Akron Public Library

Every summer, fifteen-year-old Miriam Horton and her family pack themselves tight in their old minivan and travel through small southern towns for revival season: the time when Miriam’s father—one of the South’s most famous preachers—holds massive healing services for people desperate to be cured of ailments and disease. This summer, the revival season doesn’t go as planned, and after one service in which Reverend Horton’s healing powers...

THE BIG MONEY completes John Dos Passos's three-volume "fable of America's materialistic success and moral decline" (American Heritage) and marks the end of "one of the most ambitious projects that an American novelist has ever undertaken" (Time). Here we come back to America after the war and find a nation on the upswing. Industrialism booms. The stock market surges. Lindbergh takes his solo flight. Henry Ford makes automobiles. From New York to...

Mark Cloud, the son of a Baptist preacher, is uprooted when his family moves from Fort Worth, Texas to Fred, a tiny town in East Texas, and struggles through his teenage years coming to terms with life in a small town.

"Curtis Black is no stranger to scandal. Throughout the decades, he has done much in the public eye, both good and evil. But what most people don't realize is that Curtis has been hiding a horrific childhood, which has affected him in countless, unspeakable ways. His buried past returns in an unwelcome visit when his estranged sister becomes alarmingly ill and his youngest child, twelve-year-old Curtina, becomes the kind of problem daughter that he...

Joshua Wynn is definitely what you would call a good guy. He's a preacher's son who chooses abstinence and religious retreats over crazy nights and wild parties...One Sunday, Joshua's mind drifts from his father's sermon to a beautiful girl in the fifth row. She's gorgeous, wearing a dress cut down to there, and she looks like the little girl he crushed on as a kid. It turns out that Maddie Smith is back in town, but instead of throwing her a welcome-back...

In the vast expanse of late-Victorian Britain, two boys come to life: George, the son of a Midlands vicar, and Arthur, in shabby genteel Edinburgh, both of them feeling at once near to and impossibly distant from the beating heart of Empire. One falls prey to a series of pranks en route to a legal vocation, while the other studies medicine before discovering a different calling entirely, and it is years before their destinies are entwined in a mesmerizing...

"In this novel told in Spanglish, fifteen-year-old Francisca is uprooted from her life in Bogotá, Colombia, and moves with her family to Miami, Florida, where she is ushered into an evangelical church and falls in love with the pastor's daughter"--Provided by publisher.

"Complete in one volume! The Prairie Trilogy is a thematically linked series of three novels by Willa Cather. - O Pioneers!: Alexandra Bergson inherits the family farm when her father passes away. She decides to make a go of it when so many other immigrant families are giving up at the turn of the twentieth century. - The Song of the Lark: Thea Kronborg is a piano teacher with a voice that came from the heavens. She seeks to use her gift, and in so...