Growing up in a house full of women, fourteen-year-old Grayling learns to deal with death, love, and the unanswered questions raised by her widowed mother's apparent abandonment.
Melinda Monroe, desperate for a change after the death of her husband and too many years working at the county hospital in Los Angeles, answers an ad for a nurse practitioner/midwife in the small California town of Virgin River, but she arrives to find the pictures and promises the led her to take the job were all lies, and only the discovery of an abandoned infant on the doorstep of the town's elderly doctor convinces her of the need to stay.
Abandoned by his mother in an Acadia National Park campground, Jack tries to make his way back to Boston before anyone figures out what is going on, with only a small toy elephant for company.
Homicide Department head Artie Dolan and officer Colleen Greer assist the narcotics police with an investigation into a young boy's suspicious overdose death and find links between the case and the abandonment of four precocious kids.
When fifteen-year-old Lance Covington finds the abandoned baby of a drug addict, he is accused of kidnapping, and his mother Barbara looks for help from her old lover, Kent Harlan.
Because her mother cannot afford to keep her, Ren tries to survive along with other homeless persons who are united in their determination to care for an abandoned baby.
A sixteen-year-old girl in 1980s British Columbia, abandoned by her father, develops an obsession with another girl, the street-smart Justine, and enters a chaotic underworld of prostitution, drugs, and violence.
Twelve-year-old Caity and her younger sister Cara must fend for themselves when their abusive mother storms out of the house with a suitcase and doesn't come back.
When her mother died in a fire, eight-year-old Jerri thought life couldn't get worse. She was wrong. Sent to live with people who didn't want her, Jerri was powerless to stop her once-happy childhood from becoming a nightmare of cruelty and neglect. Only a stubborn belief in her own worth and a fierce will to live allowed her to reach adulthood physically and emotionally intact. This is a book that will inspire not only those who have been orphans or foster children, but anyone who has known the pain of being unwanted. - Back cover.
