single-parent families

In a small, rainy town in the north of England, Lizzie watches as her father, as well as other family members and friends, begin acting strangely as they all prepare for the Great Human Bird Competition.

Although Aunt Arlene tries to interest her in clothing and growing up, ten-year-old Mildred is entirely focused on growing a pumpkin big enough to win the annual Circleville, Ohio, contest, as her mother dreamed of doing before she died.

In Kentucky in the 1960s, partly as revenge against her older sister for publicly embarrassing her, eleven-year-old Sassy decides to make the handsomest boy in the neighborhood her boyfriend, but first she has to find out what makes a boy like a girl, and how to know when he does.

After her mother dies, Josie becomes the force that holds her family together, but as she becomes aware of her father's dangerous hobbies and murderous friends, she realizes that her family is changing and there is nothing she can do about it.

Sixteen-year-old Maria leaves her father and grandmother in Red Hill, South Carolina, to live with her mother, an artist who lives with her young boyfriend in a tiny apartment in Manhattan's Lower East Side.

Common sense advice for teens about special problems faced by one parent households.

Thirteen-year-old Korean American adoptee Lauren, tired of being called names because of her Asian heritage, longs to have plastic surgery on her eyes, but when her father finds out about her wish--and a long-kept secret about her mother's death is revealed--Lauren starts to question some of her own assumptions.

Twelve-year-old Blue, always on the move with her ranch-hand mother, yearns for a real home where her father can find them, and on a remote ranch on a Wyoming reservation she finds that and more, including a mystical ability to heal injuries.

After sixteen-year-old Jules loses her boyfriend she experiences complications from the pregnancy that drove him away and suddenly, some of the people closest to her are behaving as if her baby is not real.

A boy whose manic-depressive mother has always told him that his father won a Nobel Prize, spends his time taking care of her and searching for clues to the identity of the Nobel Prize-winning sperm donor, eventually finding a truth he must learn to accept.