Solly's stepmother forbids him to go the Circus Lunicus, but gives him an inflatable lizard that turns into his fairy godmother and teaches him how to turn into a space lizard as well.
Dogbreath, Tim's alternative Seattle grunge rock band, enters a major battle of the bands contest, but is beaten by The Angry Housewives, a new group fronted by Tim's mother.
When he no longer fits into his vagabond mother's life, thirteen-year-old Harley adopts an abandoned dog and falls in with an outspoken old woman, a cantankerous junk collector, and an energetic and loving teenage girl.
Having spent his fifteen years happily alone with his mother, Chip finds his familiar world threatened when she becomes pregnant, refuses to name the father, and confronts him with his own possessiveness.
A novel based upon the murder of Fulbright scholar Amy Elizabeth Biehl in which the fictitious mother of the killer examines the life and world of her son in the black township of Guguletu, South Africa.
Gene Cheek describes his childhood in North Carolina with his loving mother and abusive, alcoholic father, tells how he was torn from his mother's home at the age of twelve when his father filed a complaint in court that she was unfit due to her involvement with an African-American man, and discusses the lasting impact of that event on his life.
Harriet Lovatt's life is torn apart when she gives birth to Ben, an insatiably hungry, abnormally strong, brutal child, who she cannot bear to leave in an institution, but whose presence in her home terrorizes her husband and other four children.
