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"Family secrets Fiction."
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House of the Hanging Jade
\"A dark presence had invaded the Jorgensens' house. On a spectacular bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, something evil is watching and waiting... Tired of the cold winters in Washington, D.C. and disturbed by her increasingly obsessive boyfriend, Kailani Kanaka savors her move back to her native Big Island of Hawaii. She also finds a new job as personal chef for the Jorgensen family. The gentle caress of the Hawaiian trade winds, the soft sigh of the swaying palm trees, and the stunning blue waters of the Pacific lull her into a sense of calm at the House of Hanging Jade--an idyll that quickly fades as it becomes apparent that dark secrets lurk within her new home. Furtive whispers in the night, a terrifying shark attack, and the discovery of a dead body leave Kailani shaken and afraid. But it's the unexpected appearance of her ex-boyfriend, tracking her every move and demanding she return to him, that has her fearing for her life...\"--Page [4] of cover.
Book
The Left-Handed Dinner Party and Other Stories
Contemporary Canadian short fiction about perplexing family secrets and the haunting consequences of loss.
eBook
Secrets of Hallstead House
\"Macy Stoddard had hoped to ease the grief of losing her parents in a fiery car crash by accepting a job as a private nurse to the wealthy and widowed Alexandria Hallstead. But her first sight of Hallstead House is of a dark and forbidding home. Shey quickly finds its winding halls and shadowy rooms filled with secrets and suspicions. Alex seems happy to have Macy's help, but others on the island, including Alex's sinister servants and hostile relatives, are far less welcoming. Watching eyes, veiled threats ... slowly, surely, the menacing spirit of Hallstead Island closes in around Macy. And she can only wonder if her story will become just one of the many secrets of Hallstead House...\" p. [4] of cover.
Book
Psychoanalysing Theresa: Telling It Slant in Alice McDermott’s Child of My Heart
Psychoanalytic theory, as explained by Esther Rashkin, combines with literary analysis to understand the driving force that motivates a character to tell a story. Such is the case for understanding the first-person narrator in the fictive memoir, Alice McDermott’s novel, 'Child of My Heart'. By analysing symbolism, descriptive details, and dialogue, the reader recognises a conflicted identity of the 15-year-old protagonist Theresa - as told by her more mature self about her coming of age that summer in the early 1960s. Theresa reminisces about love, loss and death. Through the examination of what is said and what remains unstated - by use of psychoanalytic theory - the character’s motivating force to tell her story is intimated. Her phantom, or a secret in her family history, is considered through close analysis of words and symbols. Through cryptonomy, select words, symbolic acts and images are examined to identify her phantom. This phantom impels Theresa to tell her story with lies, including lies of omission, understatements, and silences; symbolic acts also point to her psychological needs. Significant questions surface about events from that summer in the 1960s to the time when the adult narrator - for her imagined reader - reminisces about her adolescent conflicted identity. Hints of a major family secret, too shameful to be expressed explicitly, when identified by the reader, sheds light on the character’s grief and loss.
Journal Article
The House in Scarsdale
Winner of the 2018 PEN America Award in Drama
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As Tolstoy said, \"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.\"
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In The House in Scarsdale, playwright Dan O'Brien traces the roots of his family's particular unhappiness to learn why his parents and siblings cut him off years ago. The more Dan learns about his family, the more mysterious the circumstances surrounding their estrangement become, until his world is shaken when rumours surface that his real father might be another member of the family.
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Is his pathological pursuit of the truth worth the risk? Or should he follow the advice of a psychic and make his life a never-finished work of art?
eBook
No one can know
\"The author of What Lies in the Woods returns with a novel about three sisters, two murders, and too many secrets to count. Emma hasn't told her husband much about her past. He knows her parents are dead and she hasn't spoken to her sisters in years. Then they lose their apartment, her husband gets laid off, and Emma discovers she's pregnant-right as the bank account slips into the red. That's when Emma confesses that she has one more asset: her parents' house, which she owns jointly with her estranged sisters. They can't sell it, but they can live in it. But returning home means that Emma is forced to reveal her secrets to her husband: that the house is not a run-down farmhouse but a stately mansion, and that her parents died there. Were murdered. And that some people say Emma did it. Emma and her sisters have never spoken about what really happened that night. Now, her return to the house may lure her sisters back, but it will also crack open family and small-town secrets lots of people don't want revealed. As Emma struggles to reconnect with her old family and hold together her new one, she begins to realize that the things they have left unspoken all these years have put them in danger again\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The curse of caste, or, The slave bride : a rediscovered African American novel
In 1865, The Christian Recorder, the national newspaper of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, serialized The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride, a novel written by Mrs. Julia C. Collins, an African American woman living in the small town of Williamsport, Pennsylvania. The first novel ever published by a black American woman, it is set in antebellum Louisiana and Connecticut, and focuses on the lives of a beautiful mixed-race mother and daughter whose opportunities for fulfillment through love and marriage are threatened by slavery and caste prejudice. The text shares much with popular nineteenth-century women's fiction, while its dominant themes of interracial romance, hidden African ancestry, and ambiguous racial identity have parallels in the writings of both black and white authors from the period. Begun in the waning months of the Civil War, the novel was near its conclusion when Julia Collins died of tuberculosis in November of 1865. In this first-ever book publication of The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride, the editors have composed a hopeful and a tragic ending, reflecting two alternatives Collins almost certainly would have considered for the closing of her unprecedented novel. In their introduction, the editors offer the most complete and current research on the life and community of an author who left few traces in the historical record, and provide extensive discussion of her novel's literary and historical significance. Collins's published essays, which provide intriguing glimpses into the mind of this gifted but overlooked writer, are included in what will prove to be the definitive edition of a major new discovery in African American literature. Its publication contributes immensely to our understanding of black American literature, religion, women's history, community life, and race relations during the era of United States emancipation.
eBook