Written in the clear, engaging prose that makes this book a page-turner, Tap Dancing on Everest: A Young Doctor’s Unlikely Adventure will make you think deeply about how a combination of our family’s history and our own desires impact who we become. Mimi Zieman writes honestly about so much more than her role as the only woman and doctor (while still a medical student) on a dangerous ascent of the world’s highest mountain. Long before the peaks of Everest were on her radar, Mimi, whose father was the only survivor of the Holocaust in his own family, searched for ways to break out of the boxes she felt she’d been placed in by parents understandably focused on her safety. Though she’d hoped to become a professional dancer, she chose medicine, the clearer route to success and stability. Still, the mountains, where she felt most free, called to her. Tap Dancing on Everest shows us how writing with deep vulnerability can result in a masterpiece like this one.
The plan was outrageous: A small team of four climbers would attempt a new route on the East Face of Mt. Everest, considered the most remote and dangerous side of the mountain, which had only been successfully climbed once before. Unlike the first large team, Mimi Zieman and her team would climb without using supplemental oxygen or porter support. While the unpredictable weather and high altitude of 29,035 feet make climbing Everest perilous in any condition, attempting a new route, with no idea of what obstacles lay ahead, was especially audacious. Team members were expected to push themselves to their…
Eileen Vorbach Collins has a rare gift. Few writers are able to evoke the visceral grief of the suicide of a 15-year-old daughter, the most tragic and gut-wrenching of losses, while also leaving room for hope and even humor. In each essay she finds new angles into the truth of her experience; in every case, love is the underpinning that carries her--and us--through to a satisfying and genuine close, though of course her story has no end. Themes including the natural world and interfaith marriage round out these stories and leave us with a reading journey we're grateful to have taken. Highly recommend.
Winner of a 2022 Gold Royal Palm Award- Florida Writers Association Winner of the 2023 Sarton Women's Book Award for Memoir Winner of 2024 Pencraft Award - Literary Excellence Finalist 2023 Foreword Indies -Grief/Grieving
When her fifteen-year-old daughter Lydia ends her life, Eileen finds support in a community of bereaved parents who understand her pain on a level others cannot. No one in the group places a time limit on this grief. As the years pass, Eileen finds ways to honor the memories. She even learns to laugh again.
In Love in the Archives, a collection of linked narrative essays…
In Growth: A Mother, Her Son, and the Brain Tumor They Survived, Karen DeBonis takes us along on a journey both surprising and relatable. Many will recognize her desire to raise a family with the husband she loves, the unexpected challenges motherhood brings, and the stress that results when life doesn’t go as planned. She takes us along on a journey all her own, however, when her eldest son begins exhibiting strange behaviors—tics and decreased coordination among them—and she is launched into a years-long battle to unearth their cause. Along the way, DeBonis gradually faces her own lifelong people-pleasing qualities and other ways she’s learned to cope, which she comes to understand have never served her.
Written in concise, engaging prose, Growth is a story of perseverance and love, one that will give so many of us hope that we, too, can overcome life’s most daunting challenges. Highly recommend you pick this one up.
WINNER Book Excellence Award WINNER Outstanding Creators Awards WINNER Royal Dragonfly Book Award FINALIST The Independent Author Network Book of the Year Awards SEMI-FINALIST Chanticleer Int'l Book Awards FIVE STARS Readers Favorite
Can a woman who never learned to stand up for herself find the courage to speak up for her son?
Medical gaslighting and a mother's people-pleasing collide, shattering her expectations of motherhood and threatening the survival of her young son.
Karen is a happily married, slightly frazzled mother of two when her eight-year-old son, Matthew, develops a strange eye-rolling tic. Matthew's tics quickly multiply. He becomes clumsy and…
This book is forthcoming from Motina Books on 2/18/25.
Casey needs a family: the joys and sorrows, people who love her, and a place she belongs—what Zorba the Greek called “the full catastrophe”—and she’s determined to make it happen. Adrift since losing her father when she was eleven and her mother soon after, the death of her sole sibling eight years later only strengthens her resolve.
Though she struggles with grief and a shaky sense of her place in the world, Casey marries, has three children, and thinks she’s found the life she’s longed for. But soon it’s clear her marriage isn’t the dream she envisioned. When her husband’s behavior shifts from troubling to destructive, a contentious divorce and custody trial propel her family into a catastrophe of a different sort, one she never imagined. This hits all her children hard, especially Eric, her adventure-seeking firstborn son. Struggling alongside him, Casey embraces the spirituality she’s sought in various forms since childhood. Then the unthinkable happens—Eric dies at age twenty—and she’s left to make sense of her family’s collapse and the sudden yet somehow inevitable loss of her beloved boy.
In a moving testament to the power of love, The Full Catastrophe tells of a life of loss and sorrow transformed into one of hope and redemption. With hard-won wisdom, Casey shows us how peace and belonging can only be found within ourselves.
