The teenage son of an Appalachian single mother who dies when he is eleven uses his good looks, wit, and instincts to survive foster care, child labor, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival....

Left homeless by the death of his father, fifteen-year-old Charley Thompson sets off with a racehorse, Lean on Pete, on a perilous treck from Portland, Oregon to Wyoming to find a distant aunt, hoping to regain stability in his life.

"Absence makes the heart grow fonder... right? Everyone knows that Nick and Charlie love their nearly inseparable life together. But soon Nick will be leaving for university, and Charlie, a year younger, will be left behind. Everyone's asking if they're staying together, which is a stupid question... or at least that's what Nick and Charlie assume at first. As the time to say goodbye gets inevitably closer, both Nick and Charlie start to question...

"From the author of the "lyrical and compelling" (USA Today) novel A Good American comes a powerful story of two friends and the unintended consequences of friendship, loss, and hope. For Robert Carter, life in his coastal Maine hometown is comfortably predictable. But in 1976, on his first day of eighth grade, he meets Nathan Tilly, who changes everything. Nathan is confident, fearless, impetuous--and fascinated by kites and flying. Robert and Nathan's...

"There was a time when the world was sweeter... when the women in Beaufort, North Carolina, wore dresses, and the men donned hats. Every April, when the wind smells of both the sea and lilacs, Landon Carter remembers 1958, his last year at Beaufort High. Landon had dated a girl or two, and even once sworn that he'd been in love. Certainly the last person he thought he'd fall for was Jamie, the shy, almost ethereal daughter of the town's Baptist minister......

Relates a story of love, sexual passion, painful adolescence, and devastating betrayal as seen through the eyes of a thirteen-year-old boy--and the man he later becomes--looking back on the events of a single long, hot, and life-altering weekend.

Steven dropped to his knees next to the paramedic. "Jenna." Her eyes opened and in them he saw shock and tears and guilt. "I'm so sorry, Steven. I should have listened to you." Steven noticed the smears of blood on her worn Duke T-shirt. "Any other wounds?" he asked the paramedic.Only her throat. the blood on her shirt appears to be her own." "We found bloody handprints on the carpet where she crawled from the bedroom," said Uniform Two.Steven's gut...

"Paul Walden is not an alpha lobster, the hypermasculine crustacean king who intimidates the other male lobsters, beds all the lady lobsters, and "wins" at life. At least not according to the ego-bursting feedback he's given in his freshman seminar. But Paul finds a funny, faithful friend in Roby Smalls, and maybe - oh god, please - he's beginning to catch the interest of smart, beautiful Natalia Gutierrez. Cruising through high school as a sauced-out,...

"Leaving their Pennsylvania home to forge a new life in the untamed Oregon Territory of 1845, the Colter family is ambushed by a kill crazy gang of Indians on the Oregon Trail. Fifteen-year-old Tim Colter manages to escape and hide--only to return and find his parents butchered, his sisters Nancy and Margaret missing. Forced to fight for his life, the young Colter embarks on a perilous journey across a lawless wilderness, hoping to save his sisters...

Thirteen-year-old Rob Peck is left to take charge of his mother, aunt, a few animals on a hardscrabble five-acre Vermont farm.