Laurel-leaf books

A collection of sixteen short stories, by Louise Plummer, M.E. Kerr, Jack Gantos, and others, about teenagers in situations that test their character.

After running away from her fifth foster home, Holly, a twelve-year-old orphan, travels across the country, keeping a journal of her experiences and struggle to survive.

Sixteen-year-old Kat, whose mother is a home-birth midwife, feels betrayed when a popular, beautiful classmate gets pregnant and forms a bond with Kat's mother that Kat herself never had.

When sixteen-year-old Kate, an aspiring playwright, moves from New Jersey to attend high school in the South, she becomes embroiled in a controversy to remove the school's Confederate flag symbol.

Seeing his sister being shot to death for reading a poem at a demonstration against Serbian control of largely Albanian Kosovo changes forever the life of thirteen-year-old Adem.

Unhappy in a home seemingly devoid of love, a fourteen-year-old albino boy who thinks of himself as Harold the Ghost runs away to join the circus, where he works with the elephants and searches for a sense of who he is. Includes reading group discussion guide.

During the summer of 1971 in a small Texas town, thirteen-year-old Toby and his best friend Cal meet the star of a sideshow act, 600-pound Zachary, the fattest boy in the world.

En route to Germany in search of the maternal love she never had, eighteen-year-old Patty Bergen lingers in Paris and experiences her first love affair.

Maya, a Canadian of East Indian descent, struggles with her ethnic identity, infatuation with a classmate, and the presence of her beautiful Bengali cousin, Pinky, who comes for a visit bearing a powerful statue of the god Ganesh, the Hindu elephant boy.

Sixteen-year-old Tyler spends the summer dealing with his first love, the death of his father, and the mysterious happenings in the house across the cove.