Cathy Flaherty begins to doubt God's promise that all things work together for good when her fifteen-year-old son is arrested for selling drugs, and she is forced to delay her wedding to Steve Bennett, but her loving neighbors in Cedar Circle draw near to offer support in spite of problems of their own.

"From the summer of my twelfth year I carry a series of images more vivid and lasting than any others of my boyhood and indelible beyond all attempts the years make to erase or fade them ..." So begins David Hayden' s story of what happened in Montana in 1948. The events of that cataclysmic summer permanently alter twelve-year-old David' s understanding of his family: his father, a small-town sheriff; his remarkably strong mother; David' s uncle Frank,...

The dog days of August...All summer long, thirteen-year-old Henry kept hoping that something different would happen, but it never did. Then, just as the Labour Day weekend gets under way, in the Pricemart where Henry's mother, Adele, on one of her rare forays out of the house and into the wider world has taken him to buy trousers for school, a bleeding man approaches Henry and asks for help. Frank is a man with a secret, and a man on the run. Adele...

Eighteen-year-old Ned, having taken to hanging out at the barracks of state police Troop D in rural Pennsylvania after the death of his father, Trooper Curtis Wilcox, becomes obsessed with learning the truth about a 1954 Buick Roadmaster--apparently a conduit to the underworld--the squad has had secreted in a locked shed since 1979 when its owner mysteriously disappeared.

At the center of this beautiful package is the short, tender story of Timmy and his shoe box. At first glance, it's nothing special, just an ordinary box with a red lid and the words Running Shoes printed on the side. But Timmy carries it with him wherever he goes, and when people ask him what's inside, he smiles and says, “Just things.” As Timmy settles into his new, loving home, he remains unwilling to share the secrets of his shoe box . . ....

Young Snyde, whose father was dismissed from St. Oswald's, an aristocratic British boys' school, returns masquerading as a teacher planning revenge.

The sudden and powerful attraction between a teenage boy and a summer guest at his parents' house on the Italian Riviera has a profound and lasting influence that will mark them both for a lifetime.

"To five-year-old Jack, Room is the entire world. It is where he was born and grew up; it's where he lives with his Ma as they learn and read and eat and sleep and play. At night, his Ma shuts him safely in the wardrobe, where he is meant to be asleep when Old Nick visits. Room is home to Jack, but to Ma it's the prison where she has been held for seven years, Through her fierce love for her son, she has created a life for him in this eleven-by-eleven-foot...

"Trevor McKinney, a twelve-year-old boy in a small California town, accepts his teacher's challenge to earn extra credit by coming up with a plan to change the world. His idea is simple: do a good deed for three people and instead of asking them to return the favor, ask them to 'pay it forward' to three others who need help"--

Story of Holden Caufield with his idiosyncrasies, penetrating insight, confusion, sensitivity and negativism. The hero-narrator of "The Catcher in the Rye" is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days. The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex...