Central Kansas Library System

With love and determination befitting the "world's greatest family," twelve-year-old Deza Malone, her older brother Jimmie, and their parents endure tough times in Gary, Indiana, and later Flint, Michigan, during the Great Depression.

Since thier father died, the five Pepper children and their mother have been living in poverty, with only potatoes and brown bread for supper. Ben chops wood to help support the family, and Polly looks after the little ones while their mother earns what she can by sewing. The Peppers are so poor, they've never even had a Christmas. But from measles to monkeys, through bad times and good, the cozy kitchen in the little brown house rings with laughter...

A young Negro boy learns the pain of humiliation and anger when his father is given an unjust jail sentence for stealing a ham from a white man. Learning to read and to discover that things do not die but become part of other things brings the youngster new hope.

"Jin and Suja meet and fall in love while studying at university in Pyongyang. She is a young journalist from a prominent family, while he is from a small village of little means. Outside the school, North Korea has fallen under great political upheaval, plunged into chaos and famine. When Jin returns home to find his family starving, their food rations all but gone, he makes a rash decision that will haunt him for the rest of his life. Meanwhile,...

Despite their own poverty since Daddy died, Mama tells nine-year-old James Otis they need to help Sarah, whose family lost everything in a fire.

Gunstorm Ghost: A gunslinger fights to be able to hang up his guns for good. Outlaws of the Brasada: conditions are so harsh in Texas after the Civil War and with Reconstructionists imposing even harsher restrictions, Emery Bandine is desperate to protect his motherless children and gather a stake to get them out of poverty no matter what he has to do.

Ten-year-old Rupert, from a very large, very poor family, accidentally becomes part of an eccentric rich family's life beginning at Christmas, and soon sees that wealth is not everything.

Todo lo que Jeremy quiere es un par de esos zapatos, como los que llevan puestos los otros chicos de su escuela. Pero su abuela le explica que ellos no est�an para hablar de "quiero", sino de "necesito", y lo que Jeremy necesita son unas botas nuevas para el invierno. All Jeremy wants is a pair of those shoes, the ones everyone at school seems to be wearing. Though Jeremy's grandma says they don't have room for "want," just "need," when his old...