Growing Relationship

The award-winning Kids Korps founders present parents with a fresh framework and the tools necessary to shape children into productive, well-adjusted, compassionate individuals. By focusing on the five Touchstones, they offer ways to surround their children with actions and messages designed to strengthen character, build self-esteem, and develop inner contentment.

In The Gutsy Girl, author Caroline Paul emboldens girls to seek out lives of exhilaration. Once a young scaredy-cat herself, Caroline decided that fear got in the way of the life she wanted - of excitement, confidence, self-reliance, friendship, and fun. She has since flown planes, rafted big rivers, climbed tall mountains, and fought fires as one of the first female firefighters in San Francisco.

With the rest of the Pretty Committee scattered across the globe, Kristen is stuck in summer school at OCD, making good on her scholarship commitments. No sleepover horse camp, no Hawaiian spa, no Spanish vacation, not even a trip to Orlando. But when Kristen scores a job looking after hang-ten hottie Dune Baxter's 8-year-old sister, Ripple, Westchester suddenly doesn't seem so bad. It looks like Kristin is about to ride the wave of first love.

A poignant true story of a woman who turned her tale of foster care and adoption by a Jewish family into a heart-rending play. A courageous and energetic storyteller, she brings life’s complex issues of identity, strength, character, and charm to the stage. We experience what it must have been like to grow up adopted. The listener is taken on a beautiful journey that explores self-identity, the importance of family, and the search for self. We follow her path and realize we are all in a constant search despite our experiences.

When Stephen's dad says they're moving, Stephen knows it's pointless to argue. They're broke from paying Mom's hospital bills, and now the only option left is to live with Stephen's grandmother in Spencer, a backward small town that's like something out of The Twilight Zone. Population: 814.

Alison Wearing led a largely carefree childhood until she learned, at age 12, that her family was a little more complex than she had realized. Sure her father had always been unusual compared to the other dads in the neighborhood: he loved to bake croissants, wear silk pajamas around the house, and skip down the street singing songs from Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. But when he came out of the closet in the 1970s, when homosexuality was still a cardinal taboo, it was a shock to everyone in the quiet community of Peterborough, Ontario - especially to his wife and three children.

Halloween with Junie B. has got to be a scream! Get ready for a "Halloweenie" adventure with the world's funniest first grader!

Up until his diagnosis, Lane lived a fairly predictable life. But when he finds himself at a tuberculosis sanatorium called Latham House, he discovers an insular world with paradoxical rules, med sensors, and an eccentric yet utterly compelling confidante named Sadie - and life as Lane knows it will never be the same.

Filming for season two of The Fame Game has begun, and star Madison Parker is doing something she never thought she'd do: avoiding the PopTV cameras. She knows Trevor will come groveling and that she'll go back to the show eventually - but on her terms. Fame can turn a girl into a pawn, and Madison knows that's not the life she wants. Fame can turn a girl into a target, too, something her Fame Game costars are quickly learning....

Young Spenser is tough. No doubt about it. After all, he's being raised by his father and uncles - three of the toughest men in town. He knows how to fight, and he's had to prove it. But his father taught him something far more valuable: Sometimes the toughest thing a guy can do is walk away from a fight. So when Spenser sees his friend Jeannie being taken in a boat downriver by her abusive father, he knows he has a hard decision to make. Should he trust his gut and risk his own life to save Jeannie's? And if so, how can he overcome such a bear of a man?

New kid Jake Garrett seems to have it all figured out. He's a star athlete, he hosts the best parties, and every girl in school wants to date him. But who is Jake Garrett, really? And why has he gone to all the trouble to reinvent himself?

Gordon Korman's brilliant and intense writing and cutting edge dialogue quickly draw listeners into the adolescent struggle of popularity and acceptance.

It's not so easy being Rosemary Goode and tipping the scales at almost 200 pounds - especially when your mother runs the most successful (and gossipiest!) beauty shop in town. After a spectacularly disastrous Christmas break when the scale reaches an all-time high, Rosemary realizes that things need to change. (A certain basketball player, Kyle Cox, might have something to do with it.)

Award-winning author Melina Marchetta reopens the story of the group of friends from her acclaimed novel Saving Francesca - but five years have passed, and now it's Thomas Mackee who needs saving. After his favorite uncle was blown to bits on his way to work in a foreign city, Tom watched his family implode. He quit school and turned his back on his music and everyone that mattered, including the girl he can't forget. Shooting for oblivion, he's hit rock bottom, forced to live with his single, pregnant aunt; work at the Union pub with his former friends; and reckon with his grieving, alcoholic father.

Dancing with the Paris Opera ballet is 14-year-old Marie van Goethem's greatest joy. And yet she must honor her father's dying request to keep their poverty-stricken family together. She certainly can't count on the help of her drunken mother or selfish older sister. When famous artist Edgar Degas asks Marie to model for a sculpture, she welcomes the income - although she's hesitant to pose nude.

Giselle Boyer and her identical twin, Isabelle, are as close as sisters can be, even as their family seems to be unraveling. Then the Boyers are caught in a car crash that will shatter everyone's world forever. Giselle wakes up in the hospital, injured and unable to speak or move. Trapped in the prison of her own body, Giselle must revisit her past in order to understand how the people closest to her - her friends; her parents; and above all Isabelle, her twin - have shaped and defined her. Will she allow her love for her family and friends to lead her to recovery?

Julia just graduated as her high school valedictorian, has a full ride to college in the fall and a coveted summer internship clerking for a federal judge. But when her older sister, Sophie, shows up at the graduation determined to reveal some long-buried secrets, Julia's carefully constructed plans come to a halt. Instead of the summer she had painstakingly laid out, Julia follows Sophie back to Vermont, where Sophie is opening a bakery - and struggling with some secrets of her own.

My mother named me Gabriella, after my grandmother who, coincidentally, didn't want to meet me when I was born because my mother was unmarried, and therefore living in sin. My mom has told me the story many, many, many, times of how, when she confessed to my grandmother that she was pregnant with me, her mother beat her. BEAT HER! She was 25. That story is the basis of my sexual education and has reiterated why it's important to wait until you're married to give it up.

Troy Billings, at six-foot-one, 296 pounds, is standing at the edge of a subway platform, seriously contemplating suicide, when he meets Curt MacCrae - and emaciated, semi-homeless punk guitar genius who also happens to be a dropout legend at Troy's high school on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Originally published in his magazine, Success Unlimited, updated and edited for today's readers, Hill's proven advice covers a wide range of topics, from overcoming obstacles to developing a sense of humor, using your personal initiative, living harmoniously with others, letting your habits work for you, achieving peace of mind, and much more.

Sixteen-year-old Samar - aka Sam - is an Indian American teenager whose mom has kept her away from her old-fashioned family. It’s never bothered Sam, who is busy with school, friends, and a demanding boyfriend. But things change after 9/11. A guy in a turban shows up at Sam’s house - and turns out to be her uncle.