families

Twelve-year-old Mitch, spending the summer with his grandparents at Bird Lake after his parents' separation, becomes friends with ten-year-old Spencer, who has returned with his family to the lake where his little brother drowned years earlier, and as the boys spend time together and their friendship grows, each of them begins to heal.

Troubled fourteen-year-old Gayle is sent down South to live with her uncle and aunt, where her life begins to change as she experiences the healing power of the family.

In 1975, life is not fair for fourteen-year-old Charmaine Upshaw, who shares a room with her brother, tries to impress a handsome classmate, and acts as caretaker for a rambunctious six-year-old cousin who has taken over the family.

In rural Kentucky in 1955, Serilda Collins, single mother of four lively girls, discovers that her orphaned nephew is being subjected to brutality.

An imaginative eleven-year-old named Sebby discovers that the strange things he has been seing are real, and connected somehow with the strip-mining operation that has destroyed his town, but getting help from his bickering family seems unlikely.

In the late 1970s, Hajdar leaves his village in the countryside of Afghanistan for the excitement of the capital city Kabul, but he and his family are swept up in the turmoil when the Soviet Union invades his country.

Stephanie's relationship with her best friend, Rachel, changes during her first year in junior high as she tries to conceal a family problem and meets a new girl from California.

The true story of how Katie, a cocker spaniel belonging to a journalist living in lower Manhattan, brought love and a sense of family to the residents of their apartment building and to the strangers they met.

Illustrations and simple text teach about shapes through a story about buying and carving pumpkins, and includes activity pages that reinforce early-learning skills and focus on natural curiosity, naming numbers, shapes, and storytelling.

In alternating voices, thirteen-year-old Rosa and her mother are trying to adopt a Tanzanian child in England, while in Tanzania, nine-year-old Abela watches her family die and her uncle illegally sends her to England, in the hopes of selling her.