Böcker av Kitty Burns Florey

A delightfully offbeat history of the art and science of sentence diagramming by a veteran copyeditor and writer. Grumpy grammarians, crossword-puzzle aficionados, and lovers of language will appreciate this book. In its heyday, sentence diagramming was wildly popular in grammar schools across the country. Kitty Burns Florey learned the method in sixth grade from Sister Bernadette: "It was a bit like art, a bit like mathematics. It was a picture of language. I was hooked." Florey explores the sentence-diagramming phenomenon, including its humble roots at the Brooklyn Polytechnic, its "balloon diagram" predecessor, and what diagrams of famous writers' sentences reveal about them. Along the way, Florey offers up her own commonsense approach to learning and using good grammar. Charming, fun, and instructive, Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog will be treasured by all kinds of readers.

Amity Street continues the story that began in New Haven in 1856, chronicled in The Writing Master. It is now the year 1892. Anna Felice, a wealthy former opera star, travels from Rome, Italy, to America-Manhattan, New Haven, finally Amherst, Massachusetts-in search of the truth about her family history. In Amherst, she encounters George Mullen, who holds the key to her past; Hazel Cooper, the writing master's daughter, who is trying to chart the precarious course of her future; and Hazel's cousin, the eccentric, enigmatic Davey Chillick, whose placid existence is about to take a startling turn. And much to Anna's surprise, as she learns the shocking facts about her background, she begins to fall in love with a little country town and the people in it. The scope of the novel includes the social and political upheavals of the 1890s-among them the suffrage movement, the Rational Dress Society, and the conventions of courtship. It also encompasses the taming of a hawk, the right way to train a voice, the making of rhubarb wine, and-most of all-the many ways to define what we call home. Reflecting the author's affection for Victorian novels, New England history, and the towns and landscapes of Western Massachusetts, Amity Street is a thoughtful and compelling examination of a memorable cast of characters and the changing world in which they struggle to live their tumultuous lives.

Rosie Mortimer, celebrity gardener with a successful TV show, has a pleasantly uneventful life with her undemanding beau. Her gay son and his partner live nearby. When her estranged daughter, Susannah, product of a fractured family, returns to Rosie''s Connecticut town with her husband, a former priest, to open a restaurant, the tense relationships among these three build to a near-tragedy. Rosie is forced to face the mistakes and failures that have plagued her-and Susannah, who has her own demons, learns to forgive.

A chance encounter on a train leads painter Christine Ward to wonder whether Orin Pierce, her beloved college friend, believed dead for two decades, may actually be alive. As she begins to track down the man she believes he might be, she finds herself in the grip of a troubling past she thought she had come to terms with. In her search through the tangles of truth and illusion, memory and dream, she questions her roles as lover, mother, artist, and mourner of the dead. This haunting literary thriller is an uncompromising portrait of a contemporary woman in crisis.

Cordelia Miller, an endearing young misfit in a scholarly, cultured family, loves junk food, TV, and the son of the local grocer. Her attempt to escape her stifling background and find her way in the world takes her on a classic journey from innocence to experience. She encounters a varied cast of characters-some comic, some calamitous-and, in the end, discovers her true vocation.

Dorrie Gilbert, a potter who lives alone, is completely unprepared for motherhood when her oddball, overweight, and orphaned nephew, Hugo, comes to live with her, demanding to know the truth about his parents and horrified that she doesn''t own a television so he can watch the soap opera he''s devoted to. As Dorrie and Hugo attempt to work things out, each learns some hard and surprising, but deeply satisfying truths about real life.

Betsy Ruscoe, a single university professor in her mid-30s, is pregnant, and the man she thought she loved is not interested in fatherhood. At the same time, her dying mother begs Betsy to find the woman who gave her up for adoption at birth fifty years ago and then disappeared. Betsy struggles to cope with the changes in her life as she also sets out on a quest to uncover her mother''s surprising history.

The world of this novel moves back in time as the layers are peeled away to reveal the truth about a long-ago family tragedy that impacts the characters'' lives for years after. Beginning with a young college student haunted by her own choices and ending with the surprisingly serene image of an aging woman looking back on her turbulent life, the story encompasses a panorama of events set against the changing social backdrop of the middle years of the 20th century.

Emily Lime and her equally palindromic dog, Otto, live in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (zip code 11211), in a warm community of friends and fellow artists. Her life becomes more complicated when she falls in love with Marcus, a dog-walker and fellow Scrabble nut, whose father is Emily''s shady ex-husband who wants the lovable Emily dead. A mystery unravels, a valuable lost cache of paintings is found, and Emily''s life changes in ways she could not have anticipated.

The Writing Master, a work of historical fiction set in 1856 in New Haven, Connecticut, is about Charles Cooper, a penman-teacher of handwriting-who is attempting to come to terms with his tragic past, and Lily Prescott, an unconventional woman with her own troubled story. When a brutal murder takes place just outside the city, Charles becomes involved in its solution.