Central Kansas Library System

The day twelve-year-old Stanly finds a finger bone growing into a skeleton in his yard everything changes--his seven-year-old sister Miren adopts the skeleton, which only children can see, as a friend and playmate, and as her health continues to deteriorate Stanly blames the skeleton and tries to drive it away, although it is the only thing that seems to give Miren any joy.

Eighteen-year-old Del is in a healthier place more than a year after a suicide attempt, but her aunt's terminal cancer diagnosis forces her to confront the demons she has been keeping at bay.

"The Hope Chest is a deeply emotional novel about three people who have seemingly lost all hope until one woman's heirloom hope chest is rediscovered in the attic, along with its contents and secrets. Mattie is a fiercely independent woman battling ALS; Don, her deeply devoted husband is facing a future without his one true love; and Rose, their struggling caregiver, is a young, single mother who feels trapped in her life. With each item that is discovered--including...

Seventh grade is not going well for Will Levine. Kids at school bully him because of his funny-looking chin. His science teacher finds out about the turtles he spent his summer collecting from the marsh behind school and orders him to release them back into the wild. And for his Bar Mitzvah community service project, he has to go to the hospital to visit RJ, an older boy struggling with an incurable disease. Unfortunately, Will hates hospitals. At...

"Amid a starkly beautiful but uncanny landscape in New Mexico, a married couple from Cambridge, MA takes residency at a distinguished academic institute. When the husband is stricken with a mysterious illness, misdiagnosed at first, their lives are uprooted and husband and wife each embarks upon a nightmare journey. At thirty-seven, Michaela faces the terrifying prospect of widowhood - and the loss of Gerard, whose identity has greatly shaped her...

Documents the story of the emotionally charged decision by the author's mother to end her life after struggling for 20 years with a terminal illness, a choice also fraught with the legal and moral controversies associated with assisted suicide.

"When Miss Norma was diagnosed with uterine cancer, she was advised to undergo surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. But instead of confining herself to a hospital bed for what could be her last stay, Norma--newly widowed after nearly seven decades of marriage--rose to her full height of five feet and told her doctor, 'I'm ninety years old. I'm hitting the road.' Packing what she needed, Norma took off on an unforgettable cross-country journey with...

"Tyler Feder shares her story of her mother's first oncology appointment to facing reality as a motherless daughter in this frank and refreshingly funny graphic memoir."--

Lo Gunderson feels trapped in her small midwestern hometown until she sees an ad for a free car in the local paper. To maintain her staunch anticapitalist values, she refuses to spend money on what she can find for free, so this car is the perfect ticket out of the town. Though it doesn't cost any money, it still comes with a price. Blanche Peterson is dying and asks that Lo track down her estranged son. But before she can decide whether to fulfill...

A trio of stories around the writer, Virginia Woolf. In the first, set in 1923, Woolf is writing her novel, Mrs. Dalloway. The second story is on a woman reading the novel in 1949 Los Angeles, while the third is on a woman in present-day New York who has been nicknamed Mrs. Dalloway by her boyfriend.