New York Times bestselling author Gwyn Hyman Rubio's highly anticipated new novelLove and Ordinary Creatures is told through the eyes of a cockatoo in love with his very human caretaker. Snatched in a net from his Australian homeland as a young parrot, Caruso has adapted to captivity and has learned all he knows of love from his previous owner, who was obsessively fixated on his childhood sweetheart. Now in his new home with the beautiful and talented Clarissa, Caruso has found both love and happiness—until a handsome stranger arrives in town and sets his sights on Clarissa.Smart, passionate, and wildly inventive, Caruso strives to put his human rival in his place before he loses Clarissa for good. And when a hurricane descends upon the coast, Caruso's love for Clarissa and his memories of freedom are tested as the storm threatens all that he holds dear.Set in the early 1990s in a quaint North Carolina seashore town, Love and Ordinary ...

In the tradition of To Kill a Mockingbird and The Cape Ann, a funny, sad, wise, and redeeming first novel about a young girl's battle with a troubling affliction. Rural Kentucky in the 1950s is not an easy place to grow up in, and it's especially hard for 10-year-old Icy Sparks, an orphan who lives with her grandparents. Life becomes even more difficult for Icy when the violent tics and uncontrollable cursing begin. Icy's adolescence is marred by the humiliation brought on by her mysterious condition, and its all-too-visible symptoms are the source of endless hilarity as everyone around her offers an opinion about what's troubling the girl. Eventually, Icy finds solace in the company of an obese woman who knows what it's like to be an outcast in this tightly knit Appalachian community. Narrated by a now-grown Icy, this first novel shimmers with warmth and humor as it recounts a young girl's painful and poignant journey to womanhood—and the many lives she touches and...