Abby struggled with her life right from the beginning by living in one foster home after another, until she graduated from high school. Everyone had referred to her as the basket baby that had been abandoned at a fire station after her birth, which was difficult for her to overcome.

Knowing she wanted to escape from there, and her past, to make a fresh start with her life in another town or state, she accepted a house sitting job in Jasper, Tennessee, not knowing what to expect or what would be waiting for her around the corner.

This heart warming romance story will leave you wanting to find out more about Abby’s life, and how it had been changed along the way.

Lexi had lost her dream job and her fiancee, Phillip, in New York City on the same day. Now, she was worried about her safety because of his indiscretions and of the illegal banking information she had stumbled upon that Phillip had been doing to his clients. The only thing she could do now was get out of New York City fast and stay under the radar of Phillip’s rage. Lexi would now return to her family’s home in Michigan, where she thought she would be safe from Phillip, only to have him track her there. Little did she know that her first love was working at the resort where she had lived with her Aunt Sandy.

On Lexi’s return home, her life becomes an up-and-down battle. She battles with her old New York life that continues to haunt her, and the new life she is seeking keeps her in constant turmoil. As she tries to plan her future, she uncovers things from the past that happened during her college years that become so devastating to her that she thinks it may be in her best interest to just move away from all her family and friends.

Will Lexi find a future and the love she desires so desperately?

Sadie Stanton worked five years teaching fourth grade students, and loving it every minute. It was a career she had chosen ever since she was in the fourth grade, all because of the teacher she had that made learning enjoyable and achievable. Sadie wanted to be like her by making learning fun, and interesting for her students.

Sadie was always an elite student, and through her school experience as a student, she understood it wasn’t so much the subject being taught as it was about how the teacher presented it. Sadie always remembered that through the years. After teaching for five years Sadie was about to quit her teaching career. She had worked hard, and the kids responded with most of them reaching or exceeding the State Standards each year. The problem was that a lot of her co-workers resented her. They felt she was making them look bad, and that put a target on Sadie’s back. It made the workplace very uncomfortable and a hostile place for Sadie, to say the least.

Not certain what it would be like if she was to leave what she thought was her dream job, and now not knowing if she would ever want to teach again, but she knew she couldn’t stay there any longer. Sadie knew she was ready to begin a new chapter in her life. She decided she would search for a new job, in a new town, and a new start.

Would Sadie find what she wanted all her life or maybe that life some how would find her?

Allison was a feisty little girl who had done everything under the sun, so she would to be sent to live with her father. However, her plans didn’t work out the way she had thought they would, and she ended up living in a home for children who had behavioral issues until she graduated from high school. Allison didn’t have a mean streak in her body, but would make noises, and do silly things in class that sent her to the principal’s office every day. She was seeking attention, and she received it, but in a negative way.

While living at that school, a counselor had befriended her during her senior year of high school helping her to receive a full scholarship to college. Allison was more than happy to leave Virginia behind, as well as her past, to begin a new life in Ohio. A life where no one knew of her, and her past. A place where she could thrive, and make the most of what she wanted in life, a family, a loving husband, and security.

She met her first best friend, Vivian, a few years later, and for the first time in Allison’s life she had a friend, a best friend close enough to share thoughts with. Vivian’s husband wasn’t aware of many things happening around their house, but the girls knew he could be counted on if the time ever came for his needed help.

That was when Allison’s life made a complete change from what she had known growing up, and because of that change, she had successfully overcame the many obstacles that blocked her way.

Read how Allison not only became a best friend to Vivian, but how they had deceived the family, how Allison had saved her friend’s daughters from being kidnapped, and how Allison found love in the most unusual way.

The short stories in Dance Me to the End of Love reflect the real day-to-day life of ordinary people of different ages, genders, professions, and ethnicities with connections to a believable world of imagined events. They take place in the former Soviet Union, in the United States, and in the emigration in-between. Love, marriage, infidelity, disillusionment, intimacy and the lack of it, and rootlessness are subjects that move from an improbable reality to surreal events.

As the American novelist Maureen Howard notes, “This is Regine Rayevsky Fisher’s strong suit, one she shares with many of the best writers who have emerged from the Soviet Union that was and the Eastern bloc, such as Kundera and Berberova. Fisher knows when to fade from a scene, when to draw conclusions that have the double vision of innocence and the informed telling.”

Some of the stories slap you in the face, some make you want to cry your heart out—they are wonderfully entertaining and also very wise. The author has a satirical talent for exposing so many of our human flaws and showing how people behave from insecurity and their fragile egos. But there is tenderness and forgiveness too. These tales about simple people pose more questions than answers about morals, respectability, and roads taken and missed. Most of all they are about love that holds everything together on our planet.

The short stories in Dance Me to the End of Love reflect the real day-to-day life of ordinary people of different ages, genders, professions, and ethnicities with connections to a believable world of imagined events. They take place in the former Soviet Union, in the United States, and in the emigration in-between. Love, marriage, infidelity, disillusionment, intimacy and the lack of it, and rootlessness are subjects that move from an improbable reality to surreal events.

As the American novelist Maureen Howard notes, “This is Regine Rayevsky Fisher’s strong suit, one she shares with many of the best writers who have emerged from the Soviet Union that was and the Eastern bloc, such as Kundera and Berberova. Fisher knows when to fade from a scene, when to draw conclusions that have the double vision of innocence and the informed telling.”

Some of the stories slap you in the face, some make you want to cry your heart out—they are wonderfully entertaining and also very wise. The author has a satirical talent for exposing so many of our human flaws and showing how people behave from insecurity and their fragile egos. But there is tenderness and forgiveness too. These tales about simple people pose more questions than answers about morals, respectability, and roads taken and missed. Most of all they are about love that holds everything together on our planet.

The short stories in Dance Me to the End of Love reflect the real day-to-day life of ordinary people of different ages, genders, professions, and ethnicities with connections to a believable world of imagined events. They take place in the former Soviet Union, in the United States, and in the emigration in-between. Love, marriage, infidelity, disillusionment, intimacy and the lack of it, rootlessness are subjects that move from an improbable reality to surreal events, as the American novelist Maureen Howard noted,“… is Regine Rayevsky Fisher’s strong suit, one she shares with many of the best writers who have emerged from the Soviet Union that was and the Eastern bloc, such as Kundera and Berberova…Fisher knows when to fade from a scene, when to draw conclusions that have the double vision of innocence and the informed telling.”

Some of the stories slap you in the face, some make you want to cry your heart out—they are wonderfully entertaining and also very wise. The author has a satirical talent for exposing so many of our human flaws and showing how people behave from insecurity and their fragile egos. But there is tenderness and forgiveness too. These tales about simple people pose more questions than answers about morals, respectability, and roads taken and missed. Most of all they are about love that holds everything together on our planet.

The “Kid from the Bronx” is about a young girl’s personal journey growing up during the 1940’s and into the 1960’s in an Italian/American home, in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood. It covers a time period dating as far back as the turn of the century when her Sicilian grandmother and her family immigrated to the US and about the early WWII years, when her father, Pierre, a French/Swiss merchant marine who arrived in New York harbor for shore leave. It is a tale of Italian genealogy and the sacrifices of a strong youngster caring for a dying mother and grandmother.

The story tells about the strong maternal influence and attitudes that guided her life. It is a nostalgic view of simpler, less complicated times growing up in the 1950’s; the struggles, triumphs and travails of her life in those years. Its focus is on the neighborhood in the NW section of the Bronx, bordering Woodlawn and Van Cortlandt Park bordering on Yonkers with acres and acres of green space, parks, parkways and playgrounds. The reader, seeking nostalgic or a historical perspective of these times in the Bronx, will be enchanted and entertained by the story of “A Kid From the Bronx.”

A nineteen-year-old girl does the first brave thing in her life and moves back to New York to resume an affair with her first love. Although she has few skills and less money, she is determined to make her move work. While she longs to resurrect her former boyfriend’s feelings of love, it soon becomes clear that for him, this is just a sexual affair.

Over the next few years, she struggles to forget him, embarking on a series of affairs both large and small. Will she be able to break free of the cycle of emotional abuse, and finally find the love and respect she deserves? Set in New York City in the 1960s, Blame it on my Youth is part coming-of-age story, part cautionary tale, and tells the tale of one young woman attempting to navigate an ever-changing social and political world – and to find her own place within it.

Bob's diner is a book about lonely people searching for love and acceptance. There's Bob, the diner's owner, who escapes the world using his diner as his refuge and safe place. Lillian, his wife, childless, and looking for someone to mother. Mr. Twitters a customer, who enters the diner and finds it life changing. Rosaline, who works as a waitress, wanting desperately to be needed. Toby, a middle schooler, optimistic, just trying to fit in and searching for answers.

Many other characters, entering Bob's diner, wanting to connect, to be seen, and to be heard. A large cast of people trying to make their way in the world. All longing for these connections during seemingly simpler times of the 1960s. And yet as one reads on, they will notice, "Everything changes, and everything stays the same." Places and events within Bob's Diner might be different from today but the core and heart of these people remains timeless and universal. Within Bob's diner and this small New Jersey town of Woodlake are stories of resilience, joy and optimism.

Edwin Dwight Ledbetter was born on March 9, 1924 in Conway, Arkansas, was a B-17 pilot in WWII shot down over France, POW, recipient of France's Legion of Honor award, Phi Beta Kappa from Berkeley, graduate of Harvard Law School 1953, a diplomat in the United States Foreign Service. This war memoir is published posthumously, seven years after his demise. These are his words, a war memoir he had been working on for many years. He became so involved and charmed by it that it grew like Topsy and he began to insert other people's stories. As his loving wife, upon rereading his memoir, I have decided to omit other people's war stories and stay with his alone, or those with whom he shared that experience.

Herein are remembrances of postings in Tunisia, Vietnam, Washington, Panama, Portugal, Trinidad and Tobago, Mexico, Brazil and Australia, along with stateside detours in her career to Chicago and Iowa City. After Australia, a 3 month TDY to Panama after our US invasion there Christmas 1989.

Besides being the title of this book, Lake Effect is a term that everyone in Northeast Ohio knows. It happens when frigid air from Canada dips south, picks up water from Lake Erie, freezes it at high altitude, and then, to the delight of kids hoping for school cancellations, dumps it in the form of snow as soon as it reaches the shoreline in Ashtabula, Ohio. Lake Effect, the book, touches upon the psychological and emotional impact of growing up in Ashtabula, a blue-collar town with a huge port, major chemical and manufacturing plants, a culturally diverse population, and a spider web of railroad tracks feeding into ships in the harbor.

Told in fifty-eight vignettes through the eyes of an Italian American girl and a Finnish American boy (at a time when weddings between people of those crosstown cultures were considered mixed marriages), the book offers a glimpse into small-town America in the 1950s and 1960s. As beneficiaries of the work ethic of their parents and immigrant grandparents, the authors pay tribute to family and friends who provided example and advice (sometimes unheeded) during their coming of age years.

When I wrote my first book, “How Foreign Was My Service,” I had my daily diary at hand to guide me through various postings in my career. This effort is a compilation of my writings through the years. Perhaps some were writing assignments in writer’s groups or a class in memoire writing (I prefer the French spelling). Some may have offered a keyword to stimulate the thought and to expound upon. Some were travel experiences by myself or with my husband. Some were half-hearted attempts at poetry. Thus the title: “M & M: Musing and Meandering.”

I hope the general atmosphere will be one of interest or even pleasure for you. Perhaps it could encourage an awakening in yourself as you reflect upon your own life and emerge with something fulfilling, even so much better than that presented here.

Retired Foreign Service Officer Beverly LaVigne Ledbetter’s “M & M: Musing and Meandering” reflects on writing moments during a lifetime of travel, adventure and occasional introspection.

Agana Taitano Hofstadter, a brilliant expert in cryptanalysis, is summoned to Ennea, a dark and inhospitable planet, shrouded in mystery, whose only inhabitants are the enigmatic Enneans. Joining her on this journey to another star system is a team of humans and dolphins, including an arrogant cybernetically enhanced human and her dolphin mentor.

As Taitano struggles to manage a debilitating psychological condition, she soon uncovers a world-changing conspiracy deep within the subterranean ocean of Ennea. In a race against time, Taitano and her colleagues must work together to save the Enneans, and themselves, from certain destruction.

Just a small look into your ideas of life. And then, how you feel you fit into its plan!

You’re Just a Girl is a collection of 13 stories and remembrances from a girl who grew up during the fifties and sixties, aka the Boomer Generation.

The stories were written for my granddaughters Esme and Silvi so they’ll know who their Baba was and the life that she led. There wasn’t much opportunity for a girl of my generation but I’m happy to say that today there is a whole world out there for Esme and Silvi to enjoy and to succeed in and I’m sure they will.

The memoir begins with My Roots - our roots - beginning in 1695 when a young Quaker family, the Gilpins, arrived in a wooden sailing ship from England and disembarked on the Delaware shore. Some Family History and Tibby’s Triumph continue the story. My personal journey is told in Chapter 5, Just a Girl Getting an Education.

I hope the reader enjoys this wide-ranging collection of stories about cats and horses, a friend in need, my daughter’s house, a trip to Bermuda and the Esme and Silvia Journal taken from my diary detailing the many visits between Placitas and Duluth getting to know the girls. I finish with remembrances of two of my favorite beings who are no longer with us.