Women Childhood

For many years Elizabeth Lawson has battled single-handedly to run the family's historic horse stud in memory of her beloved father. But a devastating loss puts her dreams at risk. With no options left, Liz is forced to turn to her estranged sister Kayla for help. Kayla has built a new life in the city as a wedding planner, far removed from the stableyard sweat and dust of her rural upbringing. She never thought she'd go back. But when Liz calls out of the blue, Kayla forms a plan that could save their childhood home.

Eighteen-year-old Natalie Colter is sure that the rumors about her great-great-grandmother's cult of wronged women are just gossip, but that doesn't stop the true-crime writers and dark tourism bloggers from capitalizing on the town's reputation. It's an urban legend that's hard to ignore, and it gets harder when Nat learns that the sisterhood is real. And magical. And they want her to join.

Six-year old Susan helps her grandmother in the kitchen and begins to learn the role of women in the household. It is 1825. Women are not allowed to vote and by law must obey their husbands. Seeing how hard the women of her family work, she is struck by the unfairness of such a law.

Her Last Death begins as the phone rings early one morning in the Montana house where Susanna Sonnenberg lives with her husband and two young sons. Her aunt is calling to tell Susanna her mother is in a coma after a car accident. She might not live. Any daughter would rush the thousands of miles to her mother's bedside. But Susanna cannot bring herself to go. Her courageous memoir explains why.

Addie Andrews is living a life interrupted. Tragedy sent her fleeing from Chicago to the shelter of an unexpected inheritance - her beloved aunt's somewhat dilapidated home in Eunice, Arkansas, population very tiny. There she reconnects with some of her most cherished childhood memories. If only they didn't make her feel so much!

Nancy McCabe, who grew up in Kansas just a few hours from the Ingalls family’s home in Little House on the Prairie, always felt a deep connection with Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the Little House series. McCabe read Little House on the Prairie during her childhood and visited Wilder sites around the Midwest with her aunt when she was 13. But then, she didn’t read the series again until she decided to revisit in adulthood the books that had so influenced her childhood.

In a small Alabama town in Zion County, life is finally looking up for 20-year-old Donnette Sullivan. Having just inherited her aunt's old house and beauty shop, she's taken over the business, and her husband Tim, recently crippled in an accident, is beginning to cope not just with his disabilities but also with the loss of his dreams. Once a promising artist who gave up art for sports, Tim paints a sign for Donnette's shop, Making Waves. The raising of the sign causes ripples through the town.

All Jennifer Lewis wants is a normal life. A mother and father who loves her, family dinners, birthday parties, vacations, and playing with other kids in the neighborhood. Instead, her parents divorce and her mother marries an abusive man. Jennifer witnesses horrific fights. Her stepfather abuses her siblings and her. And the fallout ends in death and drug addiction for some of them. When she enters adulthood, she's insecure, full of fear, and destined to repeat all the trauma from which she's emerged.

Sadie's life is calm and complete. She is a mother, a good friend, and the robust survivor of a marriage she deliberately left behind. She has come to believe that she has everything she wants, or deserves. But now her father is dying; the vital, elusive man who spent his life creating perfumes for other women is slipping away from her. When she realises that she can never make her peace with him, Sadie begins to look back over her childhood to confront the truth about her father.

As the female CEO of a tech startup, Dr. Cristal Glangchai was outnumbered 20 to one. At Google, Twitter, and Facebook, women currently fill just 10 to 20 percent of technical jobs. While career opportunities in science, technology, engineering, and math have increased dramatically in the past 20 years, the achievement gap between men and women has only grown wider. In VentureGirls, Glangchai offers a unique solution based on her own experience as an engineer and entrepreneur as well as the founder of the VentureLab, an academy of entrepreneurship and technology for girls.

The year is 1939. As war breaks out across Europe, nine-year-old Susie and her older sister Gyll are dispatched to Africa by their mother. Alone on the dusty continent, the sisters find little sympathy in their new guardians, and little to like about their new way of life: patched-up clothes, a 6 o'clock bedtime (a particular indignity), and regular obsessive cleanliness rituals. Their continued presence a nuisance, and overwhelmed by fear of doing the wrong thing, Susie and Gyll seek an ally in Mavis.

This is the true story of the youngest daughter of a Sydney couple living at Lockhart River Mission for 9 years, raising their children within an Aboriginal village of five tribes. Conceived on Cape York, and finally moving to Rockhampton as a young child. A family tragedy in 1971 with the shocking death of brother Chris, two days before a family wedding, sees the upheaval of family life. Patty feels abandoned and has to educate and raise herself as well as learn to iron a cassock! Share her adventures in this gentle, humorous and insightful early memoir.

When Beating the Odds: Raising Academically Successful African American Males appeared in 1998, it was hailed as "a crucial book" (Baltimore Sun) and "undoubtedly one of the most important tools the African American parent can possess" (Kweisi Mfume, President NAACP). Now, in response to enormous demand, the authors turn their attention to African American young women. Statistics indicate that African American females, as a group, fare poorly in the United States.

World-renowned poet and Professor of African American Studies at U.C., Berkeley, June Jordan writes a deeply personal memoir of her formative years. June recalls her childhood experiences and reveals the duality of her parents’ influence on her stellar achievement as a poet. The first 12 years in Harlem were both peaceful and tumultuous for June, as she was raised the daughter of dirt-poor West Indian immigrants.

In The Genius of Judy, her remarkable story is revealed as never before, beginning with her as a mother of two searching for purpose outside of her home in 1960s suburban New Jersey. The books she wrote starred regular children with genuine thoughts and problems. But behind those deceptively simple tales, Blume explored the pillars of the growing women’s rights movement, in which girls and women were entitled to careers, bodily autonomy, fulfilling relationships, and even sexual pleasure.

Keena Roberts split her adolescence between the wilds of an island camp in Botswana and the even more treacherous halls of an elite Philadelphia private school. In Keena's funny, tender memoir, Wild Life, Africa bleeds into America and vice versa, each culture amplifying the other. By turns heartbreaking and hilarious, Wild Life is ultimately the story of a daring but sensitive young girl desperately trying to figure out if there's any place where she truly fits in.

In her authentic, fearless, and relatable memoir, Chantell Davis invites listeners into her world, recounting the traumatic and terrifying as well as the remarkable and supernatural events that shaped her life on her journey from childhood insecurity to eternal identity. No one can listen to this audiobook without experiencing a profound transformation.

To Julie Metz, her mother, Eve, was the quintessential New Yorker. Eve rarely spoke about her childhood and it was difficult to imagine her living anywhere else except Manhattan, where she could be found attending Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera or inspecting a round of French triple crème at Zabar’s. After her mother passed, Julie discovered a keepsake book filled with farewell notes from friends and relatives addressed to a ten-year-old girl named Eva.

Don’t Expect Me to Cry is a powerful story of the horrors Janet experienced at the hands of multiple abusers, including her father, and the courageous journey of healing that brought her to a life that is inspirational to other survivors. Janet’s resilience is evident as she tells her story in three parts, reflecting her thoughts and experiences at critical stages of her life. She explains how, from that place of despair, she learned that it is possible to heal from the dark shame and trauma and live a steadier and more content life.

In Outside the Box, you will listen to chapters written by nine contributing authors, each of whom is a female entrepreneur, mom, and world traveler. Authors have committed to sharing their families journeys in the hopes of educating and inspiring other travel-loving moms.