National Network for Equitable Library Service

Tom Harry and his son Rusty live alone and run a bar in a small Montana town in the early 1960s. Their lives are upended when a woman from Tom's past and her beatnik daughter breeze into town.

A single mom and her seventeen-year-old daughter learn how to let go in that precarious moment before college empties the nest.

In the late 1960s, a group of young idealists form a commune in western New York State. Into this group is born Bit, who grows into a quiet, distant man. Over the course of 50 years, Bit witnesses the utopia crumble and the world change in unimaginable ways.

A series of poems describes all the baffling changes at home and at school in twelve-year-old Joylin's transition from tomboy basketball player to not-quite-girly girl.

Campbell's heroine is 16-year-old Margo Crane. Complicit in her father's death, Margo flees home for the Stark River. And as she follows the current, she learns the ways of the world from the eccentric characters she meets.

Teenaged Isobel "Belly" Conklin, whose life revolves around spending the summer at her mother's best friend's beach house, reflects on the tragic events of the past year that changed her life forever.

Simon Jester's past is full of secrets. Ony his step-children, 12-year-old Alice and her older brother Boone, know the true darkness that lies in his heart. When terror invades their lives, the two children are forced to attempt daring escapes and acts of betrayal in order to survive.

Buddy is seven years younger than his brother, Lee, but they have always been close. After their praents die in a car crash, the two young men sell what is left of their dusty Oklahoma farm and travel north to Snake Junction, Idaho. There, while Lee sings in a bar, 17-year-old Buddy is at loose ends -- until he meets Irene. Beautiful, mysterious, and almost twice his age, Irene leads Buddy into manhood.

Jermaine Banks is a pot dealer in his Philadelphia neighborhood. He's also father to a three-year-old boy and a committed partner to his pregnant girlfriend. As he approaches his 30th birthday and suffers the loss of a close friend to gang violence, he realizes it's time for some changes. Being a good father, and possibly a good husband, means finding a legitimate job and getting away from the ghetto. Does he have what it takes to stop being a trouble man?

The oldest Mariss brother, fourteen-year-old Dewey, attempts to be the "embodiment of responsibility" as he juggles the management of the family's bicycle repair business while sharing the household and farm duties with his siblings after a sudden energy crisis strands their parents far from home.