Bent Northrop Memorial Library

Afghanistan, 1975: Twelve-year-old Amir is desperate to win the local kite-fighting tournament and his loyal friend Hassan promises to help him. But neither of the boys can foresee what will happen to Hassan that afternoon, an event that is to shatter their lives. After the Russians invade the family is forced to flee to America, Amir realises that one day he must return to Afghanistan under Taliban rule to find the one thing that his new world cannot...

In 1956, Dell Parsons' family came to a stop in Great Falls, Montana, the way many military families did after the war. His father, Bev, was a talkative airman from Alabama with an optimistic and easy-scheming nature. Their mother Neeva - shy, artistic - was alienated from their father's small-town world. It was more bad instincts and bad luck that Dell's parents decided to rob the bank. They weren't reckless people. In the days following the arrest,...

Michael, an enforcer for a New York organized crime family who fled the Iron Mountain Home for Boys after taking the blame for the murder of another orphan, falls in love with Elena and wishes he can start a new life and build a family with her, but the past and brother he left behind, as well as the vengeful son of the mob boss for whom he works, threaten his chance at happiness and he must confront them in order to have a future with Elena.

Alice MacCauley's eleventh summer is shaped by new friendship, the twinges of first love, and adult lessons about life and death when she and Theo, a New York City boy of mixed race visiting his white New England grandparents, become the companions of Kenneth, an artist dying of and losing his eyesight to AIDS, reading him the journals of Lewis and Clark and building him a secret "rope walk" through the woods.

"Charlie Reade looks like a regular high school kid, great at baseball and football, a decent student. But he carries a heavy load. His mom was killed in a hit-and-run accident when he was seven, and grief drove his dad to drink. Charlie learned how to take care of himself—and his dad. When Charlie is seventeen, he meets a dog named Radar and her aging master, Howard Bowditch, a recluse in a big house at the top of a big hill, with a locked shed...

In Jury of One, Shelly Trotter, an able and determined lawyer and a children?s rights advocate, is thrust into a world in which she?s completely unschooled ? the criminal court. Her client is a seventeen-year-old accused of killing a policeman, and she begins to suspect that he may have been involved in an undercover operation to entrap dirty cops, though his role in the scheme remains unclear. Was he the target or the bait?and what does the prosecution...

Manjunath Kumar is fourteen and living in a slum in Mumbai. He knows he is good at cricket--if not as good as his older brother Radha. But there are many other things about himself and the world that he doesn't know. Sometimes it even seems as though everyone has a clear idea of who Manju should be, except Manju himself. And when Manju meets Radha's great rival, a mysterious Muslim boy privileged and confident in all the ways Manju is not, he is forced...

Twelve-year-old Steven is determined to find the body of his uncle Billy, who disappeared eighteen years earlier and is believed to have been the victim of serial killer Arnold Avery who is in prison for murdering six other children and burying them in the moor around Steven's English village, but the boy makes a dangerous mistake when he writes Avery asking for help.

A young boy lives with his madcap parents, Louise and George, and an exotic bird in a Parisian apartment, where the unopened mail rises in a tower by the door, the bird acts like a member of the family, and his parents dance to Nina Simone's mellifluous classic Mister Bojangles. As his mother, mesmerizing and unpredictable, descends deeper into mental illness, it is up to the boy and his father to keep her safe and, when that fails, happy. Fleeing...