THE HIDDEN LIFE OF CECILY LARSON d’Ellen Baker

Orphan Train meets Before We Were Yours meets Water for Elephants in this compelling multigenerational novel of survival, love, and the families we make.

THE HIDDEN LIFE OF CECILY LARSON
by Ellen Baker
Mariner Books, February 2024

In 1924, four-year-old Cecily Larson’s mother reluctantly drops her off at an orphanage in Chicago, promising to be back once she’s made enough money to support both Cecily and herself. But she never returns, and shortly after high-spirited Cecily turns seven, she is sold to a traveling circus to perform as the “little sister” to glamorous bareback rider Isabelle DuMonde. With Isabelle and the rest of the circus, Cecily finally feels she’s found the family she craves. But as the years go by, the cracks in her little world begin to show. And when teenage Cecily meets and falls in love with a young roustabout named Lucky, she finds her life thrown onto an entirely unexpected—and dangerous—course.

In 2015, Cecily is now 94 and living a quiet life in Minnesota, with her daughter, granddaughter, and great-grandson. But when her family decides to surprise her with an at-home DNA test, the unexpected results not only bring to light the tragic love story that Cecily has kept hidden for decades but also throw into question everything about the family she’s raised and claimed as her own for nearly seventy years. Cecily and everyone in her life must now decide who they really are and what family—and forgiveness—really mean.

Sweeping through a long period of contemporary history, THE HIDDEN LIFE OF CECILY LARSON is an immersive, compelling, and entertaining family drama centered around one remarkable woman and her determination to survive.

Ellen Baker is the author of Keeping the House and I Gave My Heart to Know This. She has worked as a bookseller and event coordinator at an independent bookstore. Originally from the Upper Midwest, she currently lives in Maine.

RED HELICOPTER —A PARABLE FOR OUR TIMES de James Rhee

A true story of triumph by award-winning business leader, impact investor, and educator James Rhee that will inspire and empower us to transform our lives and our businesses with the simple and yet powerful combination of kindness and math.

RED HELICOPTER —A PARABLE FOR OUR TIMES
lead change with kindness (plus a little math)
by James Rhee
HarperOne, April 2024

In kindergarten, James Rhee received a toy red helicopter in gratitude for a simple act of kindness—the innocent generosity of sharing his lunch. Nearly four decades later, the true meaning and lesson from this memory helped him overcome indescribable hurdles as both a first time CEO and son to a dying father. Combining the radical common sense of a child with the knowledge of an experienced private equity investor and law school graduate, James led one of the most dramatic reinventions in business history. Partnering with Black women across America, James led Ashley Stewart, a twice-bankrupt retailer with no WiFi, from the jaws of liquidation to a transcendent success that inspired a world seeking a different way. And, in the process, he was able to reconcile his own complicated past and see his mom for who she truly was.

Combining the clarity and imagination we had as children with some basic business metrics, Rhee composed a system he calls “Kindness and Math.” It’s a simple solution to the dissatisfaction and worry so many of us feel, an intuitive response to the gnawing uncertainty we face daily as we meander through our lives and struggle to understand why we might feel so out of control in our professional and personal lives. red helicopter—a parable for our times exposes the root cause for these feelings and encourages us to embrace a few key principles to reorient our lives, organizations, and the world to reflect the best in us. In this remarkable book, Rhee provides the tools we can use to:

•             Embrace agency by identifying the obstacles quietly holding us back

•             Construct a balance sheet of our true assets and liabilities

•             Create and measure “goodwill,” the ultimate collective good

•             Lead systems transformation with a framework comprised of small, scalable acts

•             Drive financial profitability with little to no investment of money

•             Unlock the value of difference and the unpredictable

•             and more

Rhee’s fresh thinking emerged from an emotional journey in which both the professional and personal intersected and became one. The financial uncertainty, family tragedy, and soul-searching he endured, after the whole world left him and Ashley Stewart for dead, led him to create a simple and scalable solution to the struggles that ail us all. This quiet and powerful ode to humanity is sorely needed in today’s troubled world.

James Rhee is an acclaimed impact investor, founder, CEO, goodwill strategist, thought leader, and educator, who empowers people, brands, and organizations by marrying capital with purpose. He bridges the emotional with the mathematical, and gives permission for us to be human. A long-time private equity investor, James also serves as a founding member of JP Morgan Chase’s Advancing Black Pathways, a charter member of Ashoka’s Entrepreneur-to-Entrepreneur Network, and former Chair of the Innovation Committee of the National Retail Federation. In addition to his private sector endeavors, Rhee teaches at Howard University (where he serves as the Johnson Chair of Entrepreneurship), MIT Sloan School of Management, and Duke School of Law. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

BEHIND YOU IS THE SEA de Susan Muaddi Darraj

An exciting debut novel that gives voice to the diverse residents of a Palestinian American community in Baltimore—from young activists in conflict with their traditional parents to the poor who clean for the rich—lives which intersect across divides of class, generation, and religion.

BEHIND YOU IS THE SEA
by Susan Muaddi Darraj
HarperVia, January 2024

Funny and touching, BEHIND YOU IS THE SEA brings us into the homes and lives of three main families—the Baladis, the Salamehs, and the Ammars—Palestinian immigrants who’ve all found a different welcome in America.

Their various fates and struggles cause their community dynamic to sizzle and sometimes explode: The wealthy Ammar family employs young Maysoon Baladi, whose own family struggles financially, to clean up after their spoiled teenagers. Meanwhile, Marcus Salameh confronts his father in an effort to protect his younger sister for “dishonoring” their name. Only a trip to Palestine, where Marcus experiences an unexpected and dramatic transformation, can bridge this seemingly unbridgeable divide between the two generations.

BEHIND YOU IS THE SEA faces stereotypes about Palestinian culture head-on and, shifting perspectives to weave a complex social fabric replete with weddings, funerals, broken hearts, and devastating secrets.

Susan Muaddi Darraj is the author of A Curious Land, a novel in stories which earned an American Book Award and was a finalist for a Palestine Book Award. In 2018, she was named a Ford Fellow by USA Artists. A past winner of the Maryland State Art Council’s Independent Artist Award, she is also the author of Farah Rocks, the first children’s book series to feature a Palestinian-American character. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland, and teaches at Johns Hopkins University.

OUR BIGGEST FIGHT de Frank H. McCourt

The internet as we know it is broken. Here’s how we can seize back control of our lives from the corporate algorithms and create a better internet—before it’s too late.

OUR BIGGEST FIGHT
Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity, and Dignity in the Digital Age
by Frank H. McCourt, Jr. with Michael Casey
Crown Hardcover, March 2024

It was once a utopian dream. But today’s internet, despite its conveniences and connectivity, is the primary cause of a pervasive unease that has taken hold in the U.S. and other democratic societies. It’s why youth suicide rates are rising, why politics has become toxic, and why our most important institutions are faltering.

Information is the lifeblood of any society, and our current system for distributing it is corrupted at its heart. Everything comes down to our ability to communicate openly and trustfully with each other. But, thanks to the dominant digital platforms and the ways they distort human behavior, we have lost that ability—while, at the same time, we’ve been robbed of the data that is rightfully ours.

The roots of this crisis, argue Frank McCourt and Michael Casey, lie in the prevailing order of the internet. In plain but forceful language, the authors—a civic entrepreneur and an acclaimed journalist—show how a centralized system controlled by a small group of for-profit entities has set this catastrophe in motion and eroded our personhood.

And then they describe a groundbreaking solution to reclaim it: rather than superficial, patchwork regulations, we must reimagine the very architecture of the internet. The resulting “third-generation internet” would replace the status quo with a new model marked by digital property rights, autonomy, and ownership.

Inspired by historical calls to action like Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, OUR BIGGEST FIGHT argues that we must act now to embed the core values of a free, democratic society in the internet of tomorrow. Do it right and we will finally unlock its immense potential.

Frank H. McCourt, Jr. is the executive chairman and former CEO of McCourt Global, as well as the founder and executive chairman of Project Liberty, a visionary effort to transform the internet through a new, equitable technology infrastructure and rebuild social media in a way that enables users to own and control their personal data.

Michael J. Casey is chief content officer at CoinDesk, a podcaster and the chairman of the Consensus conference. He has worked as a journalist on five continents, including 18 years with Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal. Casey’s previous books include The Age of Cryptocurrency, The Social Organism, and The Truth Machine.

OUTOFSHAPEWORTHLESSLOSER de Gracie Gold

In this explosive tell-all memoir, Gracie Gold, Olympic medalist, offers an unprecedented look inside the pressure-packed world of figure skating and reveals her battle to survive mental illness, eating disorders, and crippling perfectionism.

OUTOFSHAPEWORTHLESSLOSER
A Memoir of Figure Skating, F*cking Up, and Figuring It Out
by Gracie Gold
Crown, February 2024

When Gracie Gold stepped onto center stage (or ice, rather) as America’s sweetheart at the 2014 Sochi Olympics, she instantly became the face of America’s most beloved winter sport. Beautiful, blonde, Midwestern, and media-trained, she was suddenly being written up everywhere from The New Yorker to Teen Vogue to People and baking cookies with Taylor Swift.

But little did the public know what Gracie was facing when the cameras were off. In 2017, she entered treatment for what was publicly announced as eating disorder and anxiety treatment, but what was, in reality, suicidal ideation. While Gracie’s public star was rising, her private life was falling apart: Cracks within her family were widening, her bulimia was getting worse, and she became a survivor of sexual assault. The pressure of training for years with demanding coaches and growing up in a household that accepted nothing less than gold had finally taken its toll. As Gracie entered treatment, she was asked to cite only her eating disorder and anxiety in the announcement: suicidal ideation wasn’t “palatable.”

In OUTOFSHAPEWORTHLESSLOSER, Gracie shares the less “palatable” parts of her life, revealing exclusive, and harrowing, details about her struggles: the battles with her family, her coaches, the powers-that-be at her federation, and the voice in her head that she calls « outofshapeworthlessloser. » Gracie’s memoir is not only a forceful reckoning from a world-class athlete, but also an intimate account of surviving as a young woman in a society that rewards appearances more than anything and demands perfection at all costs.

Gracie Gold is a two-time U.S. figure-skating champion and an Olympic bronze medalist. Gold is the first and only American woman to win an NHK Trophy title and holds the record for the highest short-program score ever recorded by an American woman. Her writing has been published in The Cut. She lives in Wilmington, Delaware, and trains in suburban Philadelphia.