Author Autographed Inscribed and Personalized Hardcovers of My Brave Year of Firsts: Tries, Sighs, and High Fives are available to Order by clicking on this link. 

Head Start of Shawnee Mission is partnering with Rainy Day Books for an opportunity for Head Start enrolled children to receive Books from you!  Community friends are invited to choose a Book from our Wish List below.  To get started, just click the link of the Book you'd like to Purchase.  Or pick your own Preschool favorite from the Rainy Day Books database.

Add the Book to your Shopping Cart, choose In-Store Pick-Up as your Shipping Option, and add the words "Head Start" to your Order Comments Field.  Rainy Day Books will arrange the Book delivery with Head Start!

Thank You for considering the opportunity to put Books into the hands and homes of low income children.

My Brave Year of Firsts: Tries, Sighs, and High Fives by Jamie Lee Curtis, Laura Cornell

It's Hard To Be Five by Jamie Lee Curtis, Laura Cornell

I'm Gonna Like Me by Jamie Lee Curtis, Laura Cornell

Today I Feel Silly & Other Moods That Make My Day by Jamie Lee Curtis, Laura Cornell

When I Was Little by Jamie Lee Curtis, Laura Cornell

Lola Love Stories by Anna McQuinn

The Very Hungry Caterpillar's Favorite Words by Eric Carle

If You Give a Mouse a Cookie by Laura Joffe Numeroff, Felicia Bond

Llama Llama Red Pajama by Anna Dewdney

Can I Play Too? (An Elephant and Piggie Book) by Mo Willems

GIRLS' NIGHT OUT featuring Adriana Trigiani!  The New York Times Bestselling author of Big Stone Gap, Very Valentine and Lucia, Lucia appears for her New Book The Shoemaker's Wife.  This Event is Monday, October 1, 2012 at 7:00 PM at Unity Temple on The Plaza, Sanctuary.

Read full details about this Event on our Website. 

A Conversation featuring Damien Echols, discussing the West Memphis Three Case and his autobiography Life After Death.  This Event is Friday, October 12, 2012 at 7:00 PM at Unity Temple on The Plaza, Sanctuary.

Co-Sponsored by Rainy Day Books & Midwest Innocence Project.

Read full details about this Event on our Website. 

The Orchardist

Amanda Coplin

Harper 

At the turn of the twentieth century, in a rural stretch of the Pacific Northwest, a reclusive orchardist, William Talmadge, tends to apples and apricots as if they were loved ones. A gentle man, he's found solace in the sweetness of the fruit he grows and the quiet, beating heart of the land he cultivates. One day, two teenage girls appear and steal his fruit from the market; they later return to the outskirts of his orchard to see the man who gave them no chase. Feral, scared, and very pregnant, the girls take up on Talmadge's land and indulge in his deep reservoir of compassion. Just as the girls begin to trust him, men arrive in the orchard with guns, and the shattering tragedy that follows will set Talmadge on an irrevocable course not only to save and protect but also to reconcile the ghosts of his own troubled past.

The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving

Jonathan Evison

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

Benjamin Benjamin has lost virtually everything--his wife, his family, his home, his livelihood. With few options, Ben enrolls in a night class called The Fundamentals of Caregiving taught in the basement of a local church. There Ben is instructed in the art of inserting catheters and avoiding liability, about professionalism, and how to keep physical and emotional distance between client and provider. But when Ben is assigned to nineteen-year-old Trev, who is in the advanced stages of Duchenne muscular dystrophy, he discovers that the endless mnemonics and service plan checklists have done little to prepare him for the reality of caring for a fiercely stubborn, sexually frustrated adolescent. As they embark on a wild road trip across the American West to visit Trev's ailing father, a new camaraderie replaces the traditional boundary between patient and caregiver. Bursting with energy, this big-hearted, soulful, and inspired novel ponders life's terrible surprises and the heart's uncanny capacity to mend and become whole again.

Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace

D.T. Max

Viking

The first biography of the most influential writer of his generation, David Foster Wallace. David Foster Wallace was the leading literary light of his era, a man who not only captivated readers with his prose but also mesmerized them with his brilliant mind. In this, the first biography of the writer, D. T. Max sets out to chart Wallace's tormented, anguished and often triumphant battle to succeed as a novelist as he fights off depression and addiction to emerge with his masterpiece, Infinite Jest. Since his untimely death by suicide at the age of forty-six in 2008, Wallace has become more than the quintessential writer for his time-he has become a symbol of sincerity and honesty in an inauthentic age. In the end, as Max shows us, what is most interesting about Wallace is not just what he wrote but how he taught us all to live. Written with the cooperation of Wallace's family and friends and with access to hundreds of his unpublished letters, manuscripts, and audio tapes, this portrait of an extraordinarily gifted writer is as fresh as news, as intimate as a love note, as painful as a goodbye.

The Bartender's Tale

Ivan Doig

Riverhead

Tom Harry has a streak of frost in his black pompadour and a venerable bar called The Medicine Lodge, the chief watering hole and last refuge of the town of Gros Ventre, in northern Montana. Tom also has a son named Rusty, an "accident between the sheets" whose mother deserted them both years ago.The pair make an odd kind of family, with the bar their true home, but they manage just fine. Until the summer of 1960, that is, when Rusty turns twelve. Change arrives with gale force, in the person of Proxy, a taxi dancer Tom knew back when, and her beatnik daughter, Francine. Is Francine, as Proxy claims, the unsuspected legacy of her and Tom's past? Without a doubt she is an unsettling gust of the future, upending every certainty in Rusty's life and generating a mist of passion and pretense that seems to obscure everyone's vision but his own. As Rusty struggles to decipher the oddities of adult behavior and the mysteries build toward a reckoning, Ivan Doig wonderfully captures how the world becomes bigger and the past becomes more complex in the last moments of childhood.

Every Day

David Levithan

Knopf Books For Young Readers

Every morning, A wakes in a different person's body, a different person's life. There's never any warning about where it will be or who it will be. A has made peace with that, even established guidelines by which to live: Never get too attached. Avoid being noticed. Do not interfere. It's all fine until the morning that A wakes up in the body of Justin and meets Justin's girlfriend, Rhiannon. From that moment, the rules by which A has been living no longer apply. Because finally A has found someone he wants to be with-day in, day out, day after day. With his new novel, David Levithan has pushed himself to new creative heights. He has written a captivating story that will fascinate readers as they begin to comprehend the complexities of life and love in A's world, as A and Rhiannon seek to discover if you can truly love someone who is destined to change every day.

Bear Has a Story to Tell

Erin Stead, Philip C. Stead

Roaring Brook Press

Bear found his friend Mouse, but Mouse was busy gathering seeds and didn't have time to listen to a story. Then Bear saw his friend Duck, but Duck was getting ready to fly south. What about his friend Toad? He was busy looking for a warm place to sleep. By the time Bear was through helping his friends get ready for winter, would anyone still be awake to hear his story?