Difficult Family Relationships

First-time novelist Jenny Han has penned a realistic story that all middle-graders will surely be able to relate to. Meet 12-year-old Annemarie “Shug” Wilcox. What’s not to like about her? She’s smart, she’s tall, and she has lots of freckles. She lives in a small Georgia town with her popular, gorgeous older sister and intellectual mother. Shug is excited about starting the seventh-grade, but she’s not prepared for all the vicious teasing that comes with the new school year.

A sequel to Crank, this harrowing and disturbing look at addiction finds protagonist Kristina Snow thinking she can use drugs yet control the consequences. Now with a baby to care for, she's determined to be the one deciding when and how much, the one calling the shots.

Poland, 1940. The Russian army invades the beautiful city streets of Vilna. Soldiers storm 10-year-old Esther Rudomin's house and arrest her entire family. The Rudomins, the soldiers say, are "capitalists - enemies of the people". Forced from their home and friends, the Rudomins are herded onto crowded cattle cars. Their destination: the endless steppe of Siberia.

What if your town was sliding underwater, and everyone was ordered to pack up and leave? How would you and your friends spend your last days together? While the adults plan for the future, box up their possessions, and find new places to live, Keeley Hewitt and her friends decide to go out with a bang.

Lauren DeStefano makes a stellar debut with this chilling tale. The first installment of a planned trilogy, Wither introduces listeners to a bleak world where a mysterious disease kills most women by the age of 20 and men by the age of 25. Like many girls her age, 16-year-old Rhine has been captured and forced into marriage in an effort to keep the population growing. But, despite her new husband’s wealth, she wants nothing more than to escape her servitude and return home before time runs out.

Clark Kent has always been faster, stronger - better - than everyone around him. But he wasn't raised to show off, and drawing attention to himself could be dangerous. Lately it's difficult to hold back and keep his heroics in the shadows. When Clark follows the sound of a girl crying, he comes across Gloria Alvarez and discovers a dark secret lurking in Smallville. Turns out, Clark's not the only one hiding something. Teaming up with his best friend, Lana Lang, he throws himself into the pursuit of the truth. What evil lies below the surface of his small town?

In this parenting classic, Dr. Stanley Turecki, one of the nation's most respected experts on children and discipline—and himself the father of a once difficult child—offers compassionate and practical advice to parents of hard-to-raise children.

In his entertaining and inspiring follow-up to Love Does, Bob Goff takes listeners on a journey into the secret of living without fear, constraint, or worry. This liberated existence we all long for is as simple to say as it is difficult to do: We are called to love everybody, always – even when it’s really difficult.

Hunter, Autumn, and Summer - three of Kristina Snow's five children - live in different homes, with different guardians and different last names. They share only a predisposition for addiction and a host of troubled feelings toward the mother who barely knows them, a mother who has been riding with the monster, crank, for 20 years.

It’s the night before Death-Cast goes live, and there’s one question on everyone’s mind: Can Death-Cast actually predict when someone will die, or is it just an elaborate hoax? Orion Pagan has waited years for someone to tell him that he’s going to die. He has a serious heart condition, and he signed up for Death-Cast so he could know what’s coming. Valentino Prince is restarting his life in New York. He has a long and promising future ahead and he only registered for Death-Cast after his twin sister nearly died in a car accident.

Miranda's disbelief turns to fear in a split second when a meteor knocks the Moon closer to the Earth. How should her family prepare for the future when worldwide tsunamis wipe out the coasts, earthquakes rock the continents, and volcanic ash blocks out the sun?

Misbah is a dreamer and storyteller, newly married to Toufiq in an arranged match. After their young life is shaken by tragedy, they come to the United States and open the Clouds' Rest Inn Motel, hoping for a new start.

Everyone knows Alice slept with two guys at one party. When Healy High star quarterback Brandon Fitzsimmons dies in a car crash, it was because he was sexting with Alice. Ask anybody. Rumor has it Alice Franklin is a slut. It's written all over the "slut stall" in the girls' bathroom: "Alice had sex in exchange for math test answers" and "Alice got an abortion last semester." After Brandon dies, the rumors start to spiral out of control.

Jackie does not like surprises. Chaos is the enemy! The best way to get her successful, busy parents to notice her is to be perfect. The perfect look, the perfect grades—the perfect daughter. And then Jackie's family dies in a freak car accident and she has to move cross-country to live with the Walters—her new guardians. Now Jackie must trade in her Type A personality and New York City apartment for a Colorado ranch and all the wild Walter boys who come with it. How can she fit in and move on when she needs to keep her parents' memory alive by living up to the promise of perfect?

Samantha McAllister looks just like the rest of the popular girls in her junior class. But hidden beneath the straightened hair and expertly applied makeup is a secret that her friends would never understand: Sam has purely obsessional OCD and is consumed by a stream of dark thoughts and worries that she can't turn off. Second-guessing every move, thought, and word makes daily life a struggle, and it doesn't help that her lifelong friends will turn toxic at the first sign of a wrong outfit, wrong lunch, or wrong crush.

In Alaska, 1970, being a teenager here isn’t like being a teenager anywhere else. Ruth has a secret that she can’t hide forever. Dora wonders if she can ever truly escape where she comes from, even when good luck strikes. Alyce is trying to reconcile her desire to dance, with the life she’s always known on her family’s fishing boat. Hank and his brothers decide it’s safer to run away than to stay home - until one of them ends up in terrible danger. Four very different lives are about to become entangled.

The year is 1910, and the working conditions at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory are deplorable. Bella, Yetta, and Jane all become passionately involved in a workers' strike: then bear witness to a catastrophic fire that changes everything.

Theodore Finch is fascinated by death, and he constantly thinks of ways he might die. But each time, something good, no matter how small, stops him. Violet Markey lives for the future, counting the days until graduation, when she can escape her Indiana town and her aching grief in the wake of her sister's recent death. When Finch and Violet meet on the ledge of the bell tower at school, it's unclear who saves whom.

Welcome to New York City's Upper East Side, where my friends and I live, go to school, play, and sleep - sometimes with each other. S is back from boarding school, and if we aren't careful, she's going to win over our teachers, wear that dress we couldn't fit into, steal our boyfriends' hearts, and basically ruin our lives in a major way. I'll be watching closely....

Reaching the end of their flight in The Knife of Never Letting Go, Todd and Viola did not find healing and hope in Haven. They found instead their worst enemy, Mayor Prentiss, waiting to welcome them to New Prentisstown. There they are forced into separate lives: Todd to prison, and Viola to a house of healing where her wounds are treated. Soon Viola is swept into the ruthless activities of the Answer, while Todd faces impossible choices when forced to join the mayor’s oppressive new regime.