Central Kansas Library System

Twelve-year-old Frankie Adams, longing at once for escape and belonging, takes her role as "member of the wedding" to mean that when her older brother marries she will join the happy couple in their new life together. But Frankie is unlucky in love; her mother is dead, and Frankie narrowly escapes being raped by a drunken soldier during a farewell tour of the town. Worst of all, "member of the wedding" doesn't mean what she thinks. A gorgeous, brief...

This sprawling and often brutal novel, set in the rich farmlands of California's Salinas Valley, follows the intertwined destinies of two families--the Trasks and the Hamiltons--whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.

After a fatal car accident that reveals Emory's brother Joey's opioid addiction, Emory struggles to help him on his road to recovery and make herself heard in a town that insists on not listening. In town, Emory is the great-great-granddaughter of the mill's founder. At school she's hot Maddie Ward's younger sister. And at home, she's the good one, her stoner older brother Joey's babysitter. When she and Joey were in the car accident that killed...

In 1849, a twelve-year-old girl who calls herself Lucy is distraught when her mother moves the family from Massachusetts to a small California mining town, where Lucy helps run a rough boarding house and looks for comfort in books while trying to find a way to get "home."

Eighteen-year-old Daunis Fontaine has never quite fit in, both in her hometown and on the nearby Ojibwe reservation. She dreams of a fresh start at college, but when family tragedy strikes, Daunis puts her future on hold to look after her fragile mother. The only bright spot is meeting Jamie, the charming new recruit on her brother Levi's hockey team. yet even as Daunis falls for Jamie, she senses the dashing hockey star is hiding something. Everything...

Gail Griffith chronicles her efforts to save her teenage son from the throes of teen depression, sharing how her son's suicide attempt impacted their family and her own feelings of self-worth.

Emma's opening sentence, which describes the titular heroine's many advantages, is loaded with foreboding. Discomfort and vexation lie on the horizon, triggered by her penchant for matchmaking. Emma's latest scheme involves finding a suitable husband for ingenue Harriet Smith, and to that end she persuades the latter to reject good-natured farmer Robert Martin, despite a mutual attraction. Harriet must set her sights higher, she exhorts, fixing on...

When her brother is sent to fight in Vietnam, twelve-year-old Jamie begins to reconsider the army world that she has grown up in.

His name is Tom. His voice can calm wild horses, his touch can heal broken spirits. And Annie has traveled a long ways to find him, desperate to heal her injured daughter, her horse, and her heart.

The final entry in a trilogy of memoirs in which Dave Pelzer, brutally abused as a child, discusses the struggles he faced as an adult, and his determination to have a meaningful life.