At twenty-three, Ruth Saunders headed west with her seventy-year-old grandma in tow, hoping to be hired as a television writer. Four years later, shes hit the jackpot when she gets The Call: the sitcom she wrote, The Next Best Thing, has gotten the green light, and Ruthies going to be the show-runner. But her dreams of Hollywood happiness are threatened by demanding actors, number-crunching executives, an unrequited crush on a boss, and her grandmothers...

"It used to be that Belly counted the days until summer, until she was back at Cousins Beach with Conrad and Jeremiah. But not this year. Not after Susannah got sick again and Conrad stopped caring. Everything that was right and good has fallen apart, leaving Belly wishing summer would never come. But when Jeremiah calls saying Conrad has disappeared, Belly knows what she must do to make things right again. And it can only happen back at the beach...

Old Thomas Mann gets a second crack at fatherhood when a baby boy is delivered to his doorstep. A note identifies the boy as the illegitimate child of Mann's son, Eddie, a soldier killed in Vietnam. The novel is narrated by the boy.

Oleander, Florida, 1964. Through the brutal and fiery days of summer practice, Billy fights for a starting spot on the football team, the Spartans. He makes the team, but in a horrific hazing scene far from the town, he rebels and in the process badly injures his rival for the flanker position. The events that follow force Billy into exile from football, then later back into the game when powerful men realize that the Spartans cannot win without him....

"It all started with a social studies assignment: come up with a plan to change the world for the better, and do it. Twelve-year-old Trevor mcKinney began by doing something good for three people. But instead of paying him back, he asked them to "pay it forward" by doing a favor for three more people, who in turn would help three others, and so on, each act a link in a chain of human kindness."--BOOK JACKET.

As Hillary works in the miniature village, allegedly built by elves, in Sara-Kate's backyard, she becomes more and more curious about Sara-Kate's real life inside her big, gloomy house with her mysterious, silent mother.

"Summer 1967. The turmoil of Mao's Cultural Revolution is spilling over into Hong Kong as war rages in nearby Vietnam. White Ghost Girls is the story of Frankie and Kate, two American sisters living in a foreign land in a chaotic time. With their war-photographer father off in Vietnam, Marianne, their beautiful but remote mother, keeps the family in Hong Kong, frightened of losing her husband to a mistress or to the addiction of war itself." "Although...

An overweight fourteen-year-old boy experiences a turningpoint summer in which he learns to stand up for himself.

Haunted by grief and by her past after losing her family in a fire, fifteen-year-old Green retreats into her ruined garden as she struggles to survive emotionally and physically on her own.

Harlow Estrada returns to the enchanted Hacienda Estrada, a family farm in Mexico where her mother, sisters, aunt and cousins harness the magic of charmed flowers, but when she's chosen to watch over the farm, she panics since she, herself, is magic-less,until she opens her heart to love and creativity.