Bent Northrop Memorial Library

Little Monster is worried because he wants to grow up to be an explorer in outer space, but that means leaving his parents behind.

There are two ways to leave the Amish one is through life and the other through death. In this personal and moving memoir, Furlong traces the genesis of her desire for freedom and education and chronicles her conflicted quest for independence after being raised in an Amish community. Eloquently told, Why I Left the Amish is a revealing portrait of life within and without this frequently misunderstood community.

The debate between helicopter parents versus free-range parents causes confusion for parents who want to find the middle ground while raising independent kids, without being wracked with worry and guilt. Somewhere between Free Range Kids and Perfect Madness is the need for a book that addresses how to parent with common sense in our culture of paranoia.

Two seventh graders, Drew and Mia, spend their summer in Half Moon Bay, California, training for a half-marathon, and supporting each other as their families struggle with medical and financial problems.

Twelve-year-old Quijana is a biracial girl, desperately trying to understand the changes that are going on in her life; her mother rarely gets home before bedtime, her father suddenly seems to be trying to get in touch with his Guatemalan roots (even though he never bothered to teach Quijana Spanish), she is about to start seventh grade in the Texas town where they live and she is worried about fitting in--and Quijana suspects that her parents are...

This novel is a tour de force of metaphysical reality, it is powered by two remarkable characters: a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home either to escape a gruesome oedipal prophecy or to search for his long-missing mother and sister; and an aging simpleton called Nakata, who never recovered from a wartime affliction and now is drawn toward Kafka for reasons that, like the most basic activities of daily life, he cannot fathom. Their...

A stirring narrative of memory and parental love, Richard Ford tells of his mother, Edna, a feisty Catholic girl with a difficult past, and his father, Parker, a sweet-natured soft-spoken traveling salesman, both born at the turn of the twentieth century in rural Arkansas. For Ford, the questions of what his parents dreamed of and how they loved each other and him became a striking portrait of American life in the mid-century. With his celebrated...

Old Guy Dad recounts the adventures of a man who, in the proverbial autumn of his years, or at least the pre pre-autumn, discovers his girlfriend is pregnant. And having a baby. Whereupon hijinks, cosmic and mundane, ensues. A collection of celebrated columns on The Rumpus with new material and never-before-told tales, Old Guy Dad is Jerry Stahl at his finest and most domestic.

Seven-year-old Billy Miller starts second grade with a bump on his head and a lot of worries, but by the end of the year he has developed good relationships with his teacher, his little sister, and his parents and learned many important lessons.

For ten summers, the Seton family—all three generations—met at their country home in New England to spend a week together playing tennis, badminton, and golf, and savoring gin and tonics on the wraparound porch to celebrate the end of the season. In the eleventh summer, everything changed. A hunting rifle with a single cartridge left in the chamber wound up in exactly the wrong hands at exactly the wrong time, and led to a nightmarish...