A feisty young boy fakes his own death to escape his abusive father and heads off down the Mississippi River with his newfound friend Jim, a runaway slave.

Finn sets a tragic figure loose in a landscape at once familiar and mythic. It begins and ends with a lifeless body-flayed and stripped of all identifying marks-drifting down the Mississippi. The circumstances of the murder, and the secret of the victims identity, shape Finns story as they will shape his life and his death. Along the way Clinch introduces a cast of unforgettable characters: Finns terrifying father, known only as the Judge; his sickly,...

Placed in witness protection in remote northern Maine, Leah risks exposing herself to the dangerous forces of her past when her homesick children run away.

A nineteenth-century boy, floating down the Mississippi River on a raft with a runaway slave, becomes involved with a feuding family, two scoundrels pretending to be royalty, and Tom Sawyer's aunt, who mistakes him for Tom

"Jason has just learned that his Afghan mother has been living illegally in the United States since his father was killed in Afghanistan ... when he sees his mother being escorted from her workplace by two officers, Jason feels completely alone. He boards a train with the hope of finding his aunt in New York City, but as soon as he arrives in Penn Station, the bustling city makes him wonder if he's overestimated what he can do"--Amazon.com.

Sam Krupnik, mad at his mother because she won't let him wear his new plastic fangs in the house, decides to run away to Alaska.

"The exasperating Gingerbread Man, famous for leading a host of townsfolk and animals in a wild chase about the countryside, lives at 398.2 on the library shelves. But the Gingerbread Man is not the type of cookie that stays in one place for very long, and one day he just can't help himself. With a leap and a whoosh, he escapes the librarian's grasp, and the chase for the wily Gingerbread Man is on again!"--p. [2] of jacket.

Young Ven Polypheme is sent on a secret mission within the walls of the Gated City, a former penal colony in the land of Serendair, where he and his friends face kidnapping and even worse dangers from the ruthless Thief Queen, who is trying to reclaim her runaway daughter.

In 1971, the state of Minnesota was rocked by the "Butcher Boy" incident, as coverage of a family brutally murdered by one of their own swept across newspapers and television screens nationwide. Now, in present-day New Orleans, Polly Deschamps finds herself at yet another lonely crossroads in her life. No stranger to tragedy, Polly was a runaway at the age of fifteen, escaping a nightmarish Mississippi childhood. Lonely, that is, until she encounters...