Showing titles in Coming of Age

“Sarda’s main strength lies in how he breathes life into the characters and their world, both of which feel fully lived-in and authentic.” — Kirkus Reviews Bakersfield, California, 1978. At a drive-thru dairy store off Highway 99, three lives have a rendezvous with fate. For local trailer trash, Hanson’s Cash-n-Carry is a dream job. For the confirmation class at St. Paul’s, it’s an entitlement. For a big-city cop with a drinking problem, it’s a last chance. When he’s offered a job on the steps of church, young Frank Lehmann thinks he’s moving up in the world. Nobody told...

American Vineyard is a selected finalist in the 2017 New Mexico/Arizona Book Awards! As reviewed in Publisher's Weekly: Vincent Lowry "demonstrates his versatility with this memorable coming-of-age narrative." In 1980s America, six adolescents struggle to secretly build a ranch fence to repay a large debt caused by their own carelessness. As the fence construction nears completion, an unexpected evil strikes the children, testing their character and resolve to right an unfathomable wrong. American Vineyard is Vincent Lowry’s finest coming-of-age novel about youth and innocence. ...

Until that September of 1952, Luke Chandler had never kept a secret or told a single lie. But in the long, hot summer of his seventh year, two groups of migrant workers — and two very dangerous men — came through the Arkansas Delta to work the Chandler cotton farm. And suddenly mysteries are flooding Luke’s world.

Seventeen-year-old Lorelei Patio is the adopted daughter of 200-year-old vampire Sergio Patio. She never realized why her family has had to move so often or why she is not permitted to get too friendly with other young people. In fact, except for one shocking moment that seemed more like a dream, Lorelei never fully realized who and what her father was nor what her sisters were brought up to do for him. But one day, that all changed.

Deep in the tobacco land of North Carolina, nothing's been the same since the boys shipped off to war and worry took their place. Thirteen-year-old Lucy Brown is precocious and itching for adventure. Then Allie Bert Tucker wanders into town, an outcast with a puzzling past, and Lucy figures the two of them can solve any curious crime they find - just like her hero, Nancy Drew. Their chance comes when a man goes missing, a woman stops speaking, and an eccentric gives the girls a mystery to solve that takes them beyond the ordinary.

When faced with the inequities of college life for women in 1965, first-generation college student Ramona Bronson must decide whether she's willing to risk her education for the possibility of better. As fall term begins, Ramona is reassigned to the night shift waitressing at Dusty's Drive-In, which closes after the female-only campus curfew. Panicked because she needs her job to pay tuition, Ramona petitions to appeal the curfew on the advice of her friend Dimitri.

The move to World Cup Academy of Gymnastics is the greatest challenge Adrianna has encountered. Punished for Coach Kova’s overwhelming desires, she’s reeling with resentment while she sits out the first meet of the season. As Adrianna fights to regain her focus, he pushes her body to the extreme, leaving her mentally and physically exhausted.

Originally published in 1953, Go Tell It on the Mountain was James Baldwin's first major work, based in part on his own childhood in Harlem. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a Pentecostal storefront church in Harlem.

It has been centuries since the Draconic Army took wing, almost extinguishing humankind. Marosa Vetalda is a prisoner in her own home, controlled by her cold father, King Sigoso. Over the mountains, her betrothed, Aubrecht Lievelyn, rules Mentendon in all but name. Together, they intend to usher in a better world. A better world seems impossibly distant to Estina Melaugo, who hunts the Draconic beasts that have slept across the world for centuries.

There comes a point in your life where you have to say enough is enough. I wasted my college years on a guy who played with my head, played with my heart. I was blinded by the fairy tale, the one that didn't exist. The day I gave up on the idea of happily ever after, my focus became me. Moving forward and establishing my career. Until one day.... I didn't expect him. My new boss, a six foot two, inked rock god. I believed I was working for the record label - I was wrong.

Wisecracking, inquisitive, and bombastic, Selam Asmelash is the youngest child in her large, boisterous family. Even before she is born, she has a wry, bewitching omniscience that animates life in her Small Town in southwestern Ethiopia in the 1980s. Selam and her father listen to the radio in secret as the socialist military junta that recently overthrew the government seizes properties and wages civil war in the North. The Asmelashes, once an enterprising, land-owning family, are ostracized under the new regime.

Thirteen-year-old Mary Agnes Coyne, forced from her home in rural Ireland in 1886 after being accused of incest, endures a treacherous voyage across the Atlantic alone to an unknown life in America. From the tenements of New York to the rough alleys of Chicago, Mary Agnes suffers the bitter taste of prejudice for the crime of being poor and Irish.

Ruby Bell thought that she and James Beaufort had something special. She’s never had such strong feelings for someone. And after his betrayal, she’s also never felt this much hurt. Ruby just wants her old life back before she knew anyone at Maxton Hall, before she knew James. She used to be able to rely on her studies to keep her focused, but school is no longer a refuge—not when she sees James everywhere. But she has to stay on track, especially with university looming over them and the uncertainty of what the future holds.

It's 1990. Johanna Morrigan, 14, has shamed herself so badly on local TV that she decides that there's no point in being Johanna anymore and reinvents herself as Dolly Wilde - fast-talking, hard-drinking gothic hero and full-time Lady Sex Adventurer. She will save her poverty-stricken Bohemian family by becoming a writer - like Jo in Little Women, or the Brontës - but without the dying-young bit.

Little River, New York, 1994: April Sawicki is living in a motorless motorhome that her father won in a poker game. Failing out of school, picking up shifts at a local diner, she’s left fending for herself in a town where she’s never quite felt at home. When she “borrows” her neighbor’s car to perform at an open mic night, she realizes her life could be much bigger than where she came from. After a fight with her dad, April packs her stuff and leaves for good, setting off on a journey to find a life that’s all hers.

Anne Heche reads The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, the story of nine-year-old Trisha McFarland who gets lost in the woods while on a walk with her family. Boston Red Sox closing pitcher Tom Gordon becomes Trisha's imaginary companion - and the key to her survival against an unidentified someone (or some thing) leaving death and destruction in its wake.

On her wedding day in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1968, Rafaela Acuña y Daubón has mild misgivings, but she marries Peter Brennan Jr. anyway in a blaze of romantic optimism. She has no way of knowing how dramatically her life will change when she uproots her young family to start over in the American Midwest, unleashing a fleet of disappointments. In the 1980s, against the backdrop of her mother’s isolation in St. Louis, Missouri, Rafaela’s daughter, Ruth, wants only to belong. Eager to fit in, Ruth lets go of her language, habits, and childhood memories of Puerto Rico. I

It's Christmas and Jenny Checkland is beset with problems. The Vicar, who really should know better, has asked to borrow Marilyn the donkey for the nativity play thereby unleashing chaos on the already chaos-laden Frogmorton Farm.

As Alexandra Winslow climbs the ladder of publishing success, she resolutely adheres to her father's caution: men only read crime thrillers written by men. She publishes under the pseudonym of brilliantly successful Alexander Green, her true identity known only to those closest to her. This creates an isolating double life, but the right time to open up always seems just out of reach and the price of the truth always too high....

Elphie is a girl like any other and no other. Nothing like her parents - one beautiful, the other pious - nor her saintly sister, Nessarose. Her skin is green, her mind is cunning. One day she will command this strange and wonderful world. For now, her journey is just beginning. The road ahead is full of lessons and heartbreak, the first bruising attempts at friendship - and tantalising whispers of magic. It will lead Elphie to the doors of Shiz University, and to the girl who will change her life forever.