Cat, a single mother living in Detroit, comes to a new understanding about the importance of family after her brother dies in the attack on the World Trade Center, leaving behind an orphaned child, and her somewhat estranged father Sam calls asking her join him in a ceremony to honor her brother in the Jewish church--a faith they no longer practice.
Seventh-grader, Alice, discovers that turning thirteen will make her the woman of the house, so she devises a plan to get more appreciation from her father and older brother.
Twelve-year-old Randi, unhappy about moving from Brooklyn to Deer Creek, Tennessee, after her mother's death, soon finds new friends and a case to solve surrounding a stolen time capsule and rumors of a centuries-old treasure.
Anne Elliot, persuaded by family and friends that the charming and handsome Frederick Wentworth is not worthy of her regard, questions her decision to send him away until he returns seven years later, with his circumstances much improved.
A memoir written in the form of a letter to an unknown man who shot the author in the back and rendered him a paraplegic describes how he embraced forgiveness, earned a master's degree, and became an advocate for the disabled.
Michael Smolij is forced to grow up fast when his father leaves--like so many other families in his Detroit neighborhood--and he takes a job at the mall, enrolls in classes at the community college, and tries to make a life for himself.
Discusses the problems and adjustments involved in having only one parent in the family and what happens when that parent remarries, giving the child a stepfamily.
In Charlottesville, Virginia, amidst the social and political turmoil of 1969, eleven-year-old Alice learns when to fight battles and when to let go from her family's elderly gardener, Doc, and begins to connect with her widowed mother.
While planning a wedding as part of an assignment for her eighth-grade health class, Alice thinks about her father's and older brother's love lives and learns that you cannot prepare for all of life's decisions.
The lives of two young people, one in Ohio and one in another dimension, intersect as they struggle to hold their single-parent families together and to explain the behavioral changes they see in their fathers.
