Maggie Barnes has left her journals to her son, Rowland, but he is puzzled by gaps in her accounts, and he turns to his mother’s dear friend, Alethea, for help. Rowland reviews memories he shaped as a naïve boy, and in the process is forced to admit that he was clueless about much of what was happening around him. Alethea tries to answer Rowland’s questions about his mother, but as she does she realizes that she cannot tell Maggie’s story without telling her own. The hidden stories Rowland and Alethea resurrect and share with each other change them, and their hearts are opened to a connection that bridges the generations.

At the heart of Cynthia Thayer's debut novel, Strong for Potatoes, was the tender relationship between a girl and her grandfather, constantly evolving as their lives grew and changed. Now, in Thayer's second novel, she tackles another kind of relationship, one between strangers. Peter lost his wife and children in a fire years ago, yet the wounds are still as fresh as if it happened yesterday. He's turned into something of a hermit in a cabin on the coast of Maine, shearing sheep and gardening to live, an old Passamaquoddy woman his only friend. Elaine is eight months pregnant and on the run from her husband, a hard man more interested in control than love. Fear is simply a part of her life, fear for herself and her unborn child. When Elaine turns up outside Peter's cabin during one of Maine's worst winter storms in years, Peter can't turn her away into the ice. Holed up together in his one-room home, the two troubled, lonely adults clash, then slowly discover that friendship, support, and healing can come in the most unlikely places.

In the class of the high school English teacher she has been haunting, Helen feels them: for the first time in 130 years, human eyes are looking at her. They belong to a boy, a boy who has not seemed remarkable until now. And Helen—terrified, but intrigued—is drawn to him. The fact that he is in a body and she is not presents this unlikely couple with their first challenge. But as the lovers struggle to find a way to be together, they begin to discover the secrets of their former lives and of the young people they come to possess.

A Study Guide for Emily Dickinson's "There's a Certain Slant of Light," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

Seminar paper from the year 2002 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3 (A-), University of Heidelberg, course: American Poetry: Romanticism, language: English, abstract: To interpret Dickinson will stay a challenge and a never-ending task. Her poems are so deep and full of meaning that every word in them carries the multiple of its normal weight; her poems are at the same time precise and not precise at all. If we try to pin them down to a specific meaning it seems to lose some of its colorful variety, which in some of her poems is even visible by Dickinson's practice of leaving alternative word choices next to each other without choosing one. Robert Weisbuch gives in his essay "Prisming Dickinson; or, Gathering Paradise by Letting Go"1the helpful triple advice: "Don't point; don't pry; don't settle for one truth." In order to analyze Dickinson’s poem #258 "There's a certain Slant of light " I could not help to disregard the advice "don't pry", and I did my best to at least not pin down the things I pointed, and I was careful not to "settle for one truth". Emily Dickinson's words shine in various colors and so do the possible interpretations. Her poems might tell every person something else. In this essay will analyze her poem #258, give possible interpretations of it and demonstrate what it tells me without clouding its shine.