Young Divorce

It's basketball season. And for once, triple threat Alex Myers is not the one in the spotlight. There's anew new guy in town, and Max Bellotti promises to turn the Lions' losing streak around and lead the team to a conference title. Alex is psyched, but some of the older guys on the team resent being benched in favor of an upstart freshman. Team morale is rocky at best. And when Max comes out as gay, not everyone takes the news in stride.

Seth Baumgartner just had the worst day of his life. His girlfriend dumped him (at Applebee’s), he spied his father on a date with a woman who is not his mother (also at Applebee’s!), and he lost his fourth job of the year. It’s like every relationship he cares about is imploding, and he can’t figure out what’s going on. To find answers, Seth decides to start an anonymous podcast called The Love Manifesto.

Narrated through the viewpoint of a child, My Changing Family provides children aged two to nine many tips to help them cope during the divorce process. Children listening to My Changing Family will be given the necessary tools to help understand why their parents are getting divorced and how they can better accept the change in their family dynamic.

Patricia “Sweet Pea” DiMarco wasn’t sure what to expect when her parents announced they were getting a divorce. She never could have imagined that they would have the “brilliant” idea of living in nearly identical houses on the same street. In the one house between them lives their eccentric neighbor Miss Flora Mae, the famed local advice columnist behind “Miss Flora Mae I?”

Anytime Josie Shilling’s large family gets too chaotic, volunteering at the local animal clinic is the one place she can escape - and she loves working with the animals. But when a box mysteriously appears on the clinic’s front steps, Josie suddenly becomes responsible for seven adorable puppies! Taking care of her pig, Hamlet, last fall was a bit harder than she thought. So how is she ever going to handle a whole litter of mischievous pups and find the right homes for them all?

Acclaimed author Jennifer Allison’s popular Gilda Joyce mysteries have been recognized with an Edgar Award nomination and starred reviews from School Library Journal and Booklist. In The Bones of the Holy, the 13-year-old psychic sleuth is in St. Augustine, Florida, to solve two truly puzzling mysteries: Why has her mother suddenly decided to marry an antiques dealer who looks like a walrus? And who is the woman in white haunting the man’s house?

With the discovery of her birth father, 12-year-old River has definite thoughts about how her life should turn out - and that certainly does not include any of the challenges that keep popping up! It's not easy to decide if she should live with Gram, who has been her family for the past 10 years, or with her father, who she's over-the-moon to have just met but knows little about. When River gets diagnosed with scoliosis, she fears it will impact her hopes and dreams. River decides to ask God for help.

When his mother leaves with the father of his worst enemy at school, nine-year-old Jeremy seeks to make sense of her abandonment. He throws himself into recreating the Book of Birds, a collection of drawings that his mother took with her on the day she left. While his father fights his own depression, and his sister distances herself from their lives, Jeremy turns wholeheartedly to nature, and finds solace in the quiet comfort of drawing.

For Kirsten McKenna, the world is crumbling. Her parents are barely speaking to each other, and her best friend has come under the spell of the school's queen bee, Brianna. Only Kirsten's younger science-geek sister is on her side. Meanwhile, for Walker Jones, the goal is to survive at the new white private school his mom has sent him to because she thinks he's going to screw up like his cousin.

Sixteen-year-old Travis is looking for a good time. A vacation in Mexico with his mother and two siblings might cramp his style, but he’s willing to take that risk for a chance to cruise the beaches. Some things keep gnawing at him, though, like leaving Dad crying at the airport, and watching Mom disappear with a mysterious ‘headache’ every afternoon that they’re in Mexico.

Juliet is now an official member of the Starry Beach Club, and loves working with her new friends, Emma and Carmen, to make people's wishes come true. Living away from her dad is still hard, and she misses her best friend from her old town, but she has her friends and the bookmobile - and San Diego feels more like home than ever.

Stevie’s life is fluctuating rapidly. She's starting over in a brand-new middle school. Quiet and observant, it's hard for her to make friends. Plus, her mind is too occupied. The tension in her home is building as her parents' arguments are becoming more frequent. To top it all off, Stevie's older cousin Naomi is coming to live with the family in an attempt to keep her from a "bad" crowd—The Black Panthers.

Alice is angry at having to move to Rainbow, Georgia - a too small, too hot, dried-up place she's sure will never feel like home. Then she gets put in charge of walking her elderly neighbor's dog. But Clarence won't budge without Miss Millie, so Alice and Miss Millie walk him together. Strolling with Clarence and Miss Millie quickly becomes the highlight of Alice's day and opens her eyes to all sorts of new things to marvel over.

What does a kid do when his Mum and Dad are past it? Get them into shape, decides Keith. And find them new partners. It's a brilliant plan, but he'll need help.

Life had always been easy for 15-year-old Camilla Dickinson. But now her parents, whom she had always loved and trusted, are behaving like strangers to each other and vying for her allegiance. Camilla is torn between her love for them and her disapproval of their actions. Then she meets Frank, her best friend's brother, who helps her to feel that she is not alone. Can Camilla learn to accept her parents for what they are and step toward her own independence?

High-school junior Jordan MacKenzie’s life was pretty typical: fractured family, new boyfriends, dead-end job. She’d been living with her father (the predictable optometrist) since her mother (the hippie holdover) had become too embarrassing to be around. Jordan felt that she finally had as normal a life as she could. Then came Gayle D’Angelo. Jordan knew her father was dating Gayle and that Gayle was married.

Twin brother and sister Benji and Kelly wander off at the local county fair after witnessing their parents argue. When Benji runs into a group of bullies, he escapes into a tent called The Memory Emporium, where he meets a strange old man named Louis. The old man shows him a magically vivid memory of a fighter pilot in the hopes of getting him to pay to see the other memories he’s collected from people over the years.

It's the summer before eighth grade and Flor is stuck at home and working at her family's mattress store, while her best friend goes off to band camp (probably to make new friends). It becomes even worse when she's asked to compete in the local honey pageant. This means Flor has to spend the summer practicing her talent (recorder) and volunteering (helping a recluse bee-keeper) with Candice, her former friend who's still bitter about losing the pageant crown to Flor when they were in second grade. And she can't say no.

Liberty Johansen is going to change the way we look at the night sky. Most people see the old constellations, the things they've been told to see. But Liberty sees new patterns, pictures, and possibilities. She's an exception. Some other exceptions: Her dad, who gave her the stars. Who moved out months ago and hasn't talked to her since. Her mom, who's happier since he left, even though everyone thinks she should be sad and lonely. And her sister, who won't go outside their house.

Eleven-turning-12-year-old Cassie is an expert Peacock Detective. Her sharp eye for details is why the Hudsons from across the street call her every time their pet peacocks wander away. But there are some things even the greatest Peacock Detective can’t figure out, like why her best friend is so angry lately; why her older sister is cutting her hair off; or why her parents are acting like they don’t know each other anymore. Cassie is an expert at solving things. But what’s a master detective to do when her whole world is changing, and all the answers are out of reach?