From the Publisher: Gloria Whelan's National Book Award-winning novel, chronicles the breathtaking story of a remarkable young woman who dares to defy fate. Like many girls her age in India, thirteen-year-old Koly faces her arranged marriage with hope and courage. But Koly's story takes a terrible turn when in the wake of the ceremony, she discovers she's been horribly misled; her life has been sold for a dowry. In prose both graceful and unflinching,...

One by one, four ducklings find the courage to jump into the pond and paddle with Mama Duck, until only Little Quack is left in the nest, trying to be brave.

"Born in West Africa in the mid-eighteenth century, Maryam Prescilla Grace survives capture, enslavement, the Atlantic crossing, and a brief stint as a pirate's ward, acting as both a spy and translator. Maryam learns midwifery from a Caribbean-born woman. Those skills allow her to sometimes transcend the racial and class barriers of her enslavement, as she tries to balance the lives and health of her own people with the cruel economic mandates of...

In this skillfully told novel by the author of The Bean Trees, a young woman returns to her hometown to care for her father and, without knowing it, herself. As usual, Codi is seeking to avoid life, but instead she finds plenty of it. She begins a complicated romance with a former boyfriend, corresponds with her sister, Hallie, who is kidnapped and then murdered in Nicaragua, tries to convince her father that his declining mental abilities are interfering...

Orphaned in the cholera epidemic of 1833, Adria Starr was found by a slave named Louis, a man who passed up an opportunity to escape his bondage in order to tend to the sick and bury the dead. Twelve years later, nineteen-year-old Adria is determined to find a way to buy Louis's freedom. But in Springfield, Kentucky, she'll face an uphill battle. Meanwhile, Adria is pursued by several young gentlemen, a new pastor arrives in town, and the woman who...

Cassie Lockwood's mother died when she was little, so Cassie traveled with her father's Wild West show and became an amazingly skillful trick rider. When her father died, Cassie stayed with the show. Now she's discovered that "Uncle" Jason, the show's manager, has driven the show into debt and absconded with what little was left. Devastated, Cassie decides to try to find the hidden valley where her father had dreamed of putting down roots.

How could two hardworking people do everything right in life, a woman asks, and end up destitute? Willa Knox and her husband followed all the rules as responsible parents and professionals, and have nothing to show for it but debts and an inherited brick house that is falling apart. The magazine where Willa worked has folded; the college where her husband had tenure has closed. Their dubious shelter is also the only option for a disabled father-in-law...

When Momma abandoned Dicey Tillerman and her three siblings in a mall parking lot and was later traced to an asylum where she lay unrecognizing, unknowing, she left her four children no choice but to get on by themselves. They set off alone on foot over hundreds of miles until they finally found someone to take them in. Gramʹs rundown farm isnʹt perfect, but they can stay together as a family -- which is all Dicey really wanted. But after watching...

During World War II, after moving with her parents to Willow Run, Michigan, when her father gets a job in the B-24 bomber-building factory, eleven-year-old Meggie learns about different kinds of bravery from all of the people around her.

Germany, 1946: Emmy Clarke is a librarian not a soldier. But that doesn't stop the Library of Congress from sending her overseas to Germany to help the Monuments Men retrieve and catalog precious literature that was plundered by the Nazis. The Offenbach Archival Depot and its work may get less attention than returning art to its rightful owners, but for Emmy, who sees the personalized messages on the inside of the books and the notes in margins of...