the summers between high school and college, before he went off to Vietnam and the country went to Hell."--Provided by publisher

A boy recounts his annual summer trips to rural Illinois with his sister during the Great Depression to visit their larger-than-life grandmother.

During Sarah Smarsh's turbulent childhood in Kansas in the 1980s and 1990s, the country's changing economic policies solidified her family's place among the working poor. By telling the story of her life and the lives of the people she loves, Smarsh challenges us to examine the class divide in our country and the myths about people thought to be less because they earn less. Her personal history affirms the corrosive impact intergenerational poverty...

"When eleven-year-old Langston's father moves them from their home in Alabama to Chicago's Bronzeville district, it feels like he's giving up everything he loves. It's 1946. Langston's mother has just died, and now they're leaving the rest of his family and friends. He misses everything -- Grandma's Sunday suppers, the red dirt roads, and the magnolia trees his mother loved. In the city, they live in a small apartment surrounded by noise and chaos....

The star of The Incredible Dr. Pol shares his amusing, and often poignant, tales from his four decades as a vet in rural Michigan. Dr. Jan Pol is not your typical veterinarian. Born and raised the in Netherlands on a dairy farm, he is the star of Nat Geo Wild's hit show The Incredible Dr. Pol and has been treating animals in rural Michigan since the 1970s. Dr. Pol's more than 20,000 patients have ranged from white mice to 2600 pound horses and everything...

New York Times With acres of land and a house that have been in his family for generations, rancher Chance Qualtrough has deep roots in Primrose creek. Now, at the local diner, he is about to encounter his future....Perhaps it was fate that brought Hallie O'Rourke and her two young daughters to the Last Chance Café. More likely, it was the blinding Nevada snowstorm and a broken-down truck that forced the desperate single mother inside. Hallie couldn't...

Things go badly awry for Mr. J. L. B. Matekoni when he sets out to do something special for their adopted daughter, Motholeli, and it is up to his wife, Mma Precious Ramotswe, proprietor of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, to extricate him from his problems.

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