Robert Morgan

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Missouri

The Story of a Marriage

A New York Times Bestseller & Oprah's Book Club Pick Young Julie Harmon works “hard as a man,” they say, so hard that at times she’s not sure she can stop. People depend on her to slaughter the hogs and nurse the dying. People are weak, and there is so much to do. At just seventeen she marries and moves down into the valley of Gap Creek, where perhaps life will be better. But Julie and Hank’s new life in the valley, in the last years of the nineteenth century, is more complicated than the couple ever imagined. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what to fear most—the fires and floods or the flesh-and-blood grifters, drunks, and busybodies who insinuate themselves into their new life. To survive, they must find out whether love can keep chaos and madness at bay. Their struggles with nature, with work, with the changing century, and with the disappointments and triumphs of their union make Gap Creek a timeless story of a marriage.

Gap Creek

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Jordan Sonnenblick

New York

After being assigned to perform community service at a nursing home, sixteen-year-old Alex befriends a cantankerous old man who has some lessons to impart about jazz guitar playing, love, and forgiveness.

Notes from the Midnight Driver (New Hardcover)

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Gordon B. Hinckley

Steve Young

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

New Jersey

9 Ways to be Happy and Make Something of Your Life

From one of the world's foremost spiritual leaders, an inspiring book that provides young adults and their parents with a game plan for leading a better life. This inspiring, upbeat, life-affirming book shows teenagers and their families how to navigate through the moral minefields of contemporary life and how to truly enjoy the opportunities and blessings that the modern world has to offer. Drawing upon his faith as well as his personal experience, Gordon B. Hinckley provides his readers with a game plan for discovering and embracing the things in life that are valuable and worthwhile. He shows how our lives are shaped by the decisions we make every day about personal behavior -- and he shows how to make the right decisions with the help of nine guiding principles. With its vivid anecdotes, invaluable precepts, and timeless wisdom, Way to Be! will be a source of both inspiration and practical advice for young people everywhere who want to lead better, fuller, more satisfying lives.

Way to Be!

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Michigan

Jonah and his younger brother, Simon, are on their own. They set out to find what's left of their family, carrying between them ten dollars, a backpack full of dirty clothes, a notebook, and a stack of letters from their brother, who is serving a tour in Vietnam. And soon into their journey, they have a ride. With a man and a beautiful girl who may be in love with Jonah. Or Simon. Or both of them.

 

The man is crazy. The girl is desperate. This violent ride is only just beginning. And it will leave the brothers taking cover from hard truths about loyalty, love, and survival that crash into their lives.

 

One more thing: The brothers have a gun. They're going to need it.

 

In the Path of Falling Objects

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#hardcover #youngadult #ya #juvenilefiction #brooklyn #newyork #exlibrary #livingbook #historicalfiction #comingofage 

Oregon

Set in the summer in 1903, a young boy dreams of going to the amusement park at Coney Island to see all the attractions, but with so much work at hand, Joseph knows that now is just not the time for fun and games. 50,000 first printing.

Brooklyn Bridge

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Tawni O'Dell

Pennsylvania

With his mother in jail for killing his abusive father, nineteen-year-old Harley Altmyer is charged with caring for his three sisters in a backwards Pennsylvania coal town, but despite his fatherly responsibilities, he is still a teenage boy and lusts after the mother of two who lives down the road

Back Roads

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Jasmine Warga

Indiana

A book about love, loss, and the power of music, perfect for fans of Nick Hornby and Fangirl. Taliah Sahar Abdallat lives and breathes music. Songs have always helped Tal ease the pain of never having known her father. Her mother, born in Jordan and very secretive about her past, won’t say a word about who her dad really was. But when Tal finds a shoebox full of old letters from Julian Oliver—yes, the indie rock star Julian Oliver—she begins to piece the story together. She writes to Julian, but after three years of radio silence, she’s given up hope. Then one day, completely out of the blue, Julian shows up at her doorstep, and Tal doesn’t know whether to be furious or to throw herself into his arms. Before she can decide, he asks her to go on a trip with him to meet her long-estranged family and to say good-bye to his father, her grandfather, who is dying. Getting to know your father after sixteen years of estrangement doesn’t happen in one car ride. But as Tal spends more time with Julian and his family, she begins to untangle her parents’ secret past, and discovers a part of herself she never recognized before. By the acclaimed author of My Heart and Other Black Holes, this is an intergenerational story of family and legacy and the way love informs both of those things. It’s about secrets and the debt of silence. It’s about the power of songs. And most of all, it’s about learning how to say hello. And good-bye.

Here We Are Now

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#hardcover #comingofage #bravery #facingfears #courage Other than library markings, excellent coming of age YA book on facing your fears & courage. 

Louisiana

Sixth grader "Boy" Regis loves his family, their Hawaiian village, and the sea. But he's terrified of the wild dogs that lurk in the jungle along his paper route. His older brother Damon calls him "Sissyboy," and jumps into the middle of Boy's own battles at school. "Fight or die," Damon says, and "How can you be my brother?" Boy is no sissy, and he's determined to face the jungle dogs. If he can do that, he can find a way to show Damon: You don't always have to fight to win a battle. From the Hardcover edition.

Jungle Dogs

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#hardcover #NativeAmerican #family #VietnamWar #northernWI #Wisconsin #comingofage


Minnesota

Once every now and again a new voice emerges to astonish and Mary Relindes Ellis’s is one such voice. Lyrical, assured and deeply felt, Ellis’s debut novel is the story of two brothers, their parents, and their neighbors, who farm in the gloriously beautiful, isolated country of northern Wisconsin, inhabited by working-class European immigrants and the Ojibwe.By 1967, the Lucas farm has fallen into disrepair, thanks to the hard-drinking of John Lucas, who brutalizes his wife and two sons, James and Bill. The elder brother, James, escapes by enlisting in the Marines and fighting in Vietnam, a conflict he does not survive. Young Bill is left to protect his mother, with only his own will and the spirit of his dead brother to guide him. The warrior of the title, Bill fashions a shield from a giant turtle shell that he believes keeps him from harm. And, as he faces manhood, he longs to create a family very different from his father’s—a family that must include not only his damaged mother, but the elderly couple who offered him safe haven in his bleakest days.In The Turtle Warrior, Ellis takes the reader from the heartland of America to the battlefields of World War II and Vietnam, weaving a haunting tale of an unforgettable world where the physical and spiritual, the past and present merge.Lushly evoking both the natural world and the complexities of human relationships, The Turtle Warriorwill speak directly to the hearts of readers everywhere, especially to admirers of Leif Enger, Russell Banks, and Leslie Marmon Silko.

The Turtle Warrior

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Season Butler

Ohio

A Novel

Winner of the Writers' Guild Award for Best First Novel

An utterly original coming-of-age tale, marked by wrenching humor and staggering charisma, about a young woman resisting the savagery of adulthood in a community of the elderly rejecting the promise of youth.

"Season Butler has written an imaginative, atmospheric and original novel that lingers in the memory long after reading. She is a bright new voice in literature."  --Bernardine Evaristo, Booker Prize-winning author of Girl, Woman, Other

"It's too hot for most of the clothes I packed to come here, when I thought this would only be for a week or two. My mother kissed me with those purple-brown lips of hers and said, we'll be back, hold tight."

The seventeen-year-old Kid doesn't know where her parents are. They left her with her grandmother Lolly, promising to return soon. That was months ago. Now Lolly is dead and the Kid is alone, stranded ten miles off the coast of New Hampshire on tiny Swan Island. Unable to reach her parents and with no other relatives to turn to, she works for a neighbor, airbrushing the past by digitally retouching family photos and movies to earn enough money to survive.

Surrounded by the vast ocean, the Kid's temporary home is no ordinary vacation retreat. The island is populated by an idiosyncratic group of the elderly who call themselves Wrinklies. They have left behind the youth-obsessed mainland--"the Bad Place"--to create their own alternative community, one where only the elderly are welcome. The adolescent's presence on their island oasis unnerves the Wrinklies, turning some downright hostile. They don't care if she has nowhere to go;they just want her gone. She is a reminder of all they've left behind and are determined to forget.

But the Kid isn't the only problem threatening the insular community. Swan Island is eroding into the rising sea, threatening the Wrinklies' very existence there. The Kid's own house edges closer to the seaside cliffs each day. To find a way forward, she must come to terms with the realities of her life, the inevitability of loss, and an unknown future that is hers alone to embrace.

Season Butler makes her literary debut with an ambitious work of bold imagination. Tough and tender, compassionate and ferocious, understated and provocative, Cygnet is a meditation on death and life, past and future, aging and youth, memory and forgetting, that explores what it means to find acceptance--of things gone and of those yet to come.

Cygnet

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Eimear Ryan

Virginia

A moving and "whip smart" (Sunday Telegraph) debut novel, following a former competitive swimmer and granddaughter of a famous Irish poet as she comes of age in the shadow of her family's tragic past, perfect for fans of Sally Rooney, Lily King's Writers & Lovers, and Elif Batuman's The Idiot.

"A joy to read. ... Emotional, clever, and humorous, Holding Her Breath will engross readers with its academic atmosphere and family drama." -- Booklist

When Beth Crowe starts university, she is haunted by the ghost of her potential as a competitive swimmer. With her Olympic dreams shattered after a breakdown, she is suddenly free to create a fresh identity for herself outside of swimming. Striking up a friendship with her English major roommate, Beth soon finds herself among a literary crowd of people who adore the poetry of her grandfather, Benjamin Crowe, who died tragically before she was born. Beth's mother and grandmother rarely talk about what happened to Benjamin, and Beth is unsettled to find that her classmates may know more about her own family history than she does.

As the year goes on, Beth embarks on a secret relationship with an older postdoctoral researcher--and on a quest to discover the truth about Benjamin and his widow, her beloved grandmother Lydia. The quest brings her into an archive that no scholar has ever seen, and to a person who knows things about her family that nobody else knows.

Holding Her Breath is a razor-sharp, moving, and seriously entertaining novel about complicated love stories, ambition, and grief--and a young woman coming fully into her powers.

Holding Her Breath

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Lisa Rosinsky

What if you suddenly found out you had a sister . . . and she took over your life?

Cadie is close to her father. They are so much alike--same temperament, sense of humor, and love for the theater--and Dad always knows how to comfort her . . . until the day he announces that he has another daughter.

Suddenly, Cadie has a sister, Elizabeth--a sister who is six months older than her, a sister who is about to move in with them, a sister whose very existence means that Cadie's beloved father cheated on her mother when they were already married. What other secrets might he have? Can she still trust him? Does Cadie really know her father at all?

And when Elizabeth arrives, Cadie's worst fears come true. Elizabeth looks just like Dad; not only that, she seems all too perfect. Until she begins stealing Cadie's place in the family and even Cadie's one true love . . . But Elizabeth has secrets of her own.

This deeply emotional coming-of-age story explores the choices you make when your family--and your life--changes overnight. Are these choices the inevitable and only ones? And will they ultimately bring your family back together or push you further apart?

Inevitable and Only

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Emma Jane Unsworth

Washington

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER “[E]ssential reading for our dismal times.” —The Wall Street Journal One of Bustle’s “Most Anticipated Books of Summer 2020” PopSugar’s “26 Incredible New Books Coming Your Way This August” Good Housekeeping’s “25 New Fall Books You Have to Read This Season” Lit Hub’s “Most Anticipated Books of 2020” Fleabag meets Conversations with Friends in this brutally honest, observant, original novel about a woman going through a breakup…but really having more of a breakdown. Jenny McLaine’s life is falling apart. Her friendships are flagging. Her body has failed her. She’s just lost her column at The Foof because she isn’t the fierce voice new feminism needs. Her ex has gotten together with another woman. And worst of all: Jenny’s mother is about to move in. Having left home at eighteen to remake herself as a self-sufficient millennial, Jenny is now in her thirties and nothing is as she thought it would be. Least of all adulthood. Told in live-wire prose, texts, emails, script dialogue, and social media messages, Grown Ups is a neurotic dramedy of 21st-century manners for the digital age. It reckons with what it means to exist in a woman’s body: to sing and dance and work and mother and sparkle and equalize and not complain and be beautiful and love your imperfections and stay strong and show your vulnerability and bake and box… But, despite our impossible expectations of women, Emma Jane Unsworth never lets Jenny off the hook. Jenny’s life is falling apart at her own hands and whether or not she has help from her mother or her friends, Jenny is the only one who will be able to pick up the pieces and learn how to, more or less, grow up. Or will she?

Grown Ups

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Jerry Spinelli

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Stargirl, a teen who animates quiet Mica High with her colorful personality, suddenly finds herself shunned for her refusal to conform.

Stargirl

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#hardcover #fiction #lgbt #comingofage #contemporary #helenedunbar 📚 

Kentucky

Includes afterwords by Ron Goldberg and Jeremiah Johnson and Jason Walker.

We Are Lost and Found

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Delia Ray

Colorado

When 12-year-old Linc Crenshaw decides he wants to go to public school, his professor mom isn't so happy with the idea. He's convinced it will be the ticket to a new social life. Instead, it's a disaster when his mom shows up at their field trip to the local cemetery to lecture them on gravestones, and Linc sees her through his fellow-students' eyes. He's convinced his chances at a social life are over until a cemetery-related project makes him sought-after by fellow students he's not so sure he wants as friends, helps him make a new, genuine friend, and brings to light some information about his family that upends his world.

Delia Ray has written a funny, heartfelt story about a lonely kid and his mother as they ultimately cope with the grief left behind from his dad's death, and along the journey find new ways to connect with each other, and their community.

Here Lies Linc

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#hardcover #fiction #literaryfiction #relationships #comingofage #contemporary

Wisconsin

Fending for themselves after the death of their mother and the abandonment of their fortune-seeking father, fifteen-year-old Lutie and twelve-year-old Fate flee their hometown in order to avoid becoming wards of the state. By the author of Where the Heart Is. (General Fiction)

Made in the U. S. A.

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Carmit Delman

Ex-library copy with typical internal stamps/markings; what's more, binding in front is *damaged/torn* 

Growing up Between Cultures - A Memoir of an Indian Jewish Girl

"From the outside, no matter what the gradations of my mixed heritage, the shadow of Indian brown in my skin caused others to automatically perceive me as Hindu or Muslim. . . . Still, I trekked through life with the spirit of a Jew, fleshed out by the unique challenges and wonders of a combined brown and white tradition." In the politics of skin color, Carmit Delman is an ambassador from a world of which few are even aware. Her mother is a direct descendant of the Bene Israel, a tiny, ancient community of Jews thriving amidst the rich cultural tableau of Western India. Her father is American, a Jewish man of Eastern European descent. They met while working the land of a nascent Israeli state. Bound by love for each other and that newborn country, they hardly took notice of the interracial aspect of their union. But their daughter, Carmit, growing up in America, was well aware of her uncommon heritage. "Burnt Bread and Chutney is a remarkable synthesis of the universal and the exotic. Carmit Delman's memories of the sometimes painful, sometimes pleasurable, often awkward moments of her adolescence juxtapose strikingly with mythic tales of her female ancestors living in the Indian-Jewish community. As rites and traditions, smells and textures intertwine, Carmit's unique cultural identity evolves. It is a youth spent dancing on the roofs of bomb shelters on a kibbutz in Israel--and the knowledge of a heritage marked by arranged marriages and archaic rules and roles. It is coming of age in Jewish summer camps and at KISS concerts--and the inevitable combination of old and new: ancient customs and modern attitudes, Jewish, Indian, and American. Carmit Delman's journey throughreligious traditions, family tensions, and social tribulations to a healthy sense of wholeness and self is rendered with grace and an acute sense of depth. "Burnt Bread and Chutney is a rich and innovative book that opens wide a previously unseen world.

Burnt Bread and Chutney

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Laura Lane McNeal

This is a withdrawn library book, but it is still in very good condition. Please see pictures.

After her father's unexpected death in 1964, Ibby Bell finds herself living at a New Orleans Garden District estate with her eccentric grandmother and her house staff including a sassy black cook named Queenie, and her smart-mouthed daughter Dollbaby.

Dollbaby

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A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!

Jacqueline Woodson's first middle-grade novel since National Book Award winner Brown Girl Dreaming celebrates the healing that can occur when a group of students share their stories.

It all starts when six kids have to meet for a weekly chat--by themselves, with no adults to listen in. There, in the room they soon dub the ARTT Room (short for "A Room to Talk"), they discover it's safe to talk about what's bothering them--everything from Esteban's father's deportation and Haley's father's incarceration to Amari's fears of racial profiling and Ashton's adjustment to his changing family fortunes. When the six are together, they can express the feelings and fears they have to hide from the rest of the world. And together, they can grow braver and more ready for the rest of their lives.

Harbor Me

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#paperback #fiction #streetkids #comingofage #lgbt #friendship #faith


Waif's Refuge

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Kirsten Smith

California

Now a Netflix Original Series! The Breakfast Club meets Leah on the Offbeat in this story of female friendships that break all the rules. Tabitha, Elodie, and Moe: a beauty queen, a wallflower, and a burnout. Tabitha has just about everything she wants: money, friends, popularity, a hot boyfriend who worships her... and a yen for stealing. So does Elodie, who, despite her goodie-two-shoes attitude pretty much has "klepto" written across her forehead. Both of them are nothing compared to Moe, a bad girl with an even worse reputation. But the day that Tabitha and Elodie walk into Moe's Shoplifters Anonymous meeting, everything changes. When Tabitha challenges them to a steal-off, they forge a strange alliance linked by the thrill of stealing, and the reasons that spawn it. A more unlikely trio high school has rarely seen. Hollywood screenwriter Kirsten Smith tells this story from multiple perspectives with humor and warmth as three very different girls who are supposed to be learning the steps to recovery somehow end up on the road to friendship.

Trinkets

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Michael Morpurgo

So Bun concludes his story, proud to have written such a long one, and Anna loves it. Bun strolls off to the field towards his father's tractor, and suddenly falls down a cavity. The tractor is rumbling towards him... and he knows everything he's dreamt is about to come true.

The Sleeping Sword

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Tom McNeal

Debut novel reviewed as “remarkable, vivid, alive”

Maryland

At the age of 17, Randall Hunsacker shoots his mother's boyfriend, steals a car and comes close to killing himself. His second chance lies in a small Nebraska farm town, where the landmarks include McKibben's Mobil Station, Frmka's Superette, and a sign that says The Wages of Sin is Hell. This is Goodnight, a place so ingrown and provincial that Randall calls it "Sludgeville"-until he starts thinking of it as home.

In this pitch-perfect novel, Tom McNeal explores the currents of hope, passion, and cruelty beneath the surface of the American heartland. Innbsp;nbsp;Randall, McNeal creates an outcast whose redemption lies in Goodnight, a strange, small, but ultimately embracing community where Randall will inspire fear and adulation, win the love of a beautiful girl and nearly throw it all away.

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