problem families

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.

Ten teenagers recall what it was like to grow up in families which were affected by divorce, abandonment, alcoholism, abuse, or mental illness.

A small boy, not allowed to have a dog because times are tight, finds a starving kitten in a trash can on the same day his father loses his job.

When her mother leaves her family suddenly to take a new job, fourteen-year-old Phoebe tries to deal with her own confused feelings and, in the process, learns some things about love and the complicated ties that bind families together.