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-- Autour d'elle2018., Talonbooks Call No: QWF Fic Bie Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "Heartily sincere, human, and compassionate, Around Her is a multifaceted novel that explores, through the words and reflections of a large community of characters, the bonds that unite us, and love in all of its manifestations the love that one finds, that one loses, destroys, desires, or recovers. In the mid-1990s, a sixteen-year-old girl, secretive and vulnerable, gives birth to a healthy boy in the anonymity of a Montreal hospital. She gives him up for adoption a parting that will affect, perhaps even govern and determine, all successive stages of her adult life. Around Her traces twenty years of the lives of Florence Gaudreault and her estranged son Adrien through the prism of twenty characters who have crossed their paths and who, each in turn and with their own unique voice, tell their story. Patiently assembling disparate points of view, those of the young, the old, the families, the couples, or the lonely souls, this novel, replete with emotive twists and turns, probes the failures and hopes of a whole segment of society, revealing the proximity of past traumas. Around Her is a highly emotional book, written with stylistic virtuosity, and populated with a complex kaleidoscope of voices. Author Sophie Bienvenu has a tangible gift for portraying real-life, contrasting characters, and revealing their idiosyncratic and evolving streams of consciousness. Around Her is Bienvenu's fiction at its best, rigorously authentic, wholeheartedly humane, and delightfully vulnerable."--.
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[2019]., Adult, Liveright Publishing Corporation Call No: Fic Mil Edition: First edition. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: Building on her critically acclaimed novel The Last Days of California and her biting collection Always Happy Hour, Miller transports readers to this delightfully wry, unapologetic corner of the south—Biloxi, Mississippi, home to sixty-three-year-old Louis McDonald, Jr. Louis has been forlorn since his wife of thirty-seven years left him, his father passed, and he impulsively retired from his job in anticipation of an inheritance check that may not come. These days he watches reality television and tries to avoid his ex-wife and daughter, benefiting from the charity of his former brother-in-law, Frank, who religiously brings over his Chili’s leftovers and always stays for a beer. Yet the past is no predictor of Louis’s future. On a routine trip to Walgreens to pick up his diabetes medication, he stops at a sign advertising free dogs and meets Harry Davidson, a man who claims to have more than a dozen canines on offer, but offers only one: an overweight mixed breed named Layla. Without any rational explanation, Louis feels compelled to take the dog home, and the two become inseparable. Louis, more than anyone, is dumbfounded to find himself in love—bursting into song with improvised jingles, exploring new locales, and reevaluating what he once considered the fixed horizons of his life. With her “sociologist’s eye for the mundane and revealing” (Joyce Carol Oates, New York Review of Books), Miller populates the Gulf Coast with Ann Beattie-like characters. A strangely heartwarming tale of loneliness, masculinity, and the limitations of each, Biloxi confirms Miller’s position as one of our most gifted and perceptive writers.
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c2003., Thorndike Press ; Chivers Press Call No: LP Fic Rob Edition: Thorndike large print ed. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library
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By Gasco, Elyse1999., Picador USA Call No: QWF Fic Gas Edition: 1st Picador USA pbk. ed. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: Stories dealing with adoption. In The Third Person, an adopted woman decides at the last minute not to have an abortion, Elements is a meeting of a woman and her birth mother, while in the title story the protagonist discovers a sister who was surrendered for adoption.
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2019., Baraka Books of Montreal Call No: QWF Fic Cyr Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: It's October 1970 in Montreal, Quebec. Nadine is a trade unionist with the garment-workers union. Twenty years earlier in 1950, at the age of 15, she was banished to a home for unwed mothers. Her baby daughter, whose father is shrouded in secrecy, was given away for adoption without her permission. This prompts her to cut all ties with her mixed Irish and French-Canadian Catholic family whose past is cluttered with secrets, betrayals, incest and violence. She vows one day she will reunite with her daughter. Following the FLQ kidnapping of a British Trade Commissioner and the Quebec Minister of Labour, Ottawa proclaims the War Measures Act and sends the army into Quebec. These staggering political events lay the foundation for a reunion between Nadine and her daughter Lisette, embittered after been bounced from one foster home to another since she was a baby. Lisette and her partner Serge, who is close to the FLQ, need money and see Nadine as a possible source based on information they've gathered about Nadine's family. World Wars I and II, the Great Depression, and the 1970 October crisis provide the backdrop to this family saga spanning some 60 years. Murielle Cyr breaks new ground by telling The Daughters' Story, an unsung, overlooked but intensely passionate tale of women, propelled by their unquenchable need to belong despite oppressive conditions hard to imagine nowadays, and who manage to survive and thrive.
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By Tyler, Annec2006., Doubleday Canada Call No: Fic Tyl Availability:1 of 1 At Your LibraryClick here to watch Click here to view
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2022., Adult, Patrick Crean Editions Call No: NEW BLK Bio M818i Edition: First Canadian edition. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: A memoir from a BC Vancouver Sun journalist who was born to a West African mother, and then adopted as a small boy and raised by a white evangelical family. This is his account of being raised by fundamentalists. He grows up as a black kid who had his racial identity mocked and derided all the while being made to participate in the religious fervor of his mother's holy roller church. The religious brainwashing is of course dislocating and crushing for the boy as he grows into a teenager and is consistently abused for being black. He must navigate and survive zealotry, paranoia and prejudice. This is a narrative that amplifies a voice rarely heard: the child at the centre of an interracial adoption. This memoir invites readers to de-centre whiteness as its narrator learns to do the same and considers the controversial adoption practice from the perspective of the families being ripped apart, and the children being stripped of their culture, in order to fill demand for babies in evangelical households. As Harry grows up after a lifetime of internalized anti-blackness, he begins to redefine his terms and reconsider his history. His journey from white cult to black consciousness culminates in a happy reunion with his biological mother, who waited 25 years to tell him the truth: she wanted to keep him. Harrison Mooney's style brings accessibility and levity to a deeply personal tale of identity: a black coming-of-age narrative set in a world with little love for black boys.
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c2008, p2007., 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment Call No: DVD Fic Juno Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: Juno MacGuff is a sixteen-year-old girl who, after a one-time sexual encounter with her best friend Paulie, learns that she is pregnant. Juno and Paulie like each other, but not enough to start a family, complete with a child. Paulie leaves all the decisions about the baby to Juno, and she decides to have the baby and give it up for adoption. The next step is to find prospective parents for the as-yet unborn child.
![Juno [DVD] (2007). Directed by Jason Reitman.](/Library/images/cover/noimage.png "Juno [DVD] (2007). Directed by Jason Reitman.")
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By Ko, Lisa2017., Workman Publishing Edition: eBook ed. Summary Note: "One morning, Deming Guo's mother, an undocumented Chinese immigrant named Polly, goes to her job at the nail salon and never comes home. With his mother gone, eleven-year-old Deming is left with no one to care for him. He is eventually adopted by two white college professors who move him from the Bronx to a small town upstate. Set in New York and China, the Leavers is the story of how one boy comes into his own when everything he's loved has been taken away--and how a mother learns to live with the mistakes of her past".
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[2009], p2002., Distributed by Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment Call No: DVD Fic Lilo Edition: 2-disc big wave ed. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: An evil creator has created a little creature by genetic experimentation. The creator and creature are sent to prison. The creature escapes and heads for Earth where he tries to impersonate a dog. Bent on self preservation, he plans to use a human shield to protect him from the aliens sent to recapture him. Earth girl, Lilo, adopts the 'dog,' gives him the name Stitch, and actually developes an emotional attachment to the little creature. Lilo's dysfunctional family consists only of her sister Nani, but the two are about to be ripped apart by social worker Cobra Bubbles. Stitch, as the new family member, brings quite some action into all their lives, and after a while not even the aliens can recognize their former target.
![Lilo & Stitch [DVD] (2002). Directed by Dean DeBlois, Chris Sanders](/Library/images/~imageCT73115.JPG "Lilo & Stitch [DVD] (2002). Directed by Dean DeBlois, Chris Sanders")
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2015., Little, Brown and company Call No: MYS Fic Pel Edition: First edition. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "Whether they're cops or conmen, savage killers or creative types, gangsters or God-fearing citizens, George Pelecanos' characters are always engaged in a fight for their lives. They fight to advance or simply to survive; they fight against odds, against enemies, even against themselves. In this, his first collection of stories, the acclaimed novelist introduces readers to a vivid and eclectic cast of combatants. A seasoned claims investigator tracks a supposedly dead man from Miami to Brazil, only to be thrown off his game by a kid from the local slum. An aging loser takes a last stab at respectability by becoming a police informant. A Greek-American couple adopts an interracial trio of sons and then struggles to keep their family together, giving us a stirring bit of background on one of Pelecanos' most beloved protagonists, Spero Lucas. In the title novella - which takes its name from Hollywood slang for the last shot of the day, the one that comes before the liquor shots begin - we go behind the scenes of a television cop show, where a writer gets caught up in a drama more real than anything he could have conjured for a script. By turns heartbreaking and humane, brutal and funny, these finely constructed tales expose the violence and striving beneath the surface of any city and within any human heart. Tough, sexy, fast-paced, and crackling with energy, The Martini Shot is Pelecanos at his very best"-- Publisher.
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2008., Knopf Call No: BLK Fic Mor Edition: 1st ed. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: In exchange for a bad debt, an Anglo-Dutch trader takes on Florens, a young slave girl, who feels abandoned by her slave mother and who searches for love--first from an older servant woman at her master's new home, and then from a handsome free blacksmith.
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[2019]., Adult, Doubleday Call No: Fic Lom Edition: First edition. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: When Marilyn Connolly and David Sorenson fall in love in the 1970s, they are blithely ignorant of all that's to come. By 2016, their four radically different daughters are each in a state of unrest: Wendy, widowed young, soothes herself with booze and younger men; Violet, a litigator-turned-stay-at-home-mom, battles anxiety and self-doubt when the darkest part of her past resurfaces; Liza, a neurotic and newly tenured professor, finds herself pregnant with a baby she's not sure she wants by a man she's not sure she loves; and Grace, the dawdling youngest daughter, begins living a lie that no one in her family even suspects. Above it all, the daughters share the lingering fear that they will never find a love quite like their parents'. As the novel moves through the tumultuous year following the arrival of Jonah Bendt -- given up by one of the daughters in a closed adoption fifteen years before -- we are shown the rich and varied tapestry of the Sorensons' past: years marred by adolescence, infidelity, and resentment, but also the transcendent moments of joy that make everything else worthwhile. Spanning nearly half a century, and set against the quintessential American backdrop of Chicago and its prospering suburbs, Lombardo's debut explores the triumphs and burdens of love, the fraught tethers of parenthood and sisterhood, and the baffling mixture of affection, abhorrence, resistance, and submission we feel for those closest to us.
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2019., Adult, McClelland & Stewart Call No: Bio W741o Edition: Hardcover edition. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "A beautiful and haunting memoir of kinship and culture rediscovered. Jenny Heijun Wills was born in Korea and adopted as an infant into a white family in small-town Canada. In her late twenties, she reconnected with her first family and returned to Seoul where she spent four months getting to know other adoptees, as well as her Korean mother, father, siblings, and extended family. At the guesthouse for transnational adoptees where she lived, alliances were troubled by violence and fraught with the trauma of separation and of cultural illiteracy. Unsurprisingly, heartbreakingly, Wills found that her nascent relationships with her family were similarly fraught. Ten years later, Wills sustains close ties with her Korean family. Her Korean parents and her younger sister attended her wedding in Montreal, and that same sister now lives in Canada. Remarkably, meeting Jenny caused her birth parents to reunite after having been estranged since her adoption. Little by little, Jenny Heijun Wills is learning and relearning her stories and those of her biological kin, piecing together a fragmented life into something resembling a whole. Delving into gender, class, racial, and ethnic complexities, as well as into the complex relationships between Korean women--sisters, mothers and daughters, grandmothers and grandchildren, aunts and nieces--Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related. describes in visceral, lyrical prose the painful ripple effects that follow a child's removal from a family, and the rewards that can flow from both struggle and forgiveness."--
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-- Oranges and sunshine2012., Adult, Cohen Media Group ; marketed and distributed in the US by New Video Call No: DVD Fic Oranges Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "Oranges & Sunshine tells the story of Margaret Humphreys (Emily Watson, two time Academy Award nominee for Breaking The Waves and Hilary and Jackie), a social worker from Nottingham who uncovered one of the most significant social scandals of recent times: the deportation of thousands of children from the United Kingdom to Australia. Children as young as four had been told that their parents were dead and been sent to children's homes on the other side of the world. Many were subjected to appalling abuse. They were promised oranges and sunshine; they got hard labor and life in institutions. Almost single handedly, against overwhelming odds, and with little regard for her own well being, Margaret reunited thousands of families, brought authorities to account and drew worldwide attention to an extraordinary miscarriage of justice."--Container.
![Oranges & sunshine [DVD] (2010). Directed by Jim Loach. : a true story](/Library/images/~imageCT82368.JPG "Oranges & sunshine [DVD] (2010). Directed by Jim Loach. : a true story")
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2014., General, Entertainment One Films Canada : distributed exclusively in Canada by Entertainment One Call No: DVD Fic Philomena Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: Judi Dench stars in the story of Philomena Lee, mother to a boy conceived out of wedlock and given up for adoption. Nearly 50 years later, Philomena meets Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan), a former BBC reporter looking for his next big story. Together, they embark on a journey to locate her long lost son. As the pieces of the puzzle come together, the unlikely travel companions form a comic and heartwarming friendship. Based on the 2009 investigative book by Martin Sixsmith, The Lost Child of Philomena Lee, the film adaptation has been hailed as "a triumph for Judi Dench. Brilliant. A performance of grace, nuance and cinematic heroism." Mary Corliss, TIME MAGAZINE --Container.
![Philomena [DVD] (2014). Directed by Stephan Frears](/Library/images/~imageCT77895.JPG "Philomena [DVD] (2014). Directed by Stephan Frears")