Akron Public Library

An eleven-year-old foster child tries to cope with her longings and fears as she schemes against everyone who tries to be friendly. At eleven, Gilly is nobody's real kid. If only she could find her beautiful mother, Courtney, and live with her instead of in the ugly foster home where she has just been placed! How could she, the great Gilly Hopkins, known throughout the county for her brilliance and unmanageability, be expected to tolerate Maime Trotter,...

Thirteen-year-old fraternal twins Dallas and Florida have grown up in a terrible orphanage but their lives change forever when an eccentric but sweet older couple invites them each on an adventure, beginning in an almost magical place called Ruby Holler.

In 1905, ten-year-old Billy is taken from an orphanage to live with an aunt and an uncle of whose existence he was previously unaware. He enjoys his first taste of family life until his work in a coal mine and his involvement with a union bring trouble. He then joins a circus in hopes of finding his father.

A troublesome twelve-year-old orphan, staying with an elderly artist who needs her, remembers the only other time she was happy in a foster home, with a family that truly seemed to care about her.

NOW A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES

A Warning from the Publisher:

If you have come this far, it is likely too late. Readers who have experienced the first nine volumes in A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket are usually so weakened by their dreadful knowledge of the Baudelaire orphans' story that they spend most of their time moaning and weeping, and have no strength to read The Slippery Slope, The Grim Grotto,

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With her mama recently dead and her pa sight unseen since birth, fourteen-year-old Amelia is suddenly in charge of her younger brother and sister--and of the family gas station. Harley Blevins, local king and emperor of Standard Oil, is in hot pursuit to clinch his fuel monopoly. To keep him at bay and keep her family out of foster care, Melia must come up with a father--and fast. And so when a hobo rolls out of a passing truck, Melia grabs opportunity...

-- School Library Journal as one of the top 100 children’s novels of all time, Gertrude Chandler Warner’s story has delighted generations of young readers and launched a long-running series and an animated film featuring her fearless foursome. Now, new and old fans alike can delight in the timeless book that started it all, featuring illustrations by L. Kate Deal.

On the run as suspected murderers, the unlucky Baudelaire orphans find themselves trapped in the Caligari Carnival, where they must masquerade as freaks in order to hide from the evil Count Olaf.

"When a teacher asks the children in her class to think about what makes their families special, the answers are all different in many ways but the same in the one way that matters most of all. One child is worried that her family is just too different to explain, but listens as her classmates talk about what makes their families special. One is raised by a grandmother, and another has two dads. One is full of stepsiblings, and another has a new...

Washed ashore as a baby in tiny Tupelo Landing, North Carolina, Mo LoBeau, now age eleven, and her best friend Dale turn detective when the amnesiac, Colonel, owner of a cafe and co-parent of Mo with his cook Miss Lana, seems implicated in a murder.