Showing results by narrator "S.L. Pieplow" in All Categories

In Bitterroot Susan Devan Harness traces her journey to understand the complexities and struggles of being an American Indian child adopted by a white couple and living in the rural American West. When Harness was fifteen years old, she questioned her adoptive father about her “real” parents. He replied that they had died in a car accident not long after she was born—except they hadn’t, as Harness would learn in a conversation with a social worker a few years later.

Now that Katya Sparhardt has reached eighteen years of age, she is finally ready to be inducted into the dance ensemble at Trantonia's Metapeet Temple. After years of training, she feels ready to devote her life to worshipping the Lord through her art even if it means making some personal sacrifices—no one at the temple may practice magic, get married, or have children. But she starts to question her choices when her best friend Amalia Tansy abruptly leaves the temple.

Andrea Kott thought of herself as “the welfare Jew.” The daughter of a single mother whose depression and drinking pitched them into poverty, her stormy life looked nothing like that of the Jewish kids she knew: It defied every stereotype she associated with being Jewish—having an intact family and material wealth, and becoming a bat mitzvah. Alienated and ashamed, Kott felt ineligible to be Jewish, yet hungered for connection to the tradition and to God. It took a near-fatal accident, her mother’s death, marriage and motherhood, and losing a beloved brother for her to find her Jewish home.