Frank Carlson Library

The teenage son of an Appalachian single mother who dies when he is eleven uses his good looks, wit, and instincts to survive foster care, child labor, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival....

"From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Wish comes a poignant love story about risking everything for a dream--and whether it's possible to leave the past behind. Colby Mills once felt destined for a musical career, until tragedy grounded his aspirations. Now the head of a small family farm in North Carolina, he spontaneously takes a gig playing at a bar in St. Pete's Beach, Florida, seeking a rare break from his duties at home. But...

"Her photographs capture the beauty of Puget Sound. Do they also expose a darkness that someone would kill to keep buried?"-- After her husband was killed in a climbing accident, single mother Shauna McDade's aerial photography business is on the verge of bankruptcy. There's been a string of mechanical failures that don't seem coincidental. Now pictures for an environmental study create a furor when they show runoff is coming from one of the largest...

Jane Campion returns to the kind of mythic frontier landscape--pulsating with both freedom and menace--that she previously traversed in The Piano in order to plumb the masculine psyche in The Power of the Dog, set against the desolate plains of 1920s Montana and adapted by the filmmaker from Thomas Savage's novel. After a sensitive widow and her enigmatic, fiercely loving son move in with her gentle new husband, a tense battle of wills plays out between...

"As if the last few months haven't been hard enough--complete with threats on her life and the return of her first love, Jon--Annie has to figure out whether or not to believe a woman who claims to be her sister, Sarah, who was abducted twenty-four years ago at age five. Annie's eight-year-old daughter, Kylie, has plenty of questions about what's going on in her mother's life--but there are some stones Annie doesn't want uncovered. As Annie grapples...

Jen Dixon is not your typical Kansas City kindergarten class mom-or mom in general. Jen already has two college-age daughters by two different (probably) musicians, and it's her second time around the class mom block with five-year-old Max, this time with a husband and father by her side. Though her best friend and PTA President sees her as the "wisest" candidate for the job (or oldest), not all of the other parents agree. From recording parents'...