Akron Public Library

Eleven-year-old Verbena Polter gets through a difficult summer of turbulent emotions and the revelation of a disturbing family secret with an odd new friend who believes she is the ghost of a girl who drowned many years before.

Over the course of the summer of 1963, fourteen-year-old Esther Young discovers the passion within her when eighteen-year-old King-Roy Johnson, accused of murdering a white man in Alabama, comes to live with her family.

As he grows up on his family's farm in New York, Almanzo Wilder dreams of having a colt of his own.

When twelve-year-old Lidie leaves Brazil to join her father and brother on a horse ranch in New York, she has a hard time adjusting to her changed circumstances, as does a new horse that has come to the ranch.

Howard's family are Abenaki Indians who fled to New York from Vermont in the early twentieth century. They hid their Indian ancestry to avoid the Vermont Eugenics Project, an attempt to sterilize those who were infirm, mentally ill, of mixed heritage, or illegitimate. Many Abenaki were victims of this program and as a result the Abenaki culture faced possible extinction. In this story Howard's Uncle Louis, an Abenaki, tries to prevent that possibility...

Introduces Lily Lapp who, beginning at age five, finds opportunities for blessings, laughter, learning, and mischief as she explores her Amish community, welcomes a new baby brother, begins school, and spends time with family and friends.

In 1963, when her flamboyant mother abandons the family to pursue her dream of becoming an actress, eleven-year-old Ellie Dingman takes charge of her younger siblings, while also trying to deal with her outcast status in school and frightening acts of prejudice toward the "misfits" that live on her street.

During a momentous summer, thirteen-year-old Aislinn's dreams include that her father will stop drinking and give her more freedom, that her fifth sibling will be born safely, that she will not lose her best friend or her potential boyfriend, and that she can teach members of her community both to express their dreams and to help others' dreams come true.

A New York Harbor tugboat captain and his family take the tug up the Hudson River to pick up and tow the barge carrying the enormous Christmas tree that will be displayed at Rockefeller Center.

When her brother Rob, a Navy cook, goes missing in action during World War II, Jayna, desperate for family, leaves upstate New York and their cranky landlady, accompanied by a turtle and a ghost, to seek their grandmother, who Rob believes may live in Brooklyn. Includes soup recipes.