Akron Public Library

Over the past two decades, Nick Horrigan has built a quiet, safe life for himself, living as much under the radar as possible. But all of that shatters when, in the middle of the night, a SWAT team bursts into his apartment, grabs him and drags him to a waiting helicopter. A terrorist--someone Nick has never heard of--has seized control of a nuclear reactor, threatening to blow it up. And the only person he'll talk to is Nick, promising to tell Nick...

Set in contemporary Moscow where 12 men must decide the fate of a young man accused of murdering his step-father. Consigned to a makeshift jury room, one by one each man takes center stage to confront, connect, and confess while the accused awaits a verdict and revisits his heartbreaking journey through war in flashbacks.

Twelve-year-old Trevor has an adult problem to deal with: how to protect himself, his sisters, and his mother from his abusive stepfather (currently in prison) and he thinks the way to do that is to take up boxing--although he would really rather draw.

The author describes how, at the age of eleven, he rescued his stepfather after an accident with farm machinery and how he helped to keep the farm running until his stepfather recovered nearly a year later.

"Fifteen-year-old Gordie is trying to build a new life after tragically losing his family, but when his abusive father returns, Gordie must confront the traumas of the past"--

The experiences of high-schooler Savannah, following her decision to take her eight-year-old half brother from his abusive father and their oblivious mother, are interspersed with the earlier story of her mother, Alice, as she meets Savannah's father and unexpectedly becomes pregnant.

"When Leo's sister Paris goes missing, she and her new friend Max must follow Paris's secret notes and clues to find her"--

Denny Roman struggles to make sense of life and find happiness and success, despite her parents' meager attempts at raising her.

At first unhappy with a new stepfather and a new school on a military base that was once an off-reservation boarding school for Indian children, thirteen-year-old Jenny finds herself changing as she makes two new friends, one the son of the base commander and the other the ghost of Jonah Flying Cloud, who died there in 1880.

After losing her mother at age thirteen, Vanja leaves Rio de Janeiro to move to Colorado with her stepfather, a former guerrilla with a violent past, and begins a journey through America to find her biological father.