In Connecticut in 1757 the settlement of Mystic was populated by Puritans.

Charity Frey was a widow with twin, nine year old sons and needed help on her farm, Mystic Ridge in order to keep the farm.

Rafe Trehearne was a prisoner going on the auction block. He looked so fierce that no one would bid on him. Charity made the one and only bid on him thereby making Amos Saybrook very angry.

Charity was shocked breathless at the wayward thoughts that entered her head at seeing his solid chest that was barely cover by the tattered shirt, so full of rents as leave his magnificent musculature exposed.

His golden eyes, so intensely alive were not the eyes of civilization but glowed with some deep, primitive emotion. [The first chapter alone is worth the price of the book]

Such passionate emotion that became explosive for Charity led her to make the wedding bargain. She was mildly shocked to be lusting after her bondsman.

It turns out that Raphael Gabriel Trehearne had also been a twin and carried such deep sorrow over the death of his twin and the horror and carnage of torture by the Iroquois and the war between England and France, that he was strangely disoriented by a blow to his head and ended up passing out before Charity could even get him home.

Their story of blossoming love keeps you spell bound throughout the whole book, along with the trials and tribulations of trying to make connection with the twins, Isaac and Benjamin.

I loved the prediction of the Pequot Indian, Blue Bonnet, a shaman and friend of Ghost Fox and Grey Owl. Keep an eye out for Tewah, the blood brother of Rafe who could become a dangerous enemy.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED and definitely a keeper! Wheeee!

Ms French has done a marvelous job of building her characters.. Charity is a strong woman who is, inside, scared and unsure..but on the outside she appears self assured and capable of caring for her children.. Rafe is an unexpected and unsettling influence after Charity has purchased him from the auction block. They are wary of one another..but learn to work together...and along the way, they learn to love.. All in all, a wonderful book.

This text is a simple and to-the-point read on the ins and outs of e-publishing. It answers as many questions as you can think of -- and then some -- about the whole business. I highly recommend it.

Great little book! As a writer myself I appreciate the concise, no frills writing style, and the author's advice seems to be based on careful research and hands-on experience. This book would be especially handy to any writer who is new to the web and might otherwise be confused by the techno babble that pervades so many web sites - including the so-called "e-publishing" sites. The tips on web design and promotion are worth the price alone.

Under almost any circumstances, divorce is difficult and emotionally draining. When children are involved, the parents' added concern about them can make the situation seem almost overwhelming.

Each child ultimately must find his or her own way to accept the reality of the divorce and come to terms with that new reality. Nothing makes the process easy, but this little book can help. In a tone that's a beautiful balance of frankness and warmth, it says the things a wise and loving older friend might say. It acknowledges the sadness everyone is feeling, it talks about how things may be different in the future, and it conveys two messages the child needs to hear. The first is: "Things will be different, but they'll work out OK." And the second is, "You're not alone."

When Mom and Dad Divorce: An Elf-Help Book for Kids is a must read for families undergoing the trauma of divorce. Written with sensitivity, the book covers the whole range of emotions children experience when they learn of an upcoming divorce. It is a book children can turn to over and over again as they progress through their own stages of divorce recovery. It is filled with the reassuring messages that children of divorcing parents need to hear. And it is as artistically beautiful as it is emotionally satisfying. I wish I had this book to read to my children when our family was going through divorce.

Now this is one of the best plotted books I have read in a long time. Emily lets us really get to know these characters well. You find yourself just wanting to tell the other what is in thier heads. But that wouldn't make a story. Lord Chesterfield and Ellen are beautiful characters. Montana certainly gives Jordan a new view to life. Thanks Emily for such a good read.

The "Windfall" by Emily Carmichael is one of the most excellent historical romance novels that I've read in quite some time. The heart warming story is full of desire, lust, affection, adventure, and love that keeps you wanting to continue turning the pages to see what will happen next. Ellen O'Connell is a brave cowgirl who grew up in Montana. She's also a medical doctor who just finished her clinical training in Europe. She is not the typical cowgirl anyone would mess with because she's intelligent, courageous and feminine. Unexpectedly, on Ellen's way back from Europe she and best friend Jane ended up staying at a baronial mansion where she meets Jordan Chesterfield. This man is not just an ordinary person, but a Lord who is very wealthy. Lord Chesterfield bravely makes a decision for Ellen, a stranger female physician, to perform dangerous surgery on his brother George. The handsome aristocratic Lord ends up desiring the Montana cowgirl for her unique personality. This ultimately results into marriage to save her reputation from being pregnant with another man's child. I will leave it at that for you to go out and pick up this book and read it. Emily Carmichael is a fabulous author who brings the characters to life in her works on historical romance. You are definitely guaranteed to enjoy the unexpected adventures and love making of her novel.

You can never go wrong buying a book by Polly Longsworth. Especially if it is about enigmatic,obstinate Emily Dickinson. Ms. Longsworth knows her subject as well as, or better than, any other active ED author. She has a common-sense approach to the famous ED obscurities and mysteries, born of decades of study and the influence of Richard Benson Sewall, Yale professor and creator of the Pulitzer-prize winning "Life of Emily Dickinson" in l974. That's the best biography of the poet we have or are ever likely to have. Polly writes well and this book shows off the Amherst of ED's era in ways that nicely complement the text and the poetry. She's also a nice person, kind to other ED researchers, both professional and amateur. Not everyone in that specialty qualifies for such a compliment. As a person who has written a play about Emily's survivors and how they struggled to get her poems published, I have had reason to correspond with lots of Dickinson buffs over a 20-year period. Polly and Sewall and William Luce, author of the play "Belle of Amherst" made room in their lives for letters from an unknown. Many others did not. This book is inexpensive, fortunately, but it is a grand addition to the library of any fan of Emily's. The fact that its creator is also a decent sort is just frosting on the cake.

I am a fan of old photographs, I pour over old family pictures with great zeal. The World of Emily Dickinson certainly feeds my passion. It is crammed full of wonderful pictures of the Dickinson family, their friends, and the changing and growing town of Amherst, Massachusetts. I learned more about the life of Emily Dickinson in just half an hour than I had ever known about her. It certainly shows that Dickinson wasn't the lonely recluse that I had always heard her to be. In addition to photographs, there are many facsimile reprints of letters written both by Emily Dickinson and to her. I believe this book will be very helpful to future biographers and historians.

A truly excellent edition of this strangest and strongest of English novels, hauntingly beautiful in its impassionate poetry,
a novel that reads us instead of the other way round, more about important questions than too trivial answers.

Don't miss the very first page (the one about Emily Brontë life),
then read Lucasta Miller's preface, skip both the excellent Pauline Nestor introduction and the controversial "Charlotte's materials" (the Biographical Notice and the Preface to the New), and -giving an attentive glance to the Genealogical Tree- go to the text (perusing the notes).

Afterwards you will do well to read the previously skipped material, and, perhaps some months later, to peruse the escellent Bibliography. Have a haunting, unforgettable read!

Wuthering Heights is truly the definitive "epic" novel. The animated, wild mental scenery, the perplex love/hate relationships, and the extended tale of two generations. Its story is so dramatic and wrenching it almost borders a soap opera, but luckily Emily Bronte's writing skills and character dynamics protect it from ever being comparable. I
The plot revolves around a possessive, yet unconsummated relationship between the two main characters, a gypsy boy named Heathcliff and the daughter of a respected family, Catherine Earnshaw, and branches off into the consequences of a love too wild and profound to be controlled. A love triangle ensues involving a wealthy neighbor who wishes for Catherine's love and her hand in marriage as opposed to Heathcliff's instability. Her choice influences all the events to come and lives are ruined in the midst of the storm created by a passion too deep to renounce. With its dark themes and violent characters it is considered by many to be the original Gothic Romance novel.
Upon its first publishing, the story was considered too harsh and the characters vile, and was rejected by many readers in the early 19th Century. Emily Bronte, having been born and raised amongst the moors and the people bred of it knew no other way of life at the age of seventeen when she wrote this novel.
Ultimately, it is the wild and uncontrollable nature that makes the novel so affecting and believable, capturing your heart and your emotions. It drives you into feeling what the characters experience with it's descriptive writing and you then know what is the essence of the story. The book is a work of art made from minimal environmental resources, with the mind and the soul sculpting it into a true representation of love's ability to conquer hate.

I read this book aloud to my wife 23 years ago. At the time, I was working as an apprentice at a winery on the Rhine River. There was an old medeival castle across the river from our room. It was the perfect setting, as we two were the only English speaking people in the town. I think now is the right time to review the book, because I can only recall the feelings left behind by this powerful work of literature. Most of the plot and many of the characters have been long forgotten, leaving only the residue of strong emotion. I have read many works of powerful fiction by the world's great authors since then. But not one of them affected me emotionally the way this extraordinary tale did. I remember one gray German morning finishing the chapter where Heathcliff digs up the body of his beloved Catherine because he has gone mad in his desire to hold her close once more. And then off to the Altenkirch Schwanenkellerei I went. I spent the rest of the day working quietly in the cellars of the winery, deep inside the mountain with mold hanging all about, and brooding over the maniacal behavior of these highly romantic, insane characters. I've never been able to shake the feeling entirely. There is something so entirely timeless about this work, as though it were a piece of ancient literature, old far beyond the 1840s setting, something so utterly classical and piercingly primordial, it's as though you already had the genesis of this material in your DNA and it only required this story to bring it back to life within you. You recognize the spell it weaves because it speaks to the humanity in you so clearly, it is as though you have been secretly drugged. The English language has rarely been utilized as well as it has here, and I dare say you would need to go back to Shakespeare to find its parallel. Romanticism reached its high water mark with this novel. Ms. Brontë has now become immortal because of her creation, and in the Pantheon of world literaure, she stands among the Titans. If you are a native speaker of the English language, you can hardly consider yourself educated if you have not read this astounding novel of romantic love and uncontrollable passion.

Rather than delve on the contents of this strangest and strongest of English novels, so intensely poetic in its haunting darkness and otherness, I'll comment briefly on the best editions available for a good first contact:
1. Oxford World's Classics: authoritative text, good annotation,
excellent introduction.
2. Penguin's Classics: same as above, everything looks a little shorter but is excellent nonetheless.
3. Norton's Fourth Edition: OK, the text is still a little idiosyncratic,but the notes are much improved, and so is everything else (with the anthology of poems, and the critical essays). A fine study edition but also suitable for a first contact.
4. Hoeveler(New Riverside) and Heywood (broadview) are worse choices: Riverside annotation (I suppose inherited from the former edition) isn't very good, and Heywood is too much idiosyncratic and controversial.

The Final Judge of the 2001 Emily Dickinson Award in Poetry, David Kirby, W. Guy McKenzie Professor of English, Florida State University, wrote the following about the winning poem, "Because We are Men," as well as commenting on other poems featured in this anthology:

"If you're a poet, it's easy to love poetry, which makes it difficult in the extreme to judge a contest like this one that has so many praiseworthy entries. But when I read a poem, the first question I ask myself is, do I want to read this poem again? (You can't do that with Moby-Dick or Macbeth, but you can re-read most poems right there on the spot; indeed, if the poems are any good, you have to.) Then I want to know, Is every part as good as the whole? After all, a great poem can be deflated by a flat ending or a wobbly middle or sometimes just a comma error. But then all art contains error, as the sages of the desert tell us, so finally I ask myself if the poem transcends its own frailties. In other words, I end up where I started: do I want to read this poem again?

The problem is that almost all the poems I read for this year's Emily Dickinson Award competition meet these criteria. Finally, though, I chose "Because We are Men." True, it's a manly poem, and I am a man. But his poem about warriors is, in a larger sense, about the victims of wars, and each of us is a victim of one conflict or another, from the domestic to the global (not to mention the most widespread fighting of all, the kind that takes place in our minds.) At the highest level, though, "Because We are Men" is about the oldest of literary themes, isolation, as well as isolation's opposite, connection. "Because We are Men is succinctly encyclopedic; it's just two pages long, but it covers the world. It has a sound as new as the terrifying events of September 11, yet its lines remind us that, as William Carlos Williams said, "It is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there."

I also like "The Nuclear Family" because of the brainy, goofy way it combines family and geography in a way that makes both a lot more fun than they could ever be on their own. Finally, "Closing Time" is a poem that makes God more human and our fathers more hauntingly god-like; it's hard to imagine a topic more rewarding for either poem or reader.

As I say, all the poems are winners in one way or another. This year's poets honor me by allowing me to read them, and they honor poetry by continuing to pursue this most difficult, most rewarding craft."

A friend of mine bought me this book, knowing I'm interested inthe field, also knowing that I know nothing about Dental Assisting.It was easy enough for a beginner to learn the basics through the advanced. EXCELLENT.

+This book gives you a way to understand times and places. With the way of the world during that time in the Bible. It gives you a better out look of thing to come and thing of the past.