Pearl Dubois is a Southern belle. She was born in New Orleans to a prominent and wealthy family. During the Second World War, she wants to help the Allies. She lands a job in Paris working for the Office of Strategic Services. The OSS is the first spy agency in the United States. Its goal is to gather intelligence about the Germans and to win the war.

Pearl convinces her boss to send her on a secret mission. She will bring photos of German spies to General George Patton, who is stationed near the Belgian border. On the way to the general's camp, Pearl and three companions are ambushed by Nazi soldiers. She becomes a prisoner and must survive by her wits until she can plot her escape.

Based on the real-life experiences of Gertrude Sanford Legendre, the first woman to be captured as a spy during WWII, Pearl's adventures are both riveting and inspiring.

Laura Murata is a university professor in Japan. She is also a divorced mother of Maya, a seven-year-old girl. Widower Kazu Mori is a dentist. He is raising his son, Max, on his own. The two parents meet at the holiday bake sale at Tokyo Cherry Blossom International School where their kids are great friends.

Laura and Kazu are sweet on each other from the moment they meet, and soon their two families are spending time together. Christmas Eve, the biggest date night of the year, draws near. Kazu asks Laura to dinner, and Laura is thrilled. Things are going so well! But will misunderstandings make their budding relationship crumble?

Love requires honesty, but not too much!

Fifteen-year-old Aiko Cassidy, a bicultural girl with cerebral palsy, grew up in Michigan with her single mother. For as long as she could remember, it was just the two of them. When a new stepfather and a baby half sister enter her life, she finds herself on the margins. Having recently come into contact with her biological father, she is invited to spend the summer with his indigo-growing family in a small Japanese farming village. Aiko thinks she just might fit in better in Japan. If nothing else, she figures the trip will inspire her manga story, Gadget Girl.

However, Aiko's stay in Japan is not quite the easygoing vacation that she expected. Her grandmother is openly hostile toward her, and she soon learns of painful family secrets that have been buried for years. Even so, she takes pleasure in meeting new friends. She is drawn to Taiga, the figure skater who shows her the power of persistence against self-doubt. Sora is a fellow manga enthusiast who introduces Aiko to a wide circle of like-minded artists. And then there is Kotaro, a refugee from the recent devastating earthquake in northeastern Japan.

As she gets to know her biological father and the story of his break with her mother, Aiko begins to rethink the meaning of family and her own place in the world.

These stories, many of which riff on traditional Japanese folk tales and lore, explore the lives of individuals caught between desire and duty, as well as the conflicting expectations of different cultures. For example, in 'Day Pass, ' a college student in South Carolina befriends a female prisoner on a work release program, thinking that she will be a good influence, but then realizes that she has gotten in over her head. In 'Blue Murder, ' a Japanese farmer troubled by the crows eating his pears becomes besotted with a kingfisher. The narrator of 'Down the Mountain, ' a descendant of the Heike clan, recounts the tragic life and death of her beloved sister as she urges her own daughter to leave their secluded mountain village and go out into the world, and in the title story, 'River of Dolls, ' a Japanese woman struggles with infertility. Ranging from dirty to magical realism, the stories collected here are often infused with humor, while exposing universal truths.

Anna and the French Kiss meets Stoner & Spaz in a contemporary young adult coming-of-age novel about a girl, her struggles, and her art.

Aiko Cassidy is fourteen and lives with her sculptor mother in a small Midwestern town. For most of her young life Aiko, who has cerebral palsy, has been her mother's muse. But now, she no longer wants to pose for the sculptures that have made her mother famous. Aiko works hard on her own dream of becoming a great manga artist with a secret identity. When Aiko's mother invites her to Paris for a major exhibition of her work, Aiko at first resists. She'd much rather go to Japan, Manga Capital of the World, where she might be able to finally meet her father, the indigo farmer. When she gets to France, however, a hot waiter with a passion for manga and an interest in Aiko makes her wonder if being invisible is such a great thing after all.
Gadget Girl began as a novella published in Cicada. The story won the SCBWI Magazine Merit Award in Fiction and was included in an anthology of the best stories published in Cicada over the past ten years.

The American writer Suzanne Kamata had lived in Japan for more than half of her life, yet she had never explored the small nearby islands of the Inland Sea. The islands, first made famous by Donald Richie's The Inland Sea 50 years ago, are noted for displaying artwork created by prominent, and sometimes curious, international artists and sculptors: Naoshima s wealth of museums, including one devoted to 007, Yayoi Kusama's polka dot pumpkins, Kazuo Katase's blue teacup, and a monster rising out of a well on the hour in Sakate, called Anger at the Bottom of the Sea to name a few. Spurred by her teen-aged daughter Lilia's burgeoning interest in art and adventure, Kamata sets out to show her the islands treasures. Mother and daughter must confront several barriers on their adventure. Lilia is deaf and uses a wheelchair. It is not always easy to get onto -- or off of -- the islands, not to mention the challenges of language, culture, and a generation gap. A Girls Guide to the Islands takes the reader on a rare visit by a unique mother and daughter team.

SQUEAKY WHEELS: Travels with my Daughter by Train, Plane, Metro, Tuk-tuk and Wheelchair is a mother-daughter travel memoir woven with comparative culture and accessibility awareness. Kamata's adventures with her teen--who happens to be deaf, with cerebral palsy, and in a wheelchair--through subterranean Tennessee, to the islands of Japan, and to the top of the Eiffel Tower ultimately lead to a daughter's increasing independence, a mother letting go of expectations, and advocacy for travel which prohibits discrimination.

CINNAMON BEACH is a multicultural tragicomedy told from three strong female points of view in which an American writer living in Japan returns to South Carolina to scatter the ashes of her brother while trying to maintain the perfect-family facade she created from afar, and support her Indian American sister-in-law who wants a future which might upset everyone. Sparks fly when an impromptu book-signing reconnects the writer with her college friend who is now a famous African American country singer, and her daughter who is deaf finds a secret first love, providing readers a reflection on death, divorce, disconnection, and how summer on the hot sand can usher in surprises.

Thirteen-year-old Satoshi Matsumoto spent the last three years living in Atlanta where he was the star of his middle-school baseball team--a slugger with pro potential, according to his coach. Now that his father's work in the US has come to an end, he's moved back to his hometown in rural Japan. Living abroad has changed him, and now his old friends in Japan are suspicious of his new foreign ways. Even worse, his childhood foe Shintaro, whose dad has ties to gangsters, is in his homeroom. After he joins his new school's baseball team, Satoshi has a chance to be a hero until he makes a major-league error.

A heart-warming story about a baseball player who learns that teamwork is much more important than being the star of the team. I loved the family dynamics and depiction of life, and especially baseball, in Japan.--Shauna Holyoak, author of Kazu Jones and the Denver Dognappers (Hyperion, 2019)

A story set in Japan rich in details only Kamata, an insider, could share. With ease and respect, she weaves the pressures, agonies, and loyalties of Satoshi's life at home, at school and on a junior high baseball team with the practices and traditions of the game played in Japan. I am a big fan of this middle-grade homerun!--Annie Donwerth Chikamatsu, award-winning author of Somewhere Among (Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books, 2017)

Pop Flies really pops! A lively, fun, easy read that draws you in and keeps you guessing.--Dori Jones Yang, award-winning author of The Forbidden Temptation of Baseball (SparkPress, 2017)

When Christine, an idealistic young American teacher, meets and marries Hideki Yamada, an aspiring Japanese high school baseball coach, she believes that their love with be enough to sustain them as they deal with cultural differences. However, Hideki's duties, and the team of fit, obedient boys whom he begins to think of as a surrogate family, take up more and more of his time, just as Christine is struggling to manage the needs of their multiply-disabled daughter and their sensitive son. Things come to a head when their son is the victim of bullies. Christine begins to think that she and her children would be safer - and happier - in her native country. On a trip back to the States, she reconnects with a dangerously attractive friend from high school who, after serving and becoming wounded in Afghanistan, seems to understand her like no one else.

Meanwhile, Daisuke Uchida, a slugger with pro potential who has returned to Japan after living abroad, may be able to help propel Hideki's team to the national baseball tournament at Koshien. Not only would this be a dream come true for Hideki, but also it would secure the futures of his players, some of whom come from precarious homes. While Daisuke looks to Hideki for guidance, he is also distracted by Nana, a talented but troubled girl, whom he is trying to rescue from a life as a bar hostess (or worse). Hideki must ultimately choose between his team and his family.

The Baseball Widow explores issues of duty, disability, discrimination, violence, and forgiveness through a cross-cultural lens. Although flawed, these characters strive to advocate for fairness, goodness, and safety, while considering how their decisions have been shaped by their backgrounds.

Suzanne Kamata's many fans know she writes wonderful fiction, but with Waiting we learn she's a poet too. Every poem in this small, beautiful book is a spare, lyrical gem. Together, they tell a haunting page-turner of a story about a town and a family grappling with loss and holding tight to hope. Each character in Waiting is fully dimensional and real, yet built from so few words I kept asking myself, How did she do that? I don't know, but I'm very grateful she did. - Ona Gritz, author of Geode Seamlessly braiding true crime story and coming-of-age narrative, Kamata captures-with compassion-those long moments of longing for the next steps into sex, university life, and freedom. In this town, however, those tentative yearnings are overshadowed by the news of a missing classmate, also on the cusp of a long-anticipated adulthood; but will she ever get to experience it? In this timely novella-in-verse, Kamata adeptly uses the empty, mysterious spaces inherent in her poems to embody the uncertainty and ache of a universal moment of waiting-for the end of high school and the beginning of everything else. - Jessica Goodfellow, author of Whiteout A teenage girl, her family, and an entire town wait for news. In these deceptively quiet, spare lines, something feels ready to spring. One teenage girl faces decisions about her future, while her missing classmate may not have one. The fierce nature of love is one of many truths that come to light in this gripping poetic narrative. Waiting is rich with suspense and depth, right to its poignant last words. - Tanja Bartel, author of Everyone at This Party

Thirteen-year-old Satoshi Matsumoto spent the last three years living in Atlanta where he was the star of his middle-school baseball team--a slugger with pro potential, according to his coach. Now that his father's work in the US has come to an end, he's moved back to his hometown in rural Japan. Living abroad has changed him, and now his old friends in Japan are suspicious of his new foreign ways. Even worse, his childhood foe Shintaro, whose dad has ties to gangsters, is in his homeroom. After he joins his new school's baseball team, Satoshi has a chance to be a hero until he makes a major-league error.

A heart-warming story about a baseball player who learns that teamwork is much more important than being the star of the team. I loved the family dynamics and depiction of life, and especially baseball, in Japan.--Shauna Holyoak, author of Kazu Jones and the Denver Dognappers (Hyperion, 2019)

A story set in Japan rich in details only Kamata, an insider, could share. With ease and respect, she weaves the pressures, agonies, and loyalties of Satoshi's life at home, at school and on a junior high baseball team with the practices and traditions of the game played in Japan. I am a big fan of this middle-grade homerun!--Annie Donwerth Chikamatsu, award-winning author of Somewhere Among (Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books, 2017)

Pop Flies really pops! A lively, fun, easy read that draws you in and keeps you guessing.--Dori Jones Yang, award-winning author of The Forbidden Temptation of Baseball (SparkPress, 2017)

Elise Faulkner is more at home in the waters of her beloved Lake Michigan than on land where her beauty queen mom is always on her back about her lack of a social life; her sister is dating the boy of her dreams; her favorite penpal--the one who wrote about mermaids in Ghana--has gotten married and ended their correspondence; and no one's allowed to talk about her glamorous great-grandmother, the deep-sea wreck diver. Elise is biding her time with books until she can flee. But then crazy Chiara Hanover pops into her life, as does Miguel, a mysterious carnival worker whose dark future has been predicted by a gypsy.

The first collection of literary writing on raising a child with special needs, Love You to Pieces features families coping with autism, deafness, muscular dystrophy, Down syndrome and more. Here, poets, memoirists, and fiction writers paint beautiful, wrenchingly honest portraits of caring for their children, laying bare the moments of rage, disappointment, and guilt that can color their relationships. Parent-child communication can be a challenge at the best of times, but in this collection we witness the struggles and triumphs of those who speak their own language-or don't speak at all-and those who love them deeply.

What happens when your child doesn't speak your native language? How do you maintain cultural traditions while living outside your native country? And how can you raise a child with two cultures without fracturing his/her identity? From our house to your house - to the White House - more and more mothers are facing questions such as these. Whether through intercultural marriage, international adoption or peripatetic lifestyles, families these days are increasingly multicultural. In this collection, women around the world, such as Xujun Eberlein, Violet Garcia-Mendoza, Rose Kent, Sefi Atta, Christine Holhbaum, Saffia Farr, and others, ponder the unique joys and challenges of raising children across two or more cultures. Suzanne Kamata's short work has appeared in over 100 publications. She is the author of a novel, LOSING KEI, and a picture book, PLAYING FOR PAPA, both of which concern bicultural families. She is also the editor of two previous anthologies - THE BROKEN BRIDGE: Fiction from Expatriates in Literary Japan and LOVE YOU TO PIECES: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs, and is currently fiction editor of Literary Mama. Born and raised in Michigan and most recently from South Carolina, she now lives in rural Japan with her Japanese husband and bicultural twins.

This collection about expatriates in Cuba, Egypt, Australia, Japan and France confronts universal matters of the heart.

As seen on MTV.com

At sixteen, Trudy Baxter is tired of her debutante mom, her deadbeat dad, and her standing reservation at the juvenile detention center. Changing her name to Trudy Sin, she cranks up her major chops as a singer and starts a band, gathering around other girls ill at ease in their own lives. Cassie Haywood, would-have-been beauty queen, was scarred in an accident in which her alcoholic mom was killed. But she can still sing and play her guitar, even though she seeks way too much relief from the pain in her body and her heart through drugs, and way too much relief from loneliness through casual sex. Still, it's Cassie who hears former child prodigy Harumi Yokoyama playing in a punk band at a party, and enlists her, outraging Harumi's overbearing first-generation Japanese parents. The fourth member is Esther Shealy, who joins as a drummer in order to be close to Cassie--the long-time object of her unrequited love--and Harumi, her estranged childhood friend. Together, they are Screaming Divas, and they're quickly swept up as a local sensation. Then, just as they are about to achieve their rock-girl dreams, a tragedy strikes.

A young mother fights impossible odds to be reunited with her child in this acutely insightful first novel about an intercultural marriage gone terribly wrong.

Jill Parker is an American painter living in Japan. Far from the trendy gaijin neighborhoods of downtown Tokyo, she's settled in a remote seaside village where she makes ends meet as a bar hostess. Her world appears to open when she meets Yusuke, a savvy and sensitive art gallery owner who believes in her talent. But their love affair, and subsequent marriage, is doomed to a life of domestic hell, for Yusuke is the chonan, the eldest son, who assumes the role of rigid patriarch in his traditional family while Jill's duty is that of a servile Japanese wife. A daily battle of wills ensues as Jill resists instruction in the proper womanly arts. Even the long-anticipated birth of a son, Kei, fails to unite them. Divorce is the only way out, but in Japan a foreigner has no rights to custody, and Jill must choose between freedom and abandoning her child.

Told with tenderness, humor, and an insider's knowledge of contemporary Japan, Losing Kei is the debut novel of an exceptional expatriate voice.

Suzanne Kamata's work has appeared in over one hundred publications. She is the editor of The Broken Bridge: Fiction from Expatriates in Literary Japan and a forthcoming anthology from Beacon Press on parenting children with disabilities. A five-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize, she has twice won the Nippon Airways/Wingspan Fiction Contest.

Divorced American mom Lauren Murata has stumbled into a university job teaching Home Economics at a conservative Japanese women's college with a dwindling student population. Although she has achieved success as a domestic goddess, she is actually a scholar of gender studies. She meets widower dad Kazu Mori at her daughter's international school holiday bake sale. Mori manages talent, including a famous pop star who has just broken away from a popular all-male J-pop group. They discover that their children are good friends. The couple - and their kids - start going on playdates to iconic sites around Tokyo. They visit the pandas in Ueno Zoo. They go ice skating at Tokyo SkyTree. As their attraction to each other grows, they both try to figure out how to get out of the friend zone and move from playdates into real dates. But when a hashtag about Kazu's famous client goes viral, putting both and Kazu's and Lauren's careers at risk, their relationship begins to crumble.

Thirteen-year-old Satoshi Matsumoto spent the last three years living in Atlanta where he was the star of his middle-school baseball team-a slugger with pro potential, according to his coach. Now that his father's work in the US has come to an end, he's moved back to his hometown in rural Japan. Living abroad has changed him, and now his old friends in Japan are suspicious of his new foreign ways. Even worse, his childhood foe Shintaro, whose dad has ties to gangsters, is in his homeroom. After he joins his new school's baseball team, Satoshi has a chance to be a hero until he makes a major-league error.