American Dirt: a novel

by Jeanine Cummins (a summary by Pat Evert)

That these people would leave their homes, their cultures, their families, even their languages, and venture into tremendous peril, risking their very lives, all for the chance to get to the dream of some faraway country that doesn’t even want them. Luca understands the past to be a place that no longer exists. It’s nostalgia for a phantom limb. Her boy has weighed the call of his conscience above the call of his own salvation. This is the only way forward, so they go forward.

The worst will either happen or not happen, and there’s no worry that will make a difference in either direction. Nothing can be undone. Adelante. Every day a fresh horror, and when it’s over, this feeling of surreal detachment. A disbelief, almost, in what they just endured. The mind is magical. Human beings are magical. She is stronger. She feels every molecule of her loss and she endures it. She is not diluted, but amplified. Her love for Luca is bigger, louder.

City of Girls; a novel

by Elizabeth Gilbert

It’ll all end soon enough. He was disgusted with himself that he couldn’t sit still, or sleep through the night, or be touched, or have a proper career. They were married in name only. They just lived separate lives. He didn’t have enthusiasms anymore. There was nothing I could ever tell him about myself that he would judge or criticize. My own glints of darkness did not frighten him; he had such darkness of his own that nobody else’s shadows scared him. Sex is so often a cheat—a shortcut of intimacy. A way to skip over knowing somebody’s heart by knowing, instead, their mere body. He was the only man I ever really loved, though, with all my heart.

A Song in the Wind

A Near Death Experience (a summary by Pat Evert)

It is much more difficult to see God’s beauty in myself than in others. Since my NDE, I’ve learned that fear is just wasted energy. There is nothing to fear in the chaos of this world. It is time for me to fully let go of all those things that hold me bound, things that no longer serve me. Every day we have the chance to say “yes.” God is helping me to empty myself of all the “things” in my life that keep me filled up.

Hunger of the Pine, a novel

by Teal Swan

He no longer felt wanted in society, like something that he had used and was about to throw away the same way that the army had used him up and thrown him away. We annihilated over 100 million of native Americans, ten times more people than Nazi Germany killed. 
The only relationships he had, which were with his things, were lost. Since he was a hoarder, it was a thousand times worse for him than it was for the rest of them. 
Now, she understood that a life on the streets was just a hair’s width away from almost anyone.
The judicial system had always been a mechanism for racial control. It belonged to a larger system of inequality; inequality in housing, in employment, in education and in health care. 

What the Wind Knows; a novel

by Amy Harmon

I was an imposter, and the knowledge was ugly and frightening. The truth will be impossible for you to believe. There are things you won’t understand unless you experience them for yourself. Embrace the impossible. We’re living in a fairy tale. Once awake, I can no longer call the dream back. Happiness is an expression of gratitude. And it’s never wrong to be grateful. The world was upside down – but I’d been falling when it tipped, and I already had my sea legs.