La Porte County Public Library System

Astrid, the only child of a single mother, struggles to find a place for herself in a world full of foster homes and impossible circumstances, after her mother is jailed for murder.

Twelve-year-old Wren, who is learning special effects makeup, is thrilled to be makeup artist for her new school's production of Wicked, but her parents' divorce is seriously affecting her mother.

Eighteen-year-old Sawyer accepts her estranged grandmother's bribe to live with her for a year, participate in the debutante season and ball, and possibly meet the father she has never known.

During a blizzard, Madison digs in the attic and finds letters and photographs which give her insight into her mother, and also uncovers a photo album that causes her to reexamine her long-ago friendship with Poison Ivy.

In 1946, high schooler Dewey Kerrigan is beginning to adjust to living with the Gordon family near the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, but the arrival of her mother, who wants to take her back, changes everything.

After being expelled from a fancy boarding school, Cyd Charisse's problems with her mother escalate after Cyd falls in love with a sensitive surfer and is subsequently sent from San Francisco to New York City to spend time with her biological father.

Maren has been very close to her mother, so she is not happy when she discovers that she will soon have a new stepfather, and when she meets his twin children she is not sure that even her three friends, Delaney, Ashley, and Willow, can pull her through--especially after the twins shave Ashley's dog Coco during a particularly disastrous sleepover.

Seven-year-old Ramona Quimby, feeling that she is perhaps not as loved as her younger sister, tries a number of ploys to get her mother's attention.

"Perfect Mexican daughters do not go away to college. And they do not move out of their parents' house after high school graduation. Perfect Mexican daughters never abandon their family. But Julia is not your perfect Mexican daughter. That was Olga's role. Then a tragic accident on the busiest street in Chicago leaves Olga dead and Julia left behind to reassemble the shattered pieces of her family. And no one seems to acknowledge that Julia is broken,...

Cline Alden's grandmother says that music is in the family's blood, but Cline's mother is dead-set against her daughter's dreams of becoming a country music singer; Cline is determined to find the money to attend a Young Singer-Songwriter Workshop in Lexington (not too far from her Paris, Kentucky home), so now she has a lot on her mind--she is hiding things from her mother, she is losing her beloved grandmother to Alzheimer's, and she has begun to...