With insight and a light touch, best-selling, Newbery Honor-winning author Gary D. Schmidt tells two poignant, linked stories: that of a grieving girl and a boy trying to escape his violent past. Following the death of her closest friend in summer 1968, Meryl Lee Kowalski goes off to St. Elene's Preparatory Academy for Girls, where she struggles to navigate the venerable boarding school's traditions and a social structure heavily weighted toward students...

Badger's friends are sad when he dies, but as they recall his many kind ways, they realize that he has left each one of them with a special gift.

"Margaret Atwood has established herself as a beloved cultural icon and one of the most visionary and canonical authors of her generation. In this collection comprised of fifteen extraordinary stories-some of which have appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine-Atwood speaks to our times with her characteristic wit and intellect. Of special significance are the seven works revolving around the long-term married couple Tig and Nell....

As the older sibling to identical twins Violet and Lily, Cami Porter was always the odd sister out. The divide grew even wider when their parents split up--while the twins stayed in Cape Sanctuary with their free-spirited mother, Rosemary, fourteen-year-old Cami moved to LA with her attorney father. Nearly twenty years later, when Cami gets the terrible news that Lily has drowned saving a child's life, her mother begs her to return home to help untangle...

One sleepless night while she was in her early twenties, illustrator/writer Hallie Bateman had a painful realization: her mom would die, and after she died she would be gone. The prospect was devastating, and also scary--how would she navigate the world without the person who gave her life? She thought about all the motherly advice she would miss--advice that could help her through the challenges to come, including the ordeal of losing a parent. ...

Relates a seriously bad day in the life of Pennsylvania teenager Kirby Burns, in which he faces dangerous classmates, discovers that a friend is hiding a terrible secret, and grapples with the one-year anniversary of his sister's death.

A man wakes paralyzed from a car accident that kills his wife. He's taken care of solely by his mother-in-law, who begins to show erratic behavior as she digs up her daughter's prized garden.

When her father is killed in a car accident, Lacey feels responsible, so when she is given a chance to make a difference in the lives of some of her fellow students, she jumps at the chance.

Three women in nineteenth-century Ireland bond over a shared effort to rescue a child from a superstitious community that believes that his trauma-related inability to speak indicates that he is a changeling responsible for a series of misfortunes. Nora, bereft after the death of her husband, finds herself alone and caring for her grandson Micheal, who can neither speak nor walk. A handmaid, Mary, arrives to help Nora just as rumors begin to spread...

Even the prickliest cactus has its flower...For Susan Green, messy emotions dont fit into the equation of her perfectly ordered life. She has a flat that is ideal for one, a job that suits her passion for logic and an "interpersonal arrangement" that provides cultural and other, more intimate, benefits. But suddenly confronted with the loss of her mother and the news that she is about to become a mother herself, Susans greatest fear is realized. She...