Cammie O'Reilly is an unusual kid with an even more unusual home life. She hangs out with a flamboyant black shoplifter named Boo Boo, her housekeeper is a sullen arsonist named Eloda Pupko, and she lives above the entrance of a prison where her dad is the warden. Trying to cope with the death of her mother, who died saving Cammie's life, causes Cammie to become a depressed, angry tween, driven mad by her life in prison. The more Cammie tries to figure...

This blazingly original debut novel takes us to the swamps of the Florida Everglades to meet Ava Bigtree, an unforgettable young heroine. The Bigtree alligator-wrestling dynasty is in decline, overtaken by a sophisticated competitor. As her family members variously die, disappear, depart and defect, Ava, a resourceful but terrified thirteen, is left to manage ninety-eight gators and the vast, inscrutable landscape of her own grief. (Bestseller)

Enduring a hardscrabble existence as the children of alcoholic and absent parents, four siblings from a coastal Mississippi town prepare their meager stores for the arrival of Hurricane Katrina while struggling with such challenges as a teen pregnancy and a dying litter of prize pups.

In evocative shards of memory, a terminally ill young woman pieces together her family's difficult past in this "lyrical, delicately affecting tale" (Publisher Weekly).

At thirty, Piper Kincaid feels too young to be dying, even as breast cancer eats away her strength. Yet with all the questions of her future before her, she's adrift in the past, remembering the fateful summer she turned fourteen and her life changed...

When Nicole Reed's family moves to a remote area of the Sierra Foothills, her life is completely turned upside down. It's not that Nicole isn't tough. She knows how to hunt, and how to build things. It seems like she's been preparing for the worst-case scenario for forever. But when she and her sister, Izzy, are forced to fend for themselves in this harsh landscape, her skills are put to the ultimate test. Then Wolf, a handsome boy from the neighboring...

Through the voice of 11-year-old Reuben Land, an asthmatic boy obsessed with cowboys living in 1960s Minnesota, the story is told of the Land family's cross-country search for Reuben's outlaw older brother, who has been charged with murder.

A brilliant and immersive, all-consuming read about one fourteen-year-old girl's heart-stopping fight for her own soul.Turtle Alveston is a survivor. At fourteen, she roams the woods along the northern California coast. The creeks, tide pools, and rocky islands are her haunts and her hiding grounds, and she is known to wander for miles. But while her physical world is expansive, her personal one is small and treacherous: Turtle has grown up isolated...

Eighteen-year-old Arcadia wants adventure. Living in a tiny Florida town with her dad and four-year-old brother, Cadie spends most of her time working, going to school, and taking care of her family. So when she meets two handsome cousins at a campfire party, she finally has a chance for fun. They invite her and friend to join them on a road trip, and it's just the risk she's been craving -- the opportunity to escape. But what starts out as a fun,...

Apple Starkington turned her back on her Native American heritage the moment she was called a racial slur for someone of white and Indian descent, not that she really even knew how to be an Indian in the first place. Too bad the white world doesn't accept her either. And so begins her quirky habits to gain acceptance. Apple's name, chosen by her Indian mother on her deathbed, has a double meaning: treasured apple of my eye, but also the negative connotation...