While spending the month of August on the Massachusetts shore with her father, stepmother, and their new baby, almost thirteen-year-old Maggie finds beauty in and draws strength from a great blue heron, even as the family around her unravels.

With a young brother in the hospital, a grandfather in jail, and their mother traveling with a rodeo, Maggie and Vern try to settle family problems.

A Masterful, Engrossing Novel About The Life Of A Large Family That Is Deeply Bounded By The Stranger In Their Midst -- An Autistic Child The whole world could not have broken the spirit and strength of the Eberhardt family of 1948. Lainey is a wonderful if slightly eccentric mother. David is a good father, sometimes sarcastic, always cool-tempered. Two wonderful children round out the perfect picture. Then the next child arrives -- and life is never...

A young girl from a dysfunctional family creates for herself an alternative world which nearly results in her death but which ultimately leads her to reality.

When Jenna and Jeremy's father shoots and kills their artist mother, they struggle to slowly rebuild a functioning family.

Abandoning kickboxing after a tragedy in the ring, champion fighter Haley is forced to train an attractive mixed martial arts student who secretly fights on Haley's behalf to redeem his troubled past.

"In the tradition of bestselling domestic fiction from such authors as Liane Moriarty, Jodi Picoult, and Anna Quindlen, a wrenching, deeply heartfelt novel about a husband and wife, a missing child, and the complicated family secrets that can derail even the best of marriages."-- Provided by publisher.

Just before his sixteenth birthday, Felton Reinstein has a sudden growth spurt that turns him from a small, jumpy, picked-on boy with the nickname of "Squirrel Nut" to a powerful athlete, leading to new friends, his first love, and the courage to confront his family's past and current problems.

Fourteen-year-old Tree, resentful of her working mother who leaves her in charge of a retarded brother, encounters the ghost of her dead uncle and comes to a deeper understanding of her family's problems.

Selected as one of the New York Times Book Review’s Best Books of the Year and honored worldwide, Edgar Allan was an immediate sensation when it was first published.
 
“This is not a novel about prejudice or race relations or brotherhood, or anything too simple. It is about parents and children, young people and older people, about love and failure, loss and discovery, coming to terms with our self and others....