Joyce Maynard

In 1966, when his father's attempted suicide causes the ostracism of the family in their small Montana community, fourteen-year-old Nate copes with his sadness and anger by trying to win the school science fair.

"It's a Tuesday morning in Brooklyn - a perfect September day. Wendy's heading to school, eager to make plans with her best friend, worried about how she looks, mad at her mother for not letting her visit her father in California, impatient with her little brother and with the almost too-loving concern of her jazz musician stepfather. She's out the door to catch the bus. An hour later comes the news: A plane has crashed into the World Trade Center. Her mother's building.". "Through the eyes of thirteen-year-old Wendy, we gain entrance to the world rarely shown by those who documented the events of that one terrible day: a family's slow and terrible realization that Wendy's mother has died, and their struggle to go on with their lives in the face of crushing loss.". "Absent for years, Wendy's real father shows up without warning. He takes her back with him to California, where she re-invents a life that comes to include a teenage mother living on her own in a one-room apartment with a TV set and not much else; her father's cactus-grower girlfriend, newly reconnected with the son she gave up for adoption twenty years before; a sad and tender bookstore owner who introduces her to the voice of Anne Frank and to his autistic son; and a homeless skateboarder, on a mission to find his long-lost brother.". "Over the winter and spring that follow, Wendy moves between the alternately painful and reassuring memories of her mother and the revelations that come with growing to know her real father for the first time. Pulled between her old life in Brooklyn and a new one three thousand miles away, Wendy is faced with a world where the usual rules no longer apply but eventually discovers a strength and capacity for compassion and survival that she never knew she possessed.". "At the core of the story is Wendy's deep connection with her little brother, back in New York, who is grieving the loss of their mother without her. This is a story about the ties of siblings, about children who lose their parents, parents who lose their children, and the unexpected ways they sometimes find one another again. Set against the backdrop of global and personal tragedy, and written in a style alternately wry and heartbreaking, The Usual Rules is an unexpectedly hopeful story of healing and forgiveness that will offer readers, young and old alike, a picture of how, out of the rubble, a family rebuilds its life."--BOOK JACKET.

Claire is "pushing forty with a short stick." She's divorced and raising two teenagers in a small town where just about everybody else is married. Claire longs for companionship, romance, and passion. She's tried blind dates, answered the personals. She's still looking. When Claire meets Tim - also divorced, struggling to raise his own daughter, Ursula - she believes she's found the perfect partner and lover. But as Tim and Claire work toward joining their families and building an intimate life together, their families clash in a never-ending battle for attention and affection: Ursula resents Claire, and Claire's children hate Ursula. When Ursula wreaks a unique and deadly vengeance on everyone, her mother suddenly shows up after a two-year absence and both families spin out of control. "I used to think you and I could make a family together," Claire tells Tim. "Now I feel I'm losing the family I had.". Where Love Goes is a poignant and stirring story about a woman's brave attempt to remake her life. Maynard writes realistically - at times comically, at times lyrically - about the issues women deal with today: the conflict between sexuality and domesticity, how to be a good enough mother and still survive professionally, and how to find passion and enduring love along the way.

Andy uses the scrap material from the new house going up down the street to build a tree house.

Although persuaded by her two best friends, Beth and Ellen, to go on a camp out, Maria is extremely nervous, and her fears are confirmed when strange accidents begin to occur

Europeans arriving in New Zealand last century brought with them a new device - the camera. The early development of photography almost coincided with the beginning of this country's European history and the photographs collected here provide a visual record of life in New Zealand from about 1850 to the present day.

The tale of corruption and manipulation that subjected the world to an oil addiction that could have been avoided, that was never necessary, and that could be ended not in ten years, not in five years, but today. Investigative journalist Black mined corporate and governmental archives to assemble thousands of previously undiscovered documents and studies into this dramatic story. He traces a continuum of rapacious energy cartels and special interests dating back from wood to coal to oil, then to the bicycle and electric battery cartels of the 1890s, which created thousands of electric vehicles that plied American streets a century ago--but those noiseless and clean cars were scuttled by petroleum interests. Black also documents how General Motors conspired to undermine mass transit in dozens of cities and how Big Oil, Big Corn, and Big Coal have subverted synthetic fuels and other alternatives.--From publisher description.

"From the New York Times bestselling author of Labor Day and The Good Daughters comes a new novel of family, friendship, and suspense"--