Akron Public Library

"With classes paused for the planting season, Alexandertol's schoolteacher Augusta Dyck is glad for some meaningful work to occupy her time. She even knows exactly who their town's benevolence society should help first: quiet, reserved widower Konrad Rempel and his young twin sons. Though Konrad may be struggling, he doesn't want anyone telling him what his sons need. Or what he needs. But God, indeed, knows best. Will the competing agendas of Alexandertol's...

Growing up on their hardscrabble farm in rural Kentucky, fifteen-year-old Albertina "Bertie" Winslow has learned a lot from her mama, Polly. She knows how to lance a boil, make a pie crust, butcher a pig, and tend to every chore that needs doing. What she doesn't know, but is forced to reckon with all too soon, is how to look after children as a mother should. When Polly succumbs to a long illness, Bertie takes on responsibility for her four younger...

Legendary detective V.I. Warshawski uncovers a mystery with roots dating back to the Civil War in this edge-of-your-seat thriller from New York Times bestseller Sara Paretsky. V .I. Warshawski is famous for her cool under fire, her intelligence, her humor, her unflinching courage, and her love of good coffee. But even the strongest people sometimes need a break to recharge, so her friends send her to Kansas for a weekend of college basketball where...

Pa Ingalls decides to sell the old house, and the family sets out for Indian Country! They travel from Wisconson to Kansas and there, finally, Pa builds their little house on the prairie. Sometimes farm life is difficult, even dangerous, but Laura and the family are kept busy and are happy with the promise of their new life on the prairie.

First published in 1930, "Not Without Laughter" is the debut novel by Langston Hughes and a deeply personal, semi-autobiographical tale of an African-American family in rural Kansas. Langston Hughes, born in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri, spent much of his youth in Lawrence, Kansas and it is here that he set his first novel. "Not Without Laughter" tells the story of young Sandy Rogers as he grows from a boy to a young man and focuses on his "awakening...

Cold case, indeed: a blizzard with too many parallels to a long-ago storm shocks 33-year-old Abby Reynolds into unraveling the mystery behind a 17-year-old homicide. The unidentified young woman found bloodied and naked in the snow has literally haunted the small Kansas town ever since, her unmarked grave emitting a miraculous glow. The secret begins to peel away when Abby realizes that the stories told about that night don't quite ring true. As she...

"Dowryless and desperate, Tressa Neill applies to the inaugural class of Wyatt Herdsman School in Barnett, Kansas, in 1888. The school's one-of-a-kind program teaches young women from the East the skills needed to become a rancher - or the wife of one. Shy and small for her twenty-two years, Tressa is convinced she'll never have what it takes to survive Hattie Wyatt's hands-on instruction in skills such as milking a cow, branding a calf, riding a...

Thirteen-year-old Rocky, self-conscious about the braces on her leg, has her life changed by the remarkable artist who comes to her small Kansas town to design a war memorial.

Without rain or topsoil, Anna Mae Phipps and her husband Harley struggle to provide for their two young children on their family farm. With another baby on the way, Harley sells his mules and travels a hundred miles to earn money building an elaborate WPA monument. But after only receiving Harley's first paycheck, Anna Mae grows increasingly desperate as months drag on without even a word from her husband.

After being robbed while traveling to visit relatives, Emma Switzer and her family are stranded on the prairie. When cowboy Luke Carson encounters them in a Kansas trading settlement, Emma knows that he is the answer to their prayers for help.