problem families

Shannon is shocked by her father's violent suicide. Now she is hurt that her love was not enough to make him want to live. Shannon and her mother try to make sense of his death and renew their commitment to living in the face of their loss.

With her father out of the picture and her mother working long hours, twelve-year-old Cassie unconsciously describes her anger and confusion in a fantasy novel she is writing for school.

The love-hate relationship between high school musician Will and his older brother Jason is fueled by the abuse Will suffers at Jason's hands, but a devastating accident changes everything for the boys and their family.

In 1966, when his father's attempted suicide causes the ostracism of the family in their small Montana community, fourteen-year-old Nate copes with his sadness and anger by trying to win the school science fair.

To escape a miserable existence taking care of her alcoholic mother, seventeen-year-old Zoe rents a room from an eccentric woman, but her earnings as a waitress after school are minimal and she must go to extremes to cover expenses.

In her journal, chapters of the novel she is writing, and letters to a New York editor who has befriended her, a fifteen-year-old budding author reveals her journey of self-discovery in the midst of a dysfunctional family.

Following the death of their father, seventeen-year-old Michelle's older brother--who had disappeared six years earlier--returns to their small Texas town where, with the help of S.E. Hinton's "The Outsiders, " the two siblings try to find a way to move beyond a past tragedy.

On his way to State University, nineteen-year-old James runs into a former friend and is immersed in memories from the year they were twelve and learned that monsters exist in the world--and within themselves.

The author recalls her life growing up in a dysfunctional family with an alcoholic father and distant mother and describes how she and her siblings had to fend for themselves until they finally found the resources and will to leave home.

Instead of a car for her sixteenth birthday, Lynnie receives a manuscript from her father in which her deceased mother writes about family secrets, helping Lynnie to understand more about her parents and the complexity of growing up.