In the summer of 1963, nine-year-old spitfire Starla Claudelle runs away from her strict grandmother's Mississippi home. Afraid Mamie will make good on her threat to send her to reform school, Starla starts walking to Nashville to find her momma, who went there when Starla was three. Out in the country, she accepts a ride from a black woman traveling with a white baby. And the trio embarks on a road trip that will change Starla's life forever.

"An instant classic, for fans of Huckleberry Finn, Peace Like a River, and Jim the Boy: when two hardscrabble young boys think they've committed a crime, they flee into the Northwoods of Wisconsin. Will the adults trying to find and protect them reach them before it's too late?"-- Summer, 1994, Claypot, Wisconsin. Tired of seeing his best friend, Dale "Bread" Breadwin, bruised and terrorized by his no-good dad, ten-year-old Fischer "Fish" Branson...

Relates the story of the life of Huckleberry Finn's father, detailing his relationships with his dad, brother, and son; affair with an African-American woman; problems with money and drinking; and death.

"Once a wife, mother, and witness to a gruesome crime, Leah Trenton was extended a miraculous olive branch in the form of the state's protected witness program. But for this second chance at life, Leah would have to leave behind her Midwestern roots to the northernmost tip of Maine. Alone and isolated along the banks of the Allagash River, she is determined to focus on the present, on her reclaimed future, but the demons of her past are relentlessly...

The search for a teenage runaway sends her foster mother, a psychologist working for the LAPD, on a dangerous journey through Los Angeles' criminal underworld, in this gripping new thriller by the author of the international bestseller Baby Doll.

"In the small, sleepy town of Moab, Florida, folks live for ice cream socials, Jackie Robinson, and the local paper's weekly gossip column. For decades Sheriff Winston Browne has watched over Moab with a generous eye, and by now he's used to handling the daily dramas that keep life mildly interesting for the town's quirky residents. But just after Winston receives some terrible, life-altering news, a feisty little girl with mysterious origins shows...

After the sudden collapse of her family, Mim Malone is dragged from her home in northern Ohio to the "wastelands" of Mississippi, where she lives in a medicated milieu with her dad and new stepmom. Before the dust has a chance to settle, she learns her mother is sick back in Cleveland. So she ditches her new life and hops aboard a northbound Greyhound bus to her real home and her real mother, meeting a quirky cast of fellow travelers along the way....

"In the dead of night, a truck arrives in Slaughterville, a small town curiously named after its windowless slaughterhouse. Seven mysterious kids with suitcases step out of the vehicle and into an abandoned home on a dead-end street, looking over their shoulders to make sure they aren't noticed. When timid and lonely, Ravani Foster covertly witnesses their arrival from his bedroom window, he is eager to learn everything he can about his new neighbors:...

Twelve-year-old Ben Brown runs away from the circus with his dog (and best friend) Sancho to seek out his missing father. He stumbles into the lives of young sisters Bab and Betty Moss who live with their mother in a quiet, tidy house. Ben's juggling skills, Sancho's trick of spelling his name with letter blocks, and the duo's other tricks of the trade charm the small family while Bab and Betty's whimsical antics and their mother's steady goodness...

Adventure, suspense, detection, and humor are involved when 12-year-old Claudia and her younger brother elude the security guards and live for a week in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. When Claudia decided to run away, she planned very carefully She would be gone just long enough to teach her parents a lesson in Claudia appreciation. And she would live in comfort-at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She invited her brother Jamie to go, too, mostly...