Product Description: Secrets can’t last forever in this heartfelt debut novel, a UK bestseller and contemporary Philomena story.In a crumbling mansion in a small Irish village in County Wicklow, two elderly sisters, Ella and Roberta O’Callaghan, live alone with their secrets, memories, and mutual hatred...read more

Product Description: Working from within the contours of Christian faith, this book examines the relation between two ways of forming families—through nature (by procreation) and through history (by adoption). Christians honor the biological tie between parents and children, for it is the work of God in creation...read more

When her father loses his job and Ellen's family must move from their comfortable suburban house into her grandmother's urban home, Ellen worries about fitting into her new junior high school and making new friends, and wonders if her life will ever be the same again.When her father loses his job and Ellen's family must move from their comfortable suburban house into her grandmother's urban home, Ellen worries about fitting into her new junior high school and making new friends, and wonders if her life will ever be the same again

Product Description: How can we help heal children who have been abused or neglected? Healing Child Trauma Through Restorative Parenting details how children can be helped to recover with the use of Restorative Parenting, an innovative model informed by psychological and neurological understanding of trauma and its effects...read more

Jane Hall Fitz-Gibbon and Andrew Fitz-Gibbon have cared for more than 100 children in a foster care career spanning more than three decades. They developed a method, "loving nonviolent re-parenting," to best care for foster children. "Re-parenting" represents the complex task of caring for children who have been parented already, often inadequately, and mostly involving physical, emotional, and/or systemic violence. Welcoming Strangers analyses the violence foster children suffer and raises ethical questions―why violence is morally problematic, what philosophers have said about human nature and violence, and what moral good should be pursued in childcare. Drawing on an ancient form of ethics, sometimes known as "virtue ethics," this book focuses on the traits required to become a loving, nonviolent re-parent. The Fitz-Gibbons tell of their journey in the foster care system with candour, humour, and grace. Covering subjects as diverse as teens, sex, discipline, and the carer's own well-being, they describe the difficulties of foster care and the sometimes impossible task of restoring dignity and joy to young lives deeply damaged by violence. This book will be of immense help to foster carers, adopters, caseworkers, case managers, policymakers, and any parent who wants to integrate nonviolent practices into the way they care for children.

Charles Dickens was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world’s best-known fictional characters and is regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime, and by the twentieth century critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories enjoy lasting popularity. Dickens preferred the style of the 18th century picaresque novels that he found in abundance on his father’s shelves. According to Ackroyd, other than these, perhaps the most important literary influence on him was derived from the fables of The Arabian Nights. His writing style is marked by a profuse linguistic creativity. Satire, flourishing in his gift for caricature, is his forte. An early reviewer compared him to Hogarth for his keen practical sense of the ludicrous side of life, though his acclaimed mastery of varieties of class idiom may in fact mirror the conventions of contemporary popular theatre. Dickens worked intensively on developing arresting names for his characters that would reverberate with associations for his readers, and assist the development of motifs in the storyline, giving what one critic calls an ”allegorical impetus” to the novels’ meanings. To cite one of numerous examples, the name Mr. Murdstone in David Copperfield conjures up twin allusions to ”murder” and stony coldness. His literary style is also a mixture of fantasy and realism. His satires of British aristocratic snobbery—he calls one character the ”Noble Refrigerator”—are often popular. Comparing orphans to stocks and shares, people to tug boats, or dinner-party guests to furniture are just some of Dickens’s acclaimed flights of fancy.

Charles Dickens was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world’s best-known fictional characters and is regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime, and by the twentieth century critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories enjoy lasting popularity. Dickens preferred the style of the 18th century picaresque novels that he found in abundance on his father’s shelves. According to Ackroyd, other than these, perhaps the most important literary influence on him was derived from the fables of The Arabian Nights. His writing style is marked by a profuse linguistic creativity. Satire, flourishing in his gift for caricature, is his forte. An early reviewer compared him to Hogarth for his keen practical sense of the ludicrous side of life, though his acclaimed mastery of varieties of class idiom may in fact mirror the conventions of contemporary popular theatre. Dickens worked intensively on developing arresting names for his characters that would reverberate with associations for his readers, and assist the development of motifs in the storyline, giving what one critic calls an ”allegorical impetus” to the novels’ meanings. To cite one of numerous examples, the name Mr. Murdstone in David Copperfield conjures up twin allusions to ”murder” and stony coldness. His literary style is also a mixture of fantasy and realism. His satires of British aristocratic snobbery—he calls one character the ”Noble Refrigerator”—are often popular. Comparing orphans to stocks and shares, people to tug boats, or dinner-party guests to furniture are just some of Dickens’s acclaimed flights of fancy.