Biography Girls

It's 1985 in a small factory town near Pittsburgh. Eight-year-old Karen's parents are lifelong workers at the Anchor Glass plant, where one Saturday, an employee goes on a shooting spree, killing four supervisors, then himself. This event splits the young girl's life open, and like her mother, she begins to seek comfort in obsessive rituals and superstitions. This beautifully evocative memoir chronicles the next 14 years, as Karen moves through girlhood, adolescence, and young adulthood.

Brave women from diverse backgrounds make the world a better place through their businesses in this inspiring companion to the best-selling Girls Think of Everything by Sibert-winner Catherine Thimmesh and Caldecott Honor winner Melissa Sweet. For fans of Women Who Dared and Women in Science.

Maddie built the village orphans a shelter and a school, and she provided food and clean water. But this was just the start. Despite being bedridden, and then hospital-bound by her disease, until her dying day Maddie became an indefatigable fundraiser for her children. Maddie was recognized, in life and posthumously, with a number of awards, honors, and memorials. But, until the end, all that was important to her was providing hope and future to the village children who had filled her heart.

The prize-winning memoir of one of the world's great writers, about coming of age and finding her voice amid the hardships of Stalinist Russia. Born across the street from the Kremlin in the opulent Metropol Hotel - the setting of the New York Times best-selling novel A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles - Ludmilla Petrushevskaya grew up in a family of Bolshevik intellectuals who were reduced in the wake of the Russian Revolution to waiting in bread lines.

The award-winning New York Times columnist and former foreign correspondent turns a compassionate yet discerning eye on the legacy of his own family - most notably his mother's - in order to understand more profoundly the nature of modern Jewish experience. Through his emotionally lucid prose, we relive the anomie of European Jews after the Holocaust, following them from Lithuania to South Africa, England, the United States, and Israel.

Jessie is excited when her gran gets a white Alsatian puppy, but with Snowy’s arrival a mystery starts to unfold. As Jessie learns about Nazi Germany at school, past and present begin to slot together, and she uncovers something long buried, troubling and somehow linked to another girl and another white dog....

So much is surprising and captivating about this coming-of-age story of a culture-rich, pre-and-proto-’60s upper class girl with rebellion and independence wired in. Lale’s early decades were a complex mixture of innocence, sophistication, doubt, passion, adventure, and brutal self-criticism. They live in a small East Side walk-up, but her mother orders custom-made clothes from Christian Dior in Paris. Finally finding focus for her passion, she powers her way into her chosen profession: architecture.

La vida de Rosie Mercado ha sido todo menos fácil: ¿cómo es posible que haya tenido tres relaciones fallidas y dado a luz a tres hijos a solas? ¿Qué había hecho ella para merecerlo? En su peor momento, llegó a pesar más de ciento ochenta kilos tras toda una vida con baja autoestima y de comer emocionalmente. Pero Rosie decidió cambiarla por completo y dejar de ser la víctima. Ideó un plan, aceptó sus «defectos», y descubrió el tipo de amor más importante y esencial: el amor propio.

Casey Mackinlay’s recollection on beating life’s unforeseen challenges and her journey to success, Girls Don’t Lay Bricks is an inspiring yet humble and practical distillation of all the successful tactics, concepts, and reflections that took one hungry teenage mother from a young bricklayer to CEO. If you aspire to more than where you are at, to pave your own path to success, or simply need a dose of inspiration for business, then this is a must-listen.

In 2012, Rhyannon Styles began her gender transition and attended her first 12-step meeting - beginning two journeys that changed the course of her life. Using her personal narrative as a springboard for exploring addiction, recovery and LGBTQ+ mental health, Rhyannon writes with searing honesty about the complexity of her experiences. The audiobook spans a range of addictions including alcohol, food, sex and relationships, the internet and narcotics, and highlights the ways in which addiction and the transition process can overlap.

Donut Dolly puts you in the Vietnam War face down in the dirt under a sniper attack, inside a helicopter being struck by lightning, at dinner next to a commanding general, and slogging through the mud along a line of foxholes. You see the war through the eyes of one of the first women officially allowed in the combat zone.

Maria Konner takes you on her journey from living a frustrated and bored straight-dude life to becoming a fabulous trans entertainer in San Francisco. She also begins to discover herself sexually after a Halloween costume feels better than she ever imagined. What starts as a lark, quickly becomes a lifestyle. Told in a frank and entertaining manner, Maria details her experiences at Diva's, the legendary trans bar. There, she enters into a world of alternative lifestyles, sexual experimentation, crossdressing, and hardcore kink as she tests the boundaries of her sexuality.

The Girl with a Magical Martian Brain is a brutally honest autobiography recounting a tumultuous life interspersed with miracles and other side communications. Learn how love is the energy of the universe and how its fuel sparks our souls providing purpose and meaning to life. Soul lessons differ, but the common thread in humanity's tapestry is we are here to learn how to give and receive love. Self-love as first priority catapults you into loving others and your life purpose. Make love your religion, compassion your occupation, and kindness your karma.

In the garden, in the dew of the morning, when my sister and I grew tired of working, we'd lay in the cool, black dirt, our pillows the bellies of stray dogs our Mema had taken in. We'd whisper sweetly to them as they lay there with us, "I love you - you don't hurt, like people do." Butterflies filled the garden. "Mema, look!" I'd shout. "They are coming to me!" "Baby, it's the spirit you carry within you...." She'd respond, "They sense it."

A Girl Called Beauty is a passion project belonging to first-time published author Susan (Scully) Hetrick, who started writing in sixth grade. Even at an early age, Susie had challenges and struggles well beyond those of a normal childhood, and wondered if everyone lived the way she did. But undaunted by life's tangled paths, Susie pressed on. After being handed even more obstacles, she realized that life had thrown enough at her to fill a book, so she started writing.

Estelle’s memoir, published sixty-four years after her liberation from the Nazis, is a narrative of fear and hope and resiliency. While it is a harrowing tale of destruction and loss, it is also a story of the goodness that still exists in a dark world, of survival and renewal.

Nakkiah and Miranda are angry, young, vocal, Aboriginal and very, very funny. Join them on their journey, starting with a lesson on teatime etiquette in London where it all began, as they follow the debutante trail and discover that First Nations women across the globe have made this tradition their own. Nakkiah and Miranda ask: can beauty, poise and politeness actually empower them? Or is it better to get angry and start shouting?

At age nine, as Susanna sat on a horse for the first time, an unbreakable bond was forged. It set the stage for a lifelong odyssey for this determined girl and her devotion to her equine companions. From lush Brazilian rainforests to serene Swedish farms, from thrilling British derby banks to the picturesque wine hills of France, this is a story that spans continents, careers, and crossroads. From driven Olympians to bold bullfighters, from kind horsemanship trainers to daring jumpers, each character who crossed her path shone a light on who she yearned to be.

There have been many books written about women who changed the world a long time ago. This book goes in-depth and profiles 30 of the most influential girls, teens, and women who are actively changing the world right now. Their stories will inspire teens to take action now and begin creating the type of world that represents them, their values, and their passions.

Shereeda Redic is a God-fearing woman with a sweet, caring, and loving spirit. Her passion for writing and encouraging others inspired her to become an author. She lives in Plano, Texas. Her book is about a young girl, who discovered at the age of four years old that she was given up for adoption at birth by her biological mother - who she didn’t meet until she was 16 years old.