Central Kansas Library System

The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison's first novel, a book heralded for its richness of language and boldness of vision. Set in the author's girlhood hometown of Lorain, Ohio, it tells the story of black, eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove. Pecola prays for her eyes to turn blue so that she will be as beautiful and beloved as all the blond, blue-eyed children in America. In the autumn of 1941, the year the marigolds in the Breedloves' garden do not bloom....

After finally getting noticed by someone other than school bullies and his ever-angry father, seventeen-year-old Tyler enjoys his tough new reputation and the attentions of a popular girl, but when life starts to go bad again, he must choose between transforming himself or giving in to his destructive thoughts.

Mothers give birth in the borning room. The dying take their departure there. Outside the Lott family's Ohio farmhouse, the Civil War rages, slavery falls, and the world marvels at the wonder of electricity. Inside, within the walls of the borning room, Georgina Lott will experience her life's greatest turnings. Across the years, she discovers womanhood and first love, experiences the mourning that comes with loss, and, as did her mother and grandmother,...

One conversation can change everything. Meg has her entire life set up perfectly: she and her best friend, Emily, plan to head to Cornell together in the fall, and she volunteers at a voter registration call center in her Philadelphia suburb. But everything changes when one of those calls connects her to a stranger from small-town Ohio. Colby is stuck in a rut, reeling from a family tragedy and working a dead-end job. The last thing he has time for...

From the bestselling author of Everything I Never Told You, the intertwined stories of the picture-perfect Richardson family and the mother and daughter who upend their lives. In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is planned - from the layout of the winding roads, to the colors of the houses, to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose...

In a mining town in Ohio, a boy is invaded by an evil spirit living in a nearby silver mine. The spirit organizes a bloody massacre of the boy's neighborhood by characters from B-movies and Saturday morning TV cartoons which the boy regularly watches.

Having experienced compulsive behavior all her life, Lo's symptoms are getting her into trouble when she witnesses a murder while wandering dangerous quarters of Cleveland, Ohio, collecting things that do not belong to her, obsessing about her brother's death.

After her father is convicted of embezzlement, Becca Jones, fourteen, and her mother flee Georgia for small-town Ohio but three years later she learns that his misdeeds may have jeopardized not just her future but also her life.