coming of age

It's 1960 and the Parsons family has landed in Great Falls, Montana, where an unanticipated criminal act blasts their family apart forever. For 15-year-old Dell and his twin sister, Berner, nothing is the same after their parents are arrested for robbing a North Dakota bank. 50 years later, Dell recalls the pivotal three months of his life when boring normalcy was turned upside down and he discovered the violence and moral chaos lying just beneath the surface of everyday life.

As an adolescent, Billy Abbott was preoccupied with having crushes on the wrong people: a lusty librarian, his stepfather, the wrestling star at his all-boys prep school. John Irving's newest novel, In One Person, is narrated by adult Billy as he looks back on life and shares the details of past relationships and sexual encounters, the books he read, the places he traveled, and tender moments and conflicts between his family members.

An unusual format, a fully illustrated scrapbook, makes this period romance unique.  Frankie Pratt receives a scrapbook, her father's old typewriter and a letter of acceptance to Vassar for her high school graduation in 1920 and begins to record her world.  Caroline Preston does a remarkable job creating Frankie's voice through the small snippets of conversation and captions she uses on each scrapbook page.   True to the way one really keeps a scrapbook it only hits the highlights, an almost disasterous romance before college gets a few gushing pages, the first tough year a

Emily Hudson, a penniless orphan who lost her family to consumption and fever, is forced to accept the grudging hospitality of her aunt and uncle.  Emily does not fit into the dour straitlaced Cornford household where the least show of enthusiasm is deemed inappropriate.  Her cousin William, a novelist,  takes an interest in her watching every emotion and reaction as if thinking about how he would write the scene in a novel, even going so far as to interfere in events to create situations to observe.   Ultimately the novel is about how Emily learns to stand up for

In this Dickensian tale Jaffy, a fearless street urchin, is almost eaten by a Bengal tiger. Saved by the titular Jamrach, a jovial dealer in exotic animals who, impressed by his fearlessnes, hires him as a trainer, Jaffy meets slick talking Tim, another Jamrach protege, and his twin sister Ishbel. Tim and Jaffy become best friends. Which does not mean that their relationship is uncomplicated. The fact that Jaffy's heart is captured by Ishbel makes that a given.

What is it like growing up the youngest of three brothers of a mixed race family in upstate New York?  At times it seems that it can be pretty dangerous.  Torres offers a short, quick stories that follow our narrator as he grows up in a family that teaches him to love, to fight and to survive.  Check Our Catalog