Frank Carlson Library

Sixteen-year old Jessie, still grieving over her mother's death, must move from Chicago to "The Valley," with a new stepfamily but no new friends until an anonymous fellow student emails and offers to help her navigate the school's treacherous social waters

When Coast Guard commander Frank Beardsley bumps into his old high school flame Helen North, sparks fly again, and the two quickly marry. Complications arrive when it comes time to merge their two families. Frank has 8 kids and Helen has 10 kids. With Frank looking to keep tight military control over the brood, and Helen preferring her loving, hippy-like ways of encouragement, the two struggle to maintain a family and home where the kids don't like...

Drama. Jerks. Another new school. Those are three things Kassidy Perry vows to avoid her senior year of high school. Unfortunately, it looks like the Universe didn't get the memo. When her mom marries the football coach from a rival high school, Kassidy's forced to move (again), enroll in a new school (again) and adapt to life with three stepbrothers, including the school's star quarterback who's barely said two words to her. And what's up with her...

After the sudden collapse of her family, Mim Malone is dragged from her home in northern Ohio to the "wastelands" of Mississippi, where she lives in a medicated milieu with her dad and new stepmom. Before the dust has a chance to settle, she learns her mother is sick back in Cleveland. So she ditches her new life and hops aboard a northbound Greyhound bus to her real home and her real mother, meeting a quirky cast of fellow travelers along the way....

Receiving a mysterious guitar the night before she leaves the city to live with her mom and new stepdad, Lou believes that if she learns how to play it, she can bring a piece of her old life home. From award-winning author Sara Zarr comes a story of the small moments that show us who we are, and how family is not just something you're part of, but something you make. Lou and her family don't have much, but for Lou it's enough. Mom. Her sister, Casey....

The story of a woman who stepped into the shoes of another mother taken too soon, who learned along the way that she'd need to find her own stride in the journey her new family would walk together--a story of how love and loss are not opposites but cohabitants in family life, and how family is the richest inheritance of all.

Mia is officially a Troubled Teen™--she gets bad grades, drinks too much, and has probably gone too far with too many guys. But she doesn't realize how out of control she seems until she is taken from her home in the middle of the night and sent away to Red Oak Academy, a therapeutic girls' boarding school in the middle of nowhere. While there, Mia is forced to confront her painful past at the same time she questions why she's at Red Oak. If...

Teenage Gerald, who has spent years protecting his fragile half-sister from their abusive father, faces the prospect of one final confrontation before the problem can be solved. When Gerald was a child he was fascinated by fire. But fire is dangerous and powerful, and tragedy strikes. His substance-addicted mother is taken from him. Then he loses the loving generosity of a favorite aunt. A brutal stepfather with a flaming temper and an evil secret...

In the last months of high school, charismatic eighteen-year-old Sutter Keely lives in the present, staying drunk or high most of the time, but that could change when starts working to boost the self-confidence of a classmate, Aimee.

Her father died before she was born, but Ella Benton knows they have a supernatural connection. Since her mother discourages these beliefs, Ella keeps her cemetery visits secret. But she may not be the only one with secrets. Ella's mother might be lying about how Dad died sixteen years ago. Newfound evidence points to his death in a psychiatric hospital, not as a result of a tragic car accident as her mother always claimed. After a lifetime of just...