Reading Recommendations: The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia, a novel, Mary Helen Stefaniak.

Narrator Gladys Cailiff is eleven years old in 1938 when a new school teacher turns Threestep, Georgia upside down. A well traveled young woman, Miss Gracie Spivey believes in field trips, Arabian costumes and reading aloud from her ten-volume set of The Thousand Nights and a Night. The real trouble begins when she decides to revive the annual town festival as an exotic Baghdad Bazaar.

Miss Spivey and her project transform the lives of everyone around her: Gladys' older brother Force (with his movie star looks), their pregnant sister May ( a gifted story teller herself), and especially the Cailiffs African American neighbor, young Theo Boykin, whose creative genius becomes the key to a colorful, hidden history of the South.

The fate of a camel driver on the Arabian Peninsula in 1916, the birth of a circus in the wake of Sherman's army, the role of an enchanted pitcher in a ninth century war between brothers, the journey of an ingenious young Muslim from his African home to the coastal island of Georgia. These and other surprising stories come to the light as The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia rides a magic carpet from a school-room in the south to the banks of the Tigris (and back again) in an entrancing feat of storytelling.

And, In every Heartbeat, a novel, Kim Vogel Sawyer.

As Three friends who grew up in the same orphanage head off to college together, they each harbor a special plan of the future. Libby Conley hopes to become a famous journalist. Pete Leidig believes God has called him to become a minister and Bennet Martin plans to pledge a fraternity, find a place to belong and have as much birth as possible. But as tensions rise around the world on the brink of World War I, the friends differing aspirations and opinions begin to divide them as well.

When Libby makes a shocking discovery about Pete's family, will it drive a final wedge between the friends or bond them in ways they never anticipated?

And, The Rice Diet Renewal, a healing 30-day Program for lasting weight loss, Kitty Gurkin Rosati, M.S.,R.D.,L.D.N.

Many diets can help you lose a significant amount of weight in a short period, but only the rice diet can boast that 43% of its participants have maintained or increased their weight loss over six years. Now, Kitty Gurkin Rosati presents the essential of the four step Rice Diet Program. Rosati explains how it helps you heal your underlying food and health issues and replace negative, powerless thinking with an awakened awareness of your passion and purpose. Then she introduces a new generation of powerful exercises and tools based on the latest research including energetic healing methods, music, art, quantum physics, aromatherapy and more.

A Practical 30-day Plan for lasting Weight Loss and Inner Healing.

See you at Rylander.