maternal deprivation

Nomi Nickel explores her options in the Mennonite community her mother and sister have recently fled and rebels as her father withdraws.

Young Levi Revel and his father, Everest, move around the country trying to piece their family back together after financial ruin and a past colored by violent secrets.

Fourteen-year-old Lily and her companion, Rosaleen, an African-American woman who has cared for Lily since her mother's death ten years earlier, flee their home after Rosaleen is victimized by racist police officers, and find a safe haven in Tiburon.

Orphan Thomas Rider returns to the town of his birth at the age of eighteen to learn the truth about his parentage and how and why his mother came to destroy Ashland, Alabama's annual Watermelon Festival and accompanying fertility rite.

Three motherless teenagers, Alice, Corvus, and Annabel, make an unlikely trio of friends, but the people they encounter in the course of their lives in the Arizona desert, including a stroke victim who believes a monkey lives in the back of his brain, Annabel's ghostly mother, and a gay, tuxedo-wearing pianist, are not any closer to normal.

Seven years after being abandoned with her little brother at a Tennessee campground, fifteen-year-old Tessa Lee learns that her mother has been living two hours away.

Sixteen-year-old Nomi Nickel searches for the truth when her mother and sister disappear from their Mennonite home.

Saul St. Pierre, the son of a forgotten seventies folk singer, has just learned that his long-absent mother has committed suicide, and because of his father's renewed popularity, Saul finds every aspect of his life being examined and reported by the press.

Fourteen-year-old Paul, having run away from his abusive father and lived on the roof of a convenience store for a year, is picked up by police after slitting his wrists and begins a round of struggles in Chicago's system of youth homes before making the decision to break the cycle and try for a better life.