From the award-winning author of the Eloia Born series, comes a new novella about identity, finding oneself in the midst of wandering spirits and young love in a Japanese port city...Fourteen-year-old Annabelle's only friends are ghosts. To make matters worse, her Japanese birth father left her family two years ago and her mother has recently remarried an American sailor. Her already difficult life on the backstreets of 1980s Yokosuka, Japan has gotten a lot more complicated as she tries to navigate the complicated social strata between the Filipino, American and Japanese cultures on the small naval base. When a motherless boy drifts into her world, her life changes in unexpected ways. The shifting weight of the adult responsibilities she has shouldered for far too long makes her question if life with only her ghosts caring for her is enough?

Multicultural stories from women about women that will delight, entertain and occasionally break your heart. What happens when eleven women from around the world team up and challenge each other to write a story outside their genre? The result: the Mixed Bag of Tricks, eleven short stories that explore cross-cultural clashes, relationships on new planets, mutual grieving, a humorous otherworldly visit to a bachelorette party, the laugh-out-loud complexities of married life, and so much more. This multi-genre mashup of stories, experimental in conception, celebrates the process of storytelling and the art of collaboration. Sixty percent of profits from the sale of this book will benefit the Writers' League of Texas, a nonprofit that serves writers around the world with its online programming for authors of all genres. Learn more about the organization at writersleague.org Featuring...