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Sweet Miniatures: The Art of Making Bite-Size Desserts Completely Revised and Expanded by Michael Lamotte and Flo Braker from Chronicle Books is $2.99

Book Description:

Award-winning author and acclaimed baking expert Flo Braker knows the best things come in small packages. Now this acclaimed author is back with a revised and expanded edition of her beloved Sweet Miniatures. Winner of the IACP Single-Subject Cookbook Award, Sweet Miniatures offers rich, all-new color photography, a whimsically appealing design, and step-by-step instructions for making all kinds of delectable desserts scaled down to an irresistible one-bite size. Miniature chewy Panforte di Siena, crispy Florentine Squares, and tangy Shreveshire Tarts will whisk family and friends away on an exciting mouthwatering journey. Little sweet somethingsCandied Almond Clusters, Golden Caramels, and Toffee Butter Crunchmake a thoughtful gift during the holidays. From cheerful Chocolate Hedgehogs to a set of Midas Cups for adding that golden touch to a festive soiree, Sweet Miniatures has all the right ingredients for creating the perfect bite-size morsel to suit any occasion.

Beauty and the Werewolf (A Tale of the Five Hundred Kingdoms) by Mercedes Lackey from Luna is $1.54

Book Description:

The eldest daughter is often doomed in fairy tales. But Bella—Isabella Beauchamps, daughter of a wealthy merchant—vows to escape the usual pitfalls.

Anxious to avoid the Traditional path, Bella dons a red cloak and ventures into the forbidden forest to consult with “Granny,” the local wisewoman.

But on the way home she’s attacked by a wolf—who turns out to be a cursed nobleman! Secluded in his castle, Bella is torn between her family and this strange man who creates marvelous inventions and makes her laugh—when he isn’t howling at the moon.

Breaking spells is never easy. But a determined beauty, a wizard (after all, he’s only an occasional werewolf) and a little godmotherly interference might just be able to bring about a happy ending.…

Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice (Pivotal Moments in American History) by Raymond Arsenault from Oxford University Press is $3.75

Book Description:

Here is the definitive account of a dramatic and indeed pivotal moment in American history, a critical episode that transformed the civil rights movement in the early 1960s.

They were black and white, young and old, men and women. In the spring and summer of 1961, they put their lives on the line, riding buses through the American South to challenge segregation in interstate transport. Their story is one of the most celebrated episodes of the civil rights movement, yet a full-length history has never been written until now. In these pages, acclaimed historian Raymond Arsenault provides a gripping account of six pivotal months that jolted the consciousness of America.

The Freedom Riders were greeted with hostility, fear, and violence. They were jailed and beaten, their buses stoned and firebombed. In Alabama, police stood idly by as racist thugs battered them. When Martin Luther King met the Riders in Montgomery, a raging mob besieged them in a church. Arsenault recreates these moments with heart-stopping immediacy. His tightly braided narrative reaches from the White House–where the Kennedys were just awakening to the moral power of the civil rights struggle–to the cells of Mississippi’s infamous Parchman Prison, where Riders tormented their jailers with rousing freedom anthems. Along the way, he offers vivid portraits of dynamic figures such as James Farmer, Diane Nash, John Lewis, and Fred Shuttlesworth, recapturing the drama of an improbable, almost unbelievable saga of heroic sacrifice and unexpected triumph.

The Riders were widely criticized as reckless provocateurs, or “outside agitators.” But indelible images of their courage, broadcast to the world by a newly awakened press, galvanized the movement for racial justice across the nation. Freedom Riders is a stunning achievement, a masterpiece of storytelling that will stand alongside the finest works on the history of civil rights.

Life After Forty by Dora Heldt from AmazonCrossing is $2.45

Book Description:

When Christine’s husband of ten years dumps her over the phone while she watches a Hugh Grant film she is sent spinning on a cathartic, self-medicated journey to the land of self-acceptance and self-reliance. Surrounded by her sister and a strong support group of friends, Christine learns how to deal with the horrors of dating, finding new appliances, and the exhilarating feeling of shopping without consequence.

An uproarious look at the suddenly single life of a divorcee, Dora Heldt’s first book to appear in English captures the zeitgeist of the new millennium with searing insight while never deigning to take itself too seriously. Sparkling dialogue and unforgettable characters create a vibrant world of sardonic, take-no-prisoners women who hold their own in a world geared toward acceptance of their younger selves. Not since Bridget Jones’ Diary or Sex in the City has anything like Life After Forty so accurately and thoroughly expressed the modern female point of view with such startling clarity.

Turning Book 1: What Curiosity Kills by Helen Ellis from Sourcebooks Fire is $1.99

Book Description:

Nobody can know your secret.
Nobody can know your power.
But if nobody knows who you are to begin with…what’s stopping you?

I whisper, “What’s so special about me all of a sudden?”

Nick says, “The Turning.”

Mary feels different, but can’t explain why. The fainting, the strange cravings…and worse, the things she’s noticed about her body.

Mary doesn’t know where to turn. If she tells her parents or her sister, she’ll risk losing everything. She has no other family, no way of knowing if what she’s going through is normal. Everyone she’s ever known and loved could reject her…

Face of a Killer by Robin Burcell from HarperCollins is $0.99

Book Description:

Facts lie . . . Two decades after the murder that shattered her world, FBI agent and forensic artist Sydney Fitzpatrick confronts her father’s killer face to face. But the inmate who’s scheduled to be executed for the crime is not what she expected. Heightening Sydney’s unease, she receives a photograph sent to her by a man just prior to his suicide, causing her to question everything she believed about her father. Now she wants the truth—no matter where it’s hidden, no matter how painful . . . or dangerous. But Sydney Fitzpatrick is about to trespass on sacred ground. And being a federal agent will offer her no security or shelter if it’s her own government that wants her dead.

Midnight Assassin: A Murder in America’s Heartland by Thomas Wolf and Patricia L. Bryan from Algonquin Books is $2.51

Book Description:

In 1900, Margaret Hossack, the wife of a prominent Iowa farmer, was arrested for bludgeoning her husband to death with an ax while their children slept upstairs. The community was outraged: How could a woman commit such an act of violence? Firsthand accounts describe the victim, John Hossack, as a cruel and unstable man. Perhaps Margaret Hossack was acting out of fear. Or perhaps the story she told was true—that an intruder broke into the house, killed her husband while she slept soundly beside him, and was still on the loose. Newspapers across the country carried the story, and community sentiment was divided over her guilt. At trial, Margaret was convicted of murder, but later was released on appeal. Ultimately, neither her innocence nor her guilt was ever proved.

Patricia Bryan and Thomas Wolf examine the harsh realities of farm life at the turn of the century and look at the plight of women—legally, socially, and politically—during that period. What also emerges is the story of early feminist Susan Glaspell, who covered the Hossack case as a young reporter and later used it as the basis for her acclaimed work “ A Jury of Her Peers.”

Midnight Assassin expertly renders the American character and experience: our obsession with crime, how justice is achieved, and the powerful influence of the media.

Fante: A Family’s Legacy of Writing, Drinking and Surviving (P.S.) by Dan Fante from Harper Perennial is $1.99

Book Description:

As father and son John and Dan Fante shared a relationship characterized by competition, resentment, rage and silence. As men, both were driven to succeed by damaged by uncontrollable drinking. As writers, both were gifted with inextinguishable passion. In Fante, Dan Fante traces his family’s history from Los Angeles, where John struggles to gain literary recognition and turns instead to the steady paycheck of Hollywood screenwriting, to New York, where Dan finds an escape from his troubled childhood in a life of words and vices.

John was a writer whose literary contributions were not recognized until the end of his life. Dan was an alcoholic saved by writing, who at the age of 45 picked up his father’s old typewriter in order to ease the madness in his mind. Fante is the story of the evolution of a relationship between father and son who eventually find their way back to loving each other. In straightforward unapologetic prose, Dan Fante lays bare his family’s story from his point of view, with the rage and passion of a writer, which he feels was his true inheritance and his father’s greatest gift.