Akron Public Library

"This beautiful novel tells the love story of young Arthur Moses and Nola, and how a young man grew up to become the wise old man known as Arthur Trulove. Set in the 1950s in the warm community of Mason, Missouri, Arthur is a shy, unathletic teenage boy, in love with the most beautiful girl in his class. He is thrilled when they become friends, but he wants more than friendship. Alas, he learns that Nola has a crush on the wrong Moses--Arthur's older...

One of the most popular books of all-time, "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" has been both venerated and vilified since it was first published in 1885. The story of a young abused boy on the run and his friendship with a runaway slave is about loyalty, compassion, and doing what is right.

Fresh from a brief stay at a psych hospital, Camille's first assignment from the second-rate daily paper where she works brings her reluctantly back to her hometown to cover the murders of two preteen girls. Clues keep leading to dead ends, forcing Camille to unravel the psychological puzzle of her own past to get at the story. Dogged by her own demons, Camille will have to confront what happened to her years before if she wants to survive this homecoming....

Called "the veriest trash" by a member of the Concord, Massachusetts Library Board that banned the novel when it was first published, Huckleberry Finn has come to be viewed, as H.L. Mencken put it, as "one of the great masterpieces of the world." Ernest Hemingway wrote that "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn....There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since." A daringly ironic...

"Young Emma Wagner chafes at the constraints of Bethel colony, an 1850s religious community in Missouri that is determined to remain untainted by the concerns of the world. A passionate and independent thinker, she resents the limitations placed on women, who are expected to serve in quiet submission. In a community where dissent of any form is discouraged, Emma finds it difficult to rein in her tongue and often doesn't even try to do so, fueling...

Ellie Bowman barely remembers the incident that put her into a coma. When she awoke, filled with unease, all she knew for certain was that her boyfriend, Rick, was missing. She knew she needed to get away from her old life and recover in safety. With the proceeds of a video game she helped develop, Ellie starts over in rural Missouri, working from her cottage and trusting no one except her friend and business partner. Yet even in this quiet small...

When Marlene Queens goes home to put her late Aunt Beth's house on the market and settle the estate, she suddenly finds herself in over her head and fears that the secret she's kept for years may be revealed.

Long Bow Ranch was huge, even by standards of landholdings west of the Missouri River. The Long Bow riders couldn't patrol the entire ranch -- it was just too big -- and they were losing cattle in the Lost River Country to the Arapaho. When ranch owner old Jim Welsh had had enough, he went directly to the Arapaho and over four parlays, came to an agreement -- the Arapaho would take no more than ten cattle a year. And that arrangement was still in...

Tom Sawyer Detective is a novel by Mark Twain. It is a sequel to Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), and a prequel to Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894). Tom Sawyer attempts to solve a mysterious murder in this burlesque of the immensely popular detective novels of the time. Like Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the story is told using the first-person narrative voice of Huck Finn. In 1909, Danish schoolmaster Valdemar Thoresen claimed,...

Collects four romantic novels in which four women--a widow, an outsider, a potential veterinarian, and a tomboy--struggle to find their places when their own asperations clash with the rules of the Amish culture.