Central Kansas Library System

While on summer vacation with his family in Brackinton, fifteen-year-old Hal begins to hear thoughts his sister is having, even though she is in a comatose state in a hospital back home, and discovers the truth behind the accident that put her there.

In a gritty 1953 paper mill town in Ohio, Donna Lane is yearning to break free of the strictures of her family and go to design school, but she feels obligated to stay and care for her helpless father and her younger brother, Will. When Will decides that he wants to earn a deed to one square inch of the Alaskan Territory through a cereal company and TV show promotion, Donna at first finds his quest silly. But when he becomes ill, she decides to help...

For Zelda, a twenty-one-year-old Viking enthusiast who lives with her older brother, Gert, life is best lived with some basic rules: 1. A smile means "thank you for doing something small that I liked." 2. Fist bumps and dabs = respect. 3. Strange people are not appreciated in her home. 4. Tomatoes must go in the middle of the sandwich and not get the bread wet. 5. Sometimes the most important things don't fit on lists. But when Zelda finds out that...

Sofía Acosta, a fifth grader trying to fit into her ballet-obsessed Cuban American family and her affluent suburban New York community, learns to speak up for herself and others when she mistakenly reveals a visiting dancer's plan to defect to the United States.

A religious sect moves into an abandoned church in a small town in Mississippi and what follows is civil rights battles, child-selling and murder. The narrator is a 13-year-old girl whose natural curiosity leads her to spy on the sect.

"When the death of their beloved mother saddles the Copeland brothers with a staggering family secret, Jack and Lester decide they have no choice but to set out on horseback toward answers that lie hundreds of miles away. Their saddlebags packed, their hats pulled low, they leave behind the dust bowl ranch that has grown little besides family. Along their westward pilgrimage, in desperate search of answers, the Copeland boys soon realize the Nebraska...

"Reeling from a breakup with his almost-fiancée, the narrator of Andrew Palmer's first novel returns to his hometown in Iowa to house-sit for a family friend. There, a chance flick of the TV remote and a correspondence with an old grad school classmate plunge him into unlikely twin obsessions: the reality TV show The Bachelor and the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet John Berryman. As his heart begins to mend, his fixation with each deepens and calcifies,...