Akron Public 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....

Eleven-year-old Gopal and his family leave their rural Indian village for life with his uncle in Mumbai, but when they arrive his father goes missing and Gopal ends up locked in a sweatshop from which there is no escape.

Recent immigrants from China and desperate for work and money, ten-year-old Mia Tang's parents take a job managing a rundown motel in Southern California, even though the owner Mr. Yao is a nasty skinflint who exploits them; while her mother (who was an engineer in China) does the cleaning, Mia works the front desk and tries to cope with demanding customers and other recent immigrants--not to mention being only one of two Chinese in her fifth grade...

Exploited by the white family that took him in as a servant fifteen years earlier, groundskeeper August Sitwell becomes tragically enraged by how his employers mindlessly profit from the talents of a hired Black cook.

Dr. Kate Philo and her scientific exploration team make a breathtaking discovery in the Arctic: the body of a man buried deep in the ice. As a scientist in a groundbreaking project run by the egocentric and paranoid Erastus Carthage, Kate has brought small creatures back to life for short periods of time. But the team's methods have never been attempted on larger life-forms.

"In 2007, Saket Soni received an anonymous phone call from an Indian migrant worker inside a Mississippi labor camp. He and 500 other men were living in squalor in Gulf Coast "man camps," surrounded by barbed wire, watched by armed guards, crammed into cold trailers with putrid portable toilets, forced to eat moldy bread and frozen rice. Worse, lured by the promise of good work and green cards, the men had desperately scraped together up to 20,000...

"Eric "Hammer" Thorssen has a problem. The people who treated him as family for the last ten years are criminals. They manufacture and sell meth as well as exploiting young girls for use in their topless clubs and prostitution trade. He needs to stop them. Only problem is, the people he wants to take down are an outlaw motorcycle club, of which he is an officer. Soon Hammer is running from the club, the cops, the DEA, turning to an old friend for...

An innocent woman is arrested for possession of heroin and is sentenced to twenty years in prison. In prison, the head matron is a black lesbian who takes pleasure in alternately loving and torturing the prisoners while paying a local bandit gang to retrieve escapees.

"A mid-level employee of a New York-based public relations firm finds his consciousness uploaded into the company's internal Slack channel"-- Gerald, a mid-level employee of a New York–based public relations firm has been uploaded into the company’s internal Slack channels—at least his consciousness has. His colleagues assume it’s an elaborate gag to exploit the new work-from home policy, but now that Gerald’s productivity is through the...

Two young orphans with supernatural powers are adopted by a powerful and ruthless millionaire who plans to hold them captive and use their psychic gifts for his own selfish purposes. The children make a daring escape and learn they are actually castaways from another world.