family problems

To escape problems with both of her parents throughout her childhood in the 1940s and 50s, Pearl Harbor Keenan reaches out to Walking Mary, a strange old woman who meets every single passenger train that pulls into the Framburg depot.

Fourteen-year-old Jane Prentice, orphaned daughter of an English earl, arrives in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1776 to find her family and her loyalties divided over the question of American independence.

Filled with guilt over his younger sister's kidnapping, teenaged Fin tries to rescue her and in the process learns about a dark family secret.

After years of being shuffled from town to town and back and forth between her divorced parents, twelve-year-old Leah, now living permanently with her father and stepmother, finds it difficult to adjust to her new situation and the circumstances that made it possible.

When she agrees to meet with Jasmine as a peer counselor at their middle school, Antonia never dreams that this girl with the black lipstick and pierced eyebrow will end up helping her deal with the serious problems she faces at home and become a good friend.

When Trina's father falls into a severe depression after losing his job and her mother becomes pregnant at forty-eight, Trina faces a difficult summer even with the help of her good friend Miranda.

Young Ben finds that he is happy in the stable life provided by his stepfather despite his uncertain relationship with his moody and troubled stepbrother and his mother's growing restlessness in her new marriage.

When thirteen-year-old Rock helps his friend Liza run away from home, he wonders whether escaping from his own troubled family would be an act of patriotism or of treason.

Having fled to a family friend's hillside trailer after his mother's boyfriend tried to throw his baby sister against a wall, nine-year-old Jamie finds himself living an existence full of uncertainty and fear.

When Naomi's absent mother resurfaces to claim her, Naomi runs away to Mexico with her great-grandmother and younger brother in search of her father.