Showing titles in Coming of Age

For twelve-year-old Martha "Sonny" Creech, there is no place more beautiful than her family's cotton farm. She, her two brothers, and her parents work hard on their land - hoeing, planting, picking - but only Sonny loves the rich, dark earth the way her father does. When a tragic accident claims his life, her stricken family struggles to fend off ruin - until their rich, reclusive neighbor offers to help finance that year's cotton crop.

India Allwood grew up wanting to be an actor. Armed with a stack of index cards (for research/line memorization/make-shift confetti), she goes from awkward sixteen-year-old to Broadway ingenue to TV superhero. Her new movie is a prestige picture about adoption, but its spin is the same old tired story of tragedy. India is an adoptive mom in real life though. She wants everyone to know there’s more to her family than pain and regret. So she does something you should never do—she tells a journalist the truth: it’s a bad movie.

Anne Heche reads The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, the story of nine-year-old Trisha McFarland who gets lost in the woods while on a walk with her family. Boston Red Sox closing pitcher Tom Gordon becomes Trisha's imaginary companion - and the key to her survival against an unidentified someone (or some thing) leaving death and destruction in its wake.

“Jane Eyre” is a masterpiece of gothic romance, where tempestuous passions and dark secrets intertwine in an epic and intimate tale of love, tragedy, and one woman’s struggle for happiness against overwhelming odds. Orphaned Jane Eyre, raised in the home of her kind-hearted aunt, must confront loneliness and cruelty. Her challenging upbringing fortifies her natural independence and spirit, qualities that prove essential when she becomes a governess in the enigmatic and brooding Mr. Rochester’s household.

Toru, a serious young college student in Tokyo, is devoted to Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman, but their mutual passion is marked by the tragic death of their best friend years before. As Naoko retreats further into her own world, Toru finds himself drawn to a fiercely independent and sexually liberated young woman.

Everything changed the night my dad died. The night I met Saint, Galen, Caz, and Theo. Those manipulative a-holes set out to ruin me after our hot night together, but they didn’t realize you can’t destroy something that’s already broken. And it only works if the victim cares. Which I don’t. Because I’ve been in hell for years, and nothing penetrates the steel walls I’ve erected. Until the Sainthood decides I belong to them and cracks appear in my veneer. Their cruel games, harsh words, and rough touch awakens something inside me, and now, I’m in trouble.

Abby Rodier was a “drop-box baby,” a Korean orphan whose mother could not take care of her and left her as an infant. Abby’s tumultuous experience in the American foster care system has led her to live a solitary and guarded life, closed off to almost everyone except her best friend Iseul, whose parents took Abby into their home as a child.

Orphaned during her passage from Ireland, young, white Lavinia arrives on the steps of the kitchen house and is placed, as an indentured servant, under the care of Belle, the master's illegitimate slave daughter. Lavinia learns to cook, clean, and serve food while guided by the quiet strength and love of her new family. In time Lavinia is accepted into the world of the big house, caring for the master's opium-addicted wife and befriending his dangerous yet protective son. She attempts to straddle the worlds of the kitchen and big house, but her skin color will forever set her apart.

Veronika es una joven completamente normal. Es guapa, no le faltan pretendientes y tiene un buen trabajo. Su vida transcurre sin mayores sobresaltos, sin grandes alegrías ni grandes tristezas. Pero no es feliz. Por eso, una mañana de noviembre, Veronika decide acabar con su vida. Sueños y fantasías.

To those who matter in 1950s Hollywood, Lena Scott is the hottest rising star to hit the silver screen since Marilyn Monroe. Few know her real name is Abra. Even fewer know the price she' s paid to finally feel like she' s somebody. To Pastor Ezekiel Freeman, Abra will always be the little girl who stole his heart the night he found her, a wailing newborn abandoned under a bridge on the outskirts of Haven.

In the late 1930s, 16-year-old Billy Parham captures a she-wolf that has been marauding his family's ranch. But instead of killing it, he decides to take it back to the mountains of Mexico. With that crossing he begins an arduous and often dreamlike journey into a country where men meet ghosts and violence strikes as suddenly as heat lightning - a world where there is no order "save that which death has put there".

When Aria and her friends get a dangerous vision, they have only moments to act. A life is in danger and they find themselves caught up in the kind of adventure they've always wanted. But things aren't always what they seem. A split-second decision and a surprise invitation change everything, as the gang's lives are turned suddenly upside-down. They struggle to adjust to their new reality, but find that some ties are harder to break than others. Some ties should never have been made in the first place.

It took three car crashes to kill Jake. Theron David Alden is there for the first two: the summer they meet in rural New Hampshire, when he’s fifteen and anxious, and Jake’s seventeen and a natural; then six years later in New York City, those too-short, ecstatic, painful nights that change both their lives forever—the end of the dream and the longing for the dream and the dream itself, all at once. Theron is not there for the third crash. And yet, their story contains so much joy and self-discovery.

After a botched Halloween ritual, Madison Spencer, the snarkiest dead girl in the universe, finds herself trapped in Purgatory, otherwise known as Earth. The upside: She is no longer subject to physical limitations (she can pass through doors and walls). The downside: Well, she’s still dead.

Rescued from a poverty-stricken mountain life, Charity Royall lives as ward to Lawyer Royall in the small New England town of North Dormer. However, Charity is bored by her job at the local library and feels thwarted by the order that governs her society–until a young man named Lucius Harney plucks her from the drabness of North Dormer life.

A hungry, stray dog is the last thing Cara Butter needs. Stranded in Georgia with only her backpack and a few dwindling dollars, she already has too much baggage. Like her twin sister, Hana, who has broken Cara's heart one too many times. After a lifetime of family troubles, and bouncing from one foster home to another, Cara decides to leave it all behind and strike out alone - on foot.

When young orphan, Oliver Twist, is sold into an apprenticeship with an undertaker, he leaves behind years of miserable servitude and mistreatment at an English workhouse. Hoping to move on to better things, he decides to escape his new, equally dreary surroundings and head to London. It is there that the novel unravels as Oliver meets a host of larger-than-life characters, including The Artful Dodger, a high-ranking member of a juvenile pickpocketing gang, and their elderly leader, Fagin.

Nel and Sula's devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret. It endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the black community and Sula has become a pariah. But their friendship ends in an unforgivable betrayal—or does it end? Terrifying, comic, ribald and tragic, Sula is a work that overflows with life.

Bret Easton Ellis’s masterful new novel is a story about the end of innocence, and the perilous passage from adolescence into adulthood, set in a vibrantly fictionalized Los Angeles in 1981 as a serial killer begins targeting teenagers throughout the city.

In Jesmyn Ward's first novel since her National Book Award-winning Salvage the Bones, this singular American writer brings the archetypal road novel into rural 21st-century America. An intimate portrait of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle, Sing, Unburied, Sing journeys through Mississippi's past and present, examining the ugly truths at the heart of the American story and the power - and limitations - of family bonds.