Akron Public Library

When her mother dies of a drug overdose, sixteen-year-old Arlie must adjust to living with an uncle she has never met and going to school on a regular basis.

When fifteen-year-old Lance Covington finds an abandoned baby in the backseat of a car, he knows she's the newborn daughter of a meth addict he's been trying to help. But when the police arrest him for kidnapping, Lance is thrust into a criminal world of baby trafficking and drug abuse. His mother, Barbara, looks for help from Kent Harlan - the man whom she secretly loves and who once helped rescue her daughter from a mess of her own. Kent flies to...

"A searing and profound Southern odyssey by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward. In Jesmyn Ward's first novel since her National Book Award-winning Salvage the Bones, this singular American writer brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first-century America. Drawing on Morrison and Faulkner, The Odyssey and the Old Testament, Ward gives us an epochal story, a journey through Mississippi's past and present that is both an intimate portrait...

'Former Broadway dancer and current agoraphobic Billy Shine has not set foot outside his apartment in almost a decade. He has glimpsed his neighbors--beautiful manicurist Rayleen, lonely old Ms. Hinman, bigoted and angry Mr. Lafferty, kind-hearted Felipe, and 9-year-old Grace and her former addict mother Eileen. But most of them have never seen Billy. Not until Grace begins to sit outside on the building's front stoop for hours every day, inches from...

Ben Storm is living the perfect life in Texas at a children's home. Suddenly his entire source of stability and friendships are ripped away when he is told he will be moving to Southern California. After a few months, his relatives turn him over to a man they say is his dad and he finds himself living a tenuous situation with a father he has never known. Unable to forge a relationship with his father due to years spent apart because of his dad's chemical...

The three of them-a twelve-year-old boy, his older brother, their father-have won the war: the fathers term for his bitter divorce and custody battle. They leave their Kansas home and drive through the night to Albuquerque, eager to begin again, united by the thrilling possibility of carving out a new life together. The boys go to school, join basketball teams, make friends. Meanwhile their father works from home, smoking cheap cigars to hide another...

Pearl Jaeger is seventeen and homeless after drugs, poverty, and addiction unraveled the life she shared with JJ, her formerly glamorous rock star mother. When tragedy brings a chance to start over at an elite boarding school, she doesn't hesitate. Yet the only salvation comes from an art teacher as troubled as Pearl, and she faces the stark reality that what she thought she wanted isn't straightforward.

"A searing and profound Southern odyssey by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward. In Jesmyn Ward's first novel since her National Book Award-winning Salvage the Bones, this singular American writer brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first-century America. Drawing on Morrison and Faulkner, The Odyssey and the Old Testament, Ward gives us an epochal story, a journey through Mississippi's past and present that is both an intimate portrait...