Akron Public Library

Hired as a housekeeper to work on the early 1900s Montana homestead of widower Oliver Milliron, the irreverent Rose and her brother, Morris, endeavor to educate the widower's sons while witnessing local efforts on a massive irrigation project.

When Mrs. Rogers leaves Amelia Bedelia alone in the house on her first day of work, she follows the directions left for her very carefully, but ends up with most unusual results.

For more than three hundred years, Bluff House has sat above Whiskey Beach, guarding its shores and its secrets. To summer tourists, it's the crown jewel of the town's stunning scenery. To the residents of Whiskey Beach, it's landmark and legend. To Eli Landon, it's home. A Boston lawyer, Eli has weathered an intense year of public scrutiny and police investigations after being accused of murdering his soon-to-be ex-wife. And though there was never...

Samantha Sweeting, the 29-year-old heroine of Kinsella's latest confection (after Shopaholic Sister), is on the verge of partnership at the prestigious London law firm Carter Spink the Holy Grail of her entire workaholic life. But when she finds she has made a terrible, costly mistake just before the partnership decision, she's terrified of being fired. In a fog, she stumbles out of the building and onto the nearest train, which drops her in the countryside,...

"When ownership of the estate where Daphne Blakemoor works passes to William, Marquis of Chemsford, her quiet, secluded life is threatened. William has a connection to her youth--and they've both been hiding from the past. Can they face their deepest wounds and forge a new path for the future?" --

Tucker Mills, Massachusetts, 1839. bound as an indentured servant to the Tucker Mills bank and its controlling manager, Reese Thackery finds comfort in her faith and her friends. She vows to serve her remaining two years with a willing heart. But that's before bank owner Conner Kingsley rides into town to audit the bank. Reese starts her work at the Kingsley manor but is haunted by memories of her past. When the bank manager becomes vengeful, Conner...

A woman ahead of her time, Temperance O'Neil is happily married to her work -- helping single mothers on the city streets -- which she funds with her inheritance. When her disapproving stepfather, Angus McCairn, cuts off her income, an infuriated Temperance has no choice but to do as he commands: live, as a proper unmarried lady, in the family's home in Edinburgh. She soon strikes up a bargain with the elder McCairn to win her passage home by agreeing...

Skeeter returns home to Mississippi from college in 1962 and begins to write stories about the African-American women that are found working in white households, which includes Aibileen, who grieves for the loss of her son while caring for her seventeenth white child, and Minny, Aibileen's sassy friend, the hired cook for a secretive woman who is new to town.

Mississippi during the 1960s: Skeeter, a southern society girl, returns from college determined to become a writer, but turns her friends' lives, and a small Mississippi town, upside down when she decides to interview the black women who have spent their lives taking care of prominent southern families. Aibileen, Skeeter's best friend's housekeeper, is the first to open up, to the dismay of her friends in the tight-knit black community.

Cleaner Janice knows that it is in people's stories that you really get to know them. From recently-widowed Fiona and her son Adam; to opera-singing Geordie; and the awful Mrs 'YeahYeahYeah' and her fox terrier, Decius, Janice has a unique insight into the community around her. When Janice starts cleaning for Mrs B - a shrewd and tricksy woman in her nineties - she finally meets someone who wants to hear her story. But Janice is clear: she is the...