Jenny is a successful family doctor, the mother of three great teenagers, married to a celebrated neurosurgeon. But when her youngest child, fifteen-year-old Naomi, doesn't come home after her school play, Jenny's seemingly ideal life begins to crumble. The authorities launch a nationwide search with no success. Naomi has vanished and her family is broken. As the months pass, the worst-case scenarios--kidnapping, murder--seem less plausible. The trail...

Gem has never known what it is to have security. She's never known an adult she can truly rely on. But the one constant in her life has been Dixie. Gem grew up taking care of her sister when no one else could: not their mother, whose issues make it hard for her to keep food on the table, and definitely not their father, whose intermittent presence is the only thing worse than his frequent absence. Even as Gem and Dixie have grown apart, they've always...

It's been two months since private investigator Cal Weaver's teenage son Scott died in a tragic accident. Ever since, he and his wife have drifted apart, fracturing a once-normal life. Cal is mired in grief, a grief he can't move past. And maybe his grief has clouded his judgment. Because driving home one night, he makes his first big mistake. A girl drenched in rain taps on his car window and asks for a ride as he sits at a stoplight. Even though...

Jason has just learned that his Afghan mother has been living illegally in the United States since his father was killed in Afghanistan. Although Jason was born in the US, it's hard to feel American now when he's terrified that his mother will be discovered -- and that they will be separated. When he sees his mother being escorted from her workplace by two officers, Jason feels completely alone. He boards a train with the hope of finding his aunt...

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.

Perhaps adolescent boys have had better reasons to run away from home than young Sammy Moore, but Sammy might never have done anything about it had he not encountered the tramp named Lefty and his trained bull terrier. The appeal that life on the road with these two offers is one of continuous adventure, so Sammy heads west. Swept along through a trail of unfortunate events, Sammy finds himself as front man for a giant hunchback named Jake and his...

"Lillian Walsh and Grace Bennett have learned so much already about caring for children in distress. It hasn't been easy, but it becomes even more difficult when they suddenly discover that three children have run away. Concerned for the trio's safety, the sisters will do all they can to find the children. But the runaways are not the only thing putting the future of the children's home in question. Lillian is faced with choosing between her dreams...

In early 1960s Alabama, eleven-year-old Ben, carrying an urn with his father's ashes, sets out on an eventful journey to the Augusta National, "the Sistine Chapel of golf courses," to make peace with his father.

This is Mark Twain's first novel about Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, and it has become one of the world's best-loved books. It is a fond reminiscence of life in Hannibal, Missouri, an evocation of Mark Twain's own boyhood along the banks of the Mississippi during the 1840s. "Most of the adventures recorded in this book really occurred," he tells us. This is a book one never forgets: Tom whitewashing Aunt Polly's fence, Tom and Huck's dreadful oath, their...

Newberry Medal winner. Two suburban children run away from their Connecticut home and go to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, where their ingenuity enables them to live in luxury.