This story centers on the lives six intelligent upper middle-class women embedded in family life, who unmask falsity and pretension on the ultimate path of pursuing a successful life, and try balancing financial necessity against other concerns: love, friendship, and morals.

Twelve-year-old Adam mourns the death of his mother. He is angry and alone, with only the books on his shelf for company. But those books have begun to whisper to him in the darkness, and as he takes refuge in his imagination, he finds reality and fantasy have begun to meld. Adam is violently propelled into a land that is a strange reflection of his own world, populated by heroes and monsters. LessThe story of a young boy named Adam who is struggling with the death of his mother and his father's remarriage to Violet and the two have another child who they name Tommie. As Adam tries to adjust to this new family situation, he hears his books whispering and he often faints. He is soon lured into another world hidden in a crevice in the sunken garden of the family's new home. As he explores this new fantasy world, Adam has many adventures and lives out his own fairy tale.An imaginative tribute to the journey we all must take through the end of innocence into adulthood, Any adult who can remember the moment when childhood began to fade, and for every adult who is about to face this moment. The End of Innocence is a story of hope for those who have lost and for those who will lose. The End of Innocence into adulthood and beyond is about grief and loss, loyalty and love, and the redeeming power of stories. It's a story that reminds us of the enduring power of stories in our lives.

Smith is a complex person. His family tries to provide him an education in farming. In an effort to take charge of his own life. He decides to study Literature. He then marries a girl he hardly knows. He succeeds in his career, his marriage, and his relationship with his daughter, but it becomes a struggle. As he ages, will he look back on his life and feel satisfied with the road he had taken. LessJohn Smith was born into a poor farming family in Missouri. Sent to a university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces the life of a scholar. Over the years, Smith experiences a series of disappointments: marrying a "real" family alienates him from his parents; his career is hampered; his wife and daughter coldly turn their backs on him; A transformative new love experience ends under threat of scandal. Driven deeper and deeper, Smith rediscovers the stoic stillness of his ancestors and confronts an underlying loneliness. John Smith emerges not only as an archetypal American, but also as an unlikely existential hero,The central theme of the story is surely that of love, of love's many forms and of all the forces that oppose it. "It [love] was neither a passion of the mind nor of the heart, it was a force that encompassed them both as if they were just the matter of love, its specific substance."