Ruby's New Coat


Book Description

Ruby's New Coat begins in London when, for one night only, Ruby Biggs forgets she is engaged to be married. A V2 rocket hits a London pub and Ruby's life is turned upside down in more ways than one, as she is tumbled into a doorway and dragged into the bowels of Selfridges by a mysterious and enigmatic stranger. Passion erupts and a connection is made. Her rescuer, Loukas, is from Crete and has to return, where he discovers terrible atrocities committed by both the Germans and the Cretans against each other. Meanwhile, Ruby is in trouble, even more so after her fiancé's sister reveals a shocking secret. When her father returns from the war to discover his daughter has been "carrying on with a foreigner," Ruby has no choice but to leave England. She throws caution to the wind and moves to Crete where she begins a new life. Combining fiction with historical fact, this romantic tale has twists and turns and heals scars spanning ten years of conflict.




Lead with Hospitality


Book Description

Across all industries and levels of organizations, one key leadership trait inspires and motivates more than any other: hospitality. We have all encountered inspirational leaders who've helped us, taught us, encouraged us, pushed us to get outside our comfort zones, or motivated us to become the best version of ourselves. What is it about their leadership styles that inspires us to do more for our team and our personal and professional growth? Turns out, we admire these leaders for the same reasons we love our favorite hotels, resorts, restaurants, or bars: How they make us feel is essential. Members of today's workforce—especially millennials and Gen Z—are looking for inspiring environments and work that truly fulfills them. Before anyone is compelled to do anything they first must feel. Speaker, consultant, and hospitality industry veteran Taylor Scott knows that the most effective leaders approach their roles with heart, emotionally connecting with their team members before attempting to manage them. Scott draws from his two decades in leadership roles at respected hotels, resorts, and restaurants. He distills the principles of gracious hospitality, translating them into actionable leadership lessons which apply in any industry, such as: • How making people feel welcome fosters loyalty and keeps workers engaged with an organization's purpose • How serving people with empathy and compassion sparks workers' highest productivity • How making people feel comfortable encourages exploration, curiosity, and discovery while inviting everyone to lean into their creativity • How making people feel significant drives them to deliver their best work He also shares specific, practical steps you can take to put these principles into action. Scott shows how to connect, serve, engage, coach, and inspire your peers, teams, and even your own leaders. Lead with Hospitality is a call to action to connect with people on a human level which ultimately inspires teams, organizations, and companies to go to the next level.




In the Midst of Innocence


Book Description

"An endearing ballad of the struggle for existence and understanding." – Booklist Ten-year-old Pearl Wallace is living in the mountains of rural Tennessee in the depths of the Great Depression and several years into Prohibition. Pearl struggles with her moral dilemmas: What can she do to protect her best friend Darlene from an abusive stepfather? And, especially, how much does she need to tithe on the money she has earned from stealing her daddy’s moonshine and selling it? Meanwhile, Emily Weston, a missionary, has come to “lift the poor hillbillies of the region out of their ignorance and misery.” Coming from a place of affluence and privilege, she is quickly overwhelmed by the social and racial issues facing her students and their families. When murder, fire, and heartbreak threaten those they love, Pearl and Emily must confront the hate and bigotry of their neighbors. Emily’s time in the mountains will be one not of saving souls, but of personal reckoning. "Deborah Hining is a remarkable talent.” – Elizabeth Hein, author of How to Climb the Eiffel Tower




Ruby's Misadventures with Reality


Book Description

She's off to see the killer... Lawyer Ruby O'Deare might not be living the American dream, but it feels like it every time she visits her small town megamall. The shoes! The lighting! Prince Charming spotted in the food court! It's a dream, right? But all dreams must come to an end. Ruby's does when she wakes up after a one-night stand with the town's sexy zoning commissioner, Noel West. Actually, that part is good. It's the expired Dollar Store condoms she finds that feel too real. And then her favorite client Estelle turns up dead. Ruby is determined to find out the truth behind the curtains of Ozcorp, the company that owns the heavenly megamall and has the most to gain from her client's death. She just hopes the zoning commissioner she might be falling for isn't caught up in the danger.




Guardian Angels


Book Description

These remarkable stories of answered prayers remind us that we are never alone In this inspiring collection, the work of angels takes many forms, including miracles, healings, and heavenly visitations. These events all convey a single, urgent, and loving message: God answers prayer. “There’s real power in prayer,” writes beloved New York Times best-selling author Joan Wester Anderson. “We can trust that God’s intense love for us will carry us through.” Help is at hand when we need it most. Anderson’s astonishing first-hand accounts testify to the hope that prayer offers: a dying infant inexplicably recovers after an encounter with a mysterious visitor; a long-lost son suddenly returns home for Christmas; a young man drowning in an icy river unaccountably finds himself on shore; a grieving widow, alone and far from home, receives comfort and counsel from angels in disguise. These stories and dozens of others reveal the care of a loving God who touches the most intimate parts of our hearts.




Momma's Lost Piano


Book Description

When she is seventeen, Emily Merritt’s beloved father gives her the piano she has always wanted. A few days later, having lost his job, he sells Emily’s piano and moves the family out of its two-story house in Cleveland, Ohio, to his mother’s three-room house in his hometown of Knoxville, Tennessee. The loss of her piano casts a shadow over Emily’s life in Knoxville, a city she could never love. Throughout the rest of her life, Emily longs to return to Cleveland, where she had an idyllic youth with many boyfriends and girlfriends and was, above all, a good piano student. Her life becomes like that of a nomad, moving from house to house and from job to job. Her great love of life is expressed by dancing in highway honky-tonks, along with her six beautiful girlfriends. After divorcing her lovable, alcoholic husband, Emily falls deeply in love with troubled married men. She doesn’t enjoy whiskey or smoking, but she’s not a churchgoer. She raises three boys in poverty. A fourth son dies soon after birth. Oldest Dickie becomes a life-long petty conman, but little brother John, known as “Sunshine,” becomes a legendary rescuer of wayward boys and girls. Jerry, the middle brother, becomes a merchant seaman, a soldier, and finally a professor and successful writer. Rather than a chronological narrative, Madden employs an impressionistic style that enables readers to experience Emily’s memories as he imagines them. In sharply focused scenes, Madden evokes the colorful expressions of the articulate, witty woman he has spent all his life listening to—and this memoir will inspire readers to listen eagerly, too.




Haven’t Any News


Book Description

“Ruby wrote letters home almost every week....She wrote anything that came into her head: about her children and Fred, her housekeeping, food, clothes, her friends, activities, schemes for making money, her dreams for the future....Her letters, nave, intimate and lively, were always optimistic or poignant. We’d read them to each other on the phone or pass them around. Often we saved them.” So writes Edna Staebler in her introduction to this edited collection of her sister Ruby’s letters from the fifties. In 1957 when Edna first began to collect and edit these letters she did so simply because she was sure that others would enjoy reading them as much as her own family did. Over fifty years later, the letters remain a joy to read and reclaim the ordinary voice of a housewife. Remarkably, these letters echo themes academics want to isolate in order to analyze women’s roles in the modern world — drifting (“life just happened to me”) and contingency (“women’s lives depend on relationships”), for example, as well as the balance between family and work. As a fine example of women’s life writing they also illustrate the literary patterns of overt and covert stories and of textual and subtextual meaning. Haven’t Any News: Ruby’s Letters from the Fifties includes an Afterword by Marlene Kadar, Associate Professor of Humanities at York University and a leading expert on women’s life writing. All those concerned with women’s studies and with the social history of twentieth-century Canada will find this book of enormous interest and it will delight Edna Staebler fans everywhere.




Ruby Duke


Book Description




Women of the Depression


Book Description

Even before the Depression, unemployment, low wages, substandard housing, and poor health plagued many women in what was then one of America's poorest cities--San Antonio. Divided by tradition, prejudice, or law into three distinct communities of Mexican Americans, Anglos, and African Americans, San Antonio women faced hardships based on their personal economic circumstances as well as their identification with a particular racial or ethnic group. Women of the Depression, first published in 1984, presents a unique study of life in a city whose society more nearly reflected divisions by the concept of caste rather than class. Caste was conferred by identification with a particular ethnic or racial group, and it defined nearly every aspect of women's lives. Historian Julia Kirk Blackwelder shows that Depression-era San Antonio, with its majority Mexican American population, its heavy dependence on tourism and light industry, and its domination by an Anglo elite, suffered differently as a whole than other American cities. Loss of migrant agricultural work drove thousands of Mexican Americans into the barrios on the west side of San Antonio, and with the intense repatriation fervor of the 1930s, the fear of deportation inhibited many Mexican Americans from seeking public or private aid. The author combines excerpts from personal letters, diaries, and interviews with government statistics to present a collective view of discrimination and culture and the strength of both in the face of crisis.




First Date


Book Description

The last thing Addy Davidson wants is to be on a reality TV show where the prize is a prom date with the President’s son. She’s focused on her schoolwork so she can get a scholarship to an Ivy League college, uncomfortable in the spotlight, never been on a date, and didn’t even audition for it. But she got selected anyway. So she does her best to get eliminated on the very first show. Right before she realizes that the President’s son is possibly the most attractive guy she has ever seen in person, surprisingly nice, and seemingly unimpressed by the 99 other girls who are throwing themselves at him. Addy’s totally out of her comfort zone but that may be right where God can show her all that she was meant to be.