Frank Carlson Library

"For the past six months, Arthur Moses's days have looked the same: He tends to his rose garden and to Gordon, his cat, then rides the bus to the cemetery to visit his beloved late wife for lunch. The last thing Arthur would imagine is for one unlikely encounter to utterly transform his life. Eighteen-year-old Maddy Harris is an introspective girl who visits the cemetery to escape the other kids at school. One afternoon she joins Arthur--a gesture...

In a future Chicago, sixteen-year-old Beatrice Prior must choose among five predetermined factions to define her identity for the rest of her life, a decision made more difficult when she discovers that she is an anomaly who does not fit into any one group, and that the society she lives in is not perfect after all.

In 1942, Europe remains in the relentless grip of war. Just beyond the tents of the Russian refugee camp she calls home, a young woman speaks her wedding vows. It's a decision that will alter her destiny ... and it's a lie that will remain buried until the next century. Since she was nine years old, Alina Dziak knew she would marry her best friend, Tomasz. Now fifteen and engaged, Alina is unconcerned by reports of Nazi soldiers at the Polish border,...

When he returns to Illinois and the gang culture on the south side of Fairfield after six years in Colorado, high school senior Luis Fuentes, who dreams of becoming an astronaut, falls for a girl and enters a dark world after learning some disturbing news about his family.

Set during World War II in Poland, a novel based on real-life heroes follows Elzbieta Rabinek over the course of the war, her involvement with the Resistance, and her love for a young man imprisoned in the Jewish ghetto whose passion leads him to fight in the Warsaw Uprising. Spring, 1942. Elzbieta Rabinek has no fondness for the Germans who patrol her streets and impose their curfews, but has never given much thought to what goes on behind the walls...

Celebrates the changing seasons as children swim in a lake in summer, collect pecans in autumn, play in snow in winter, and visit a farm in spring.

"One summer morning, twelve-year-old Edward Adler, his beloved older brother, his parents, and 183 other passengers board a flight in Newark headed for Los Angeles. Among them are a Wall Street wunderkind, a young woman coming to terms with an unexpected pregnancy, an injured vet returning from Afghanistan, a business tycoon, and a free-spirited woman running away from her controlling husband. Halfway across the country, the plane crashes. Edward...

Before Owen Michaels disappears, he manages to smuggle a note to his beloved wife of one year: Protect her. Despite her confusion and fear, Hannah Hall knows exactly to whom the note refers--Owen's sixteen-year-old daughter, Bailey. Bailey, who lost her mother tragically as a child. Bailey, who wants absolutely nothing to do with her new stepmother. As Hannah's increasingly desperate calls to Owen go unanswered, as the FBI arrests Owen's boss, as...

"Bestselling author Jim Kraus returns with a heartwarming tale about a dog who has people convinced he can talk. Wilson Steele is a single professor and Vietnam veteran who likes living alone, insisting it's too late for him to have a family. His mother disagrees. When she impulsively adopts a rescued black lab mix, she insists Thurman is special, and has whispered of the coming of grandchildren. Wilson brushes the notion off as fantasy. When his...

In the frigid days of February, 1870, Caroline Ingalls, her husband Charles, and their little girls, Mary and Laura, leave the familiar comforts of the Big Woods of Wisconsin and head west to settle in a beautiful, unpredictable land full of promise and peril--the Kansas Indian Territory. The pioneer life is a hard one, especially for a pregnant woman with no friends or kin to turn to for comfort or help. The burden of work must be shouldered alone,...