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Books

The Wind Will Catch You

A Novel 

Recently posted about by Kristin Hannah and Maggie Shipstead and Perfect for fans of Where the Crawdads Sing and Demon Copperhead...


Sky Fielder is a typical college student, except that she is a product of the foster care system, lives in a halfway house, and meets with her caseworker on a weekly basis. While failing to balance her grades and erratic social life, she receives a call from a hospital, asking her to make medical decisions for her brother Ben—who died more than a decade before.  
 
The call must be a scam, and besides, Sky has a new life now. None of her classmates know about her desperate and feral childhood in West Texas, where her brother kept her mind off hunger with adventures along the riverbeds and cliffs surrounding their trailer—or about the rash decision that cost him his life and almost ended hers. 


In fact, only one person truly knows Sky, because it’s her job. But Sky’s assigned caseworker, Laura, is an employee of social services, which surely means she can’t be trusted. As Laura helps Sky unravel the mysteries surrounding the man in the hospital, Sky remembers the risks it takes to love and be loved. When the past and the present collide   and long-kept secrets are revealed, Sky must decide how far she’s willing to go to have a home and family again.   

 

The Wind Will Catch You is an eye-opening, gritty, and hopeful novel by GLAAD media award nominee Michelle Theall about upheaval and resilience, forgiveness and family, love and unexpected allies, all set in motion by issues of social justice and a broken American foster care system. 

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Book Video Trailer

PODCAST FOR BOOK CLUB DISCUSSION

Teaching the Cat to Sit 

A Memoir

Nuanced and poignant, heart-rending and funny, Michelle Theall’s thoughtful memoir is a universal story about our quest for unconditional love from our parents, our children, and most important, from ourselves.

Even when society, friends, the legal system, and the Pope himself swing toward acceptance of the once unacceptable, author Michelle Theall still waits for the one person’s blessing that has always mattered to her the most: her mother's.

 

Michelle grew up in the conservative Texas bible belt, bullied by her classmates and abandoned by her evangelical best friend before she’d ever even held a girl’s hand. She was often at odds with her volatile, overly-dramatic, and depressed mother, who had strict ideas about how girls should act. Yet they both clung tightly to their devout Catholic faith—the unifying grace that all but shattered their relationship when Michelle finally admitted she was gay.

 

Years later at forty-two years old, Michelle makes delicate peace with her mother and is living her life openly with her partner of ten years and their adopted son in the liberal haven of Boulder, Colorado. But when her four-year-old son’s Catholic school decides to expel all children of gay parents, Michelle tiptoes into a controversy that exposes her to long-buried shame, which leads to a public battle with the Church and a private one with her parents. In the end she realizes that in order to be a good mother, she may have to be a bad daughter.

 

Michelle writes with wry wit and bald honesty about her life, seamlessly weaving her past and her present into a touching commentary on all the love, pain, and redemption that families inspire. Teaching the Cat to Sit makes us each reflect on our sense of humanity, our connection to religion, and our struggles to accept ourselves—and each other—as we are.

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