Grief is an Origami Swan


Book Description

Begin to process your grief and remember those you've lost using the art form of origami. Learn to fold an origami swan using square, origami paper, and befriend the often confusing and sometimes unsettling feelings experienced during bereavement and after loss. With each origami swan you fold, think of the one you lost and honor their memory. Learn that grief has no timeline and carries no expiration. Your feelings, as confusing as they may be, are a valid and necessary part of the healing journey. Begin the journey today with this beautifully illustrated book. Using black-and-white nature illustrations paired with pressed florals and grasses, Michèle Saint-Michel takes you by the hand and leads you down the path toward healing. Step-by-step instructions assist even those unfamiliar with origami to fold a paper swan. Each swan folded is a chance to spend a little time with the one you've lost. Using Japanese design aesthetics like Ma and wabi-sabi, author and artist Michèle Saint-Michel builds a robust world where escape is possible-a world of magical, flightless birds, where grief and loss can begin to be embodied and safely explored.




The Grief We're Given


Book Description

Readers call William's poetry "breath-taking", "refreshing" and "relatable to anyone". The Grief We’re Given explores the collective and personal experience of grief and grieving through themes and tropes such as relationships, love, loss, nature, eternity, and hope as a thinning, but exuberant, door. How are we to learn to grieve when it feels unrelenting? How are we to adore and memorialize small moments of appreciation? How are we to shape our grief into something worth celebrating, and begin to understand the grief we give?




The Complete Story of Sadako Sasaki


Book Description

**Independent Publisher Book Award (IPPY) Winner** **Middle School Book of the Year-- Northern Lights Book Awards** **Skipping Stones Honor Award Winner** For the first time, middle readers can learn the complete story of the courageous girl whose life, which ended through the effects of war, inspired a worldwide call for peace. In this book, author Sue DiCicco and Sadako's older brother Masahiro tell her complete story in English for the first time--how Sadako's courage throughout her illness inspired family and friends, and how she became a symbol of all people, especially children, who suffer from the impact of war. Her life and her death carry a message: we must have a wholehearted desire for peace and be willing to work together to achieve it. Sadako Sasaki was two years old when the atomic bomb was dropped on her city of Hiroshima at the end of World War II. Ten years later, just as life was starting to feel almost normal again, this athletic and enthusiastic girl was fighting a war of a different kind. One of many children affected by the bomb, she had contracted leukemia. Patient and determined, Sadako set herself the task of folding 1000 paper cranes in the hope that her wish to be made well again would be granted. Illustrations and personal family photos give a glimpse into Sadako's life and the horrors of war. Proceeds from this book are shared equally between The Sadako Legacy NPO and The Peace Crane Project.




The Confusion of Laurel Graham


Book Description

A teen copes with her grandmother's coma by becoming obsessed with a mystery bird that she cannot identify in Adrienne Kisner's sharp and poignant YA novel, The Confusion of Laurel Graham. Seventeen-year-old Laurel Graham has a singular, all-consuming ambition in this life: become the most renowned nature photographer and birder in the world. The first step to birding domination is to win the junior nature photographer contest run by prominent Fauna magazine. Winning runs in her blood—her beloved activist and nature-loving grandmother placed when she was a girl. One day Gran drags Laurel out on a birding expedition where the pair hear a mysterious call that even Gran can’t identify. The pair vow to find out what it is together, but soon after, Gran is involved in a horrible car accident. Now that Gran is in a coma, so much of Laurel's world is rocked. Her gran's house is being sold, developers are coming in to destroy the nature sanctuary she treasures, and she still can't seem to identify the mystery bird. Laurel’s confusion isn’t just a group of warblers—it’s about what means the most to her, and what she’s willing to do to fight to save it. Maybe--just maybe-if she can find the mystery bird, it will save her gran, the conservatory land, and herself.




Sadako and the thousand paper cranes


Book Description

Hiroshima-born Sadako is lively and athletic--the star of her school's running team. And then the dizzy spells start. Soon gravely ill with leukemia, the "atom bomb disease," Sadako faces her future with spirit and bravery. Recalling a Japanese legend, Sadako sets to work folding paper cranes. For the legend holds that if a sick person folds one thousand cranes, the gods will grant her wish and make her healthy again. Based on a true story, Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes celebrates the extraordinary courage that made one young woman a heroine in Japan.







The End of Eve


Book Description

At age 39, Ariel Gore has everything she’s always wanted: a successful writing career, a long-term partnership, a beautiful if tiny home, a daughter in college and a son in preschool. But life’s happy endings don’t always last. If it’s not one thing, after all, it’s your mother. Her name is Eve. Her epic temper tantrums have already gotten her banned from three cab companies in Portland. And she’s here to announce that she’s dying. “Pitifully, Ariel,” she sighs. “You’re all I have.” Ariel doesn’t want to take care of her crazy dying mother, but she knows she will. It’s the right thing to do, isn’t it? And, anyway, how long could it go on? “Don’t worry,” Eve says. “If I’m ever a burden, I’ll just blow my brains out.” Amidst the chaos of clowns and hospice workers, pie and too much whiskey, Ariel’s own ten-year relationship begins to unravel. Darkly humorous and intimately human, The End of Eve redefines the meaning of family and everything we’ve ever been taught to call “love.”




Swagger & Remorse


Book Description

Poetry. Richard Fox weaves lyrical magic in his SWAGGER & REMORSE, a book-length series of poems at once intimate ('I'd rather be a river than anything else') and richly metaphysical ('Trees look inside the houses, see all the wood & cannot look away'). They help us to consider grief -'I'll always / think of you as I pretend to eat the living air or pull / an origami swan out of nowhere / or out of someone's ear' - with humor and mystery and an elegant humanity. I recommend these distilled and powerful poems, with their birds and trees and houses and fires and rivers and hands and salt and blood to anyone who would like a fresh pair of eyes - 'Once a year the flowers on this very porch take wing / as if they just remembered something' - and a whole new landscape to marvel over -Maureen Seaton.




Foster


Book Description

An international bestseller and one of The Times’ “Top 50 Novels Published in the 21st Century,” Claire Keegan’s piercing contemporary classic Foster is a heartbreaking story of childhood, loss, and love; now released as a standalone book for the first time ever in the US It is a hot summer in rural Ireland. A child is taken by her father to live with relatives on a farm, not knowing when or if she will be brought home again. In the Kinsellas’ house, she finds an affection and warmth she has not known and slowly, in their care, begins to blossom. But there is something unspoken in this new household—where everything is so well tended to—and this summer must soon come to an end. Winner of the prestigious Davy Byrnes Award and published in an abridged version in the New Yorker, this internationally bestselling contemporary classic is now available for the first time in the US in a full, standalone edition. A story of astonishing emotional depth, Foster showcases Claire Keegan’s great talent and secures her reputation as one of our most important storytellers.




The Promises She Keeps


Book Description

It's her destiny to die young. The man who loves her can't live with that. Promise, a talented young singer with a terminal illness, is counting on fame to keep her memory alive after she dies. Porta is an aging sorceress and art collector in search of immortality. When Promise inexplicably survives a series of freak accidents, Porta believes that she may hold the key to eternal life. Enter Chase, an autistic artist who falls in love with Promise and fascinates her with his mysterious visions and drawings. Soon, all are plunged into a confrontation over the mystery and the cost of something even greater than eternal life . . . eternal love.




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