Popular Fiction: Professor Rita Alonso-Sheldon

The life and death of three revolutionary sisters in the Dominican Republic, told by a surviving fourth. One by one the Mirabal Sisters, as they were known, join the opposition to the Trujillo dictatorship in the 1950s, suffering imprisonment and torture while their men watch powerless. They are released, then one night their jeep is ambushed. A story based on real events by the author of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents.

The trial of a midwife in 1980s Vermont. Sybil Danforth, with several hundred deliveries to her name, claims the mother was dead when she opened her to save the baby. The prosecution claims the mother was alive and the operation was illegal. The story is narrated by Sybil's daughter, portraying the trial as another round in the persecution of midwives by the New England medical profession.

May and Pearl, two sisters living in Shanghai in the mid-1930s, are beautiful, sophisticated, and well-educated, but their family is on the verge of bankruptcy. Hoping to improve their social standing, May and Pearl's parents arrange for their daughters to marry Gold Mountain men who have come from Los Angeles to find brides. But when the sisters leave China and arrive at Angel's Island (the Ellis Island of the West) where they are detained, interrogated, and humiliated for months they feel the harsh reality of leaving home. And when May discovers she s pregnant the situation becomes even more desperate. The sisters make a pact that no one can ever know.

An evocative story of friendship set against the backdrop of a nineteenth-century China in which women suffered from foot binding, isolation, and illiteracy follows an elderly woman and her companion as they communicate their hopes, dreams, joys, and tragedies through a unique secret language.

In Jackson, Mississippi, in 1962, there are lines that are not crossed. With the civil rights movement exploding all around them, three women start a movement of their own, forever changing a town and the way women--black and white, mothers and daughters--view one another.