Alamosa Public Library

The teenage son of an Appalachian single mother who dies when he is eleven uses his good looks, wit, and instincts to survive foster care, child labor, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival....

Jack's mom is gone, leaving him all alone on a campsite in Maine. Can he find his way back to Boston before the authorities realize what happened?
(Ages 10-14)
Ever since Jack can remember, his mom has been unpredictable, sometimes loving and fun, other times caught in a whirlwind of energy and "spinning" wildly until it's over. But Jack never thought his mom would take off during the night and leave him at a campground in Acadia National

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From the Publisher: From the War on Poverty to new farmers' markets, a food expert tackles America's dangerous dietary split With a new Foreword Closing the Food Gap exposes America's dangerous dietary split: from patrons of food pantries, bodegas, and convenience stores to the more comfortable classes who increasingly seek out organic and local products. Calling largely on his own experience in food activism, and mixing in surprisingly witty observations,...

Fourteen-year-olds Raphael and Gardo team up with a younger boy, Rat, to figure out the mysteries surrounding a bag Raphael finds during their daily life of sorting through trash in a third-world country's dump.

Bone, an illegitimate child in a family of social outcasts, sees her mother's happiness with her new husband and will not tell when the stepfather begins abusing her in the 1950s.

In 1933, when twelve-year-old Hallie Turner and her brothers, Tom and Benny, take to the road seeking whatever work they can get, they find kindness in small-town Kansas.

In the 1930s, fresh from a stint in the Royal Navy Reserve and against his father's wishes, Fingal O'Reilly goes to Dublin to study medicine. Facing the arduous demands of Trinity College and Sir Patrick Dun's Hospital, Fingal still manages to box and play rugby - and romance a fetching nurse named Kitty O'Hallorhan. But Dublin is a city of slums, tenements, and brutal poverty. Can Fingal harden himself to the suffering all around him? (Bestseller)...

Sixteen-year-old Bri wants to be one of the greatest rappers of all time. Or at least win her first battle. As the daughter of an underground hip-hop legend who died right before he hit big, Bri's got massive shoes to fill. But it's hard to get your come up when you're labeled a hoodlum at school and your fridge at home is empty after your mom loses her job. So Bri pours her anger and frustration into her first song, which goes viral—for all the...

With love and determination befitting the "world's greatest family," twelve-year-old Deza Malone, her older brother Jimmie, and their parents endure tough times in Gary, Indiana, and later Flint, Michigan, during the Great Depression.