Showing titles in Coming of Age

The disturbing disappearance of yet another young, red-haired gal from the Irish Travellers’ Caravan site has everyone on edge. Then Shamus Maguire’s 12-year-old sister, Erin, vanishes. While searching for clues to his sister’s disappearance, Shamus meets Lash Boswell, an older man from a Romani caravan. Lash decides to help Shamus, and they set out together to find the truth about the many disappearances.

An entire family comes of age simultaneously in this funny and poignant novel, narrated by a gay 22-year-old son torn between embracing and rejecting his quirky suburban kin. After abandoning a planned suicide, Joshua Royalton returns to his childhood home to unravel the elaborate tales, theories, and neuroses he developed while growing up, including a fictional history of Chinese restaurants, a mortal fear of crows, an obsession with singer Carly Simon, and his parents' addiction to jigsaw puzzles.

Chris and RJ are two teenage boys raised in Mormon communities. Though both are poster boys for their church with perfect academic records and pretty girlfriends; buried feelings soon rise to the surface when they are assigned to serve a mission together as part of their rite of passage.

In the sleepy town of Townsend, Washington, there was an act so gruesome that no one would ever be the same. What heinous crime do I speak of? Skylar Torres thinking she could pull off a crop top with that pudgy body of hers. Oh, did you think I was going to say my murder. Well, I thought it was more sensational than anything else, but the real scandal was who killed me and why.

Diamonds and Devils is a story of the life of Roger Holt who grew up as a gay boy with an Evangelical pastor-father, and later became a minister in a predominately LGBTQ congregation. Sometimes hilarious, sometimes disturbing, but always engaging, Roger's story takes the listener through a life of discovery and challenges. It explores finding and losing religion. When the elderly preacher-father shows up with dementia at his grown gay son’s doorstep, there are shattering revelations.

Uprooted from her comfortable life in Bogotá, Colombia, into an ant-infested Miami townhouse, 15-year-old Francisca is miserable and friendless in her strange new city. Her alienation grows when her mother is swept up into an evangelical church, replete with Christian salsa, abstinent young dancers, and baptisms for the dead. But there, Francisca also meets the magnetic Carmen: opinionated and charismatic, head of the youth group, and the pastor’s daughter. As her mother’s mental health deteriorates and her grandmother descends into alcoholism, Francisca falls in love with Carmen.

Life is a dream, or is it? Zac can remember every detail of his dreams. He’s profoundly disturbed because he dreams about Isaac, a gay boy, and Zac is absolutely, 100 percent straight, or is he? Isaac is troubled by his newly vivid dreams too because he’s dreaming about Zac. Yuck! How could a boy want to do that with girls? Zac lives in 1983 and Isaac in 2018 so how can they possibly dream about each other? As both boys begin to doubt their sanity and wonder if they are real, their dreams begin to bring them closer together across time.

Meet Haskell Hodge. At 16, he’s already garnered some fame as a former child actor and star of a popular cereal commercial. But that doesn’t do much for him when he’s dumped at his aunt’s house in the suburbs of Los Angeles to face an assortment of neighborhood bullies. He thinks he might be gay. In fact, he could be the only gay person in the valley, maybe on the entire planet. Even if he does manage to find a boyfriend, their relationship would have to be secret and invisible.

Winner of the 2017 Red Hen Press Women’s Prose Prize, Like Wings, Your Hands is both a philosophical novel and a coming-of-age story, exploring a mother-son relationship in the context of disability and interdependence....

Every summer, Jessie and Emma leave their suburban home in the Central Valley of California and fly north to Baymont. Nestled among Mendocino's golden hills, with ponies to love and endless acres to explore, Baymont should be a child's paradise. But Baymont belongs to Laurel, the girls' birth mother, whose heedless parenting and tainted judgement cast a long shadow over the sisters' summers - and their lives. Caught in a web of allegiances, the girls learn again and again that every loyalty has its price, and that even forgiveness can take unexpected turns.

In Grosse Pointe, Michigan the idle rich run wild among one another. The Knights are part of the big four in terms of the US automotive industry. The Fitzpatrick’s are extremely wealthy for a number of things...Beautiful, rich, and dysfunctional. Come, see how the other half live!

Madison Archer was a perfect daughter, with perfectly dark secrets. She did not mind that her father used her as a pawn in a business deal. She knew this role well, but meeting Jackie Westin sent her perfect world into a tailspin. Jackie introduced Madison to a different kind of love in a different kind of world, a world that would bend everything Madison believed about life. This is a tale of forbidden love, in a world of dark secrets, betrayals, and intrigue.

Tijabab [TEE-juh-baab] is a cute, little, genderless bunny who survives various encounters with fear and grows up to find Truth, Forgiveness, and Freedom.

For two decades Tyler Gibbons has been keeping a secret from his family. At the tender age of 16, Tyler embarks on a student exchange program. Sent to the Andean city of Ambato, Ecuador, he finds daily adventure as he tries to fit in at school, connect with his host family, and navigate through a world of beaches, volcanoes, and jungles. But tucked deep inside this year are events so profound, so unexpected, they forever shape the man he will become. Now, 25 years later, his mother pulls these soaring tales from her son, exposing, for the first time, the source of a deep unhappiness.

Charlie Matthews’ love story begins in a pebble-dashed house in suburban Bolton, at a time when most little boys want to grow up to be Michael Jackson, and girls want to be Princess Di. Remembering the Green Cross Code and getting out of football are the most important things in his life until Auntie Jan gives him a gift that will last a lifetime: a seven-inch single called "Lucky Star"....

After a string of sexual conquests, she is determined to figure out why the intense romantic connections she's spent her life chasing have left her emotionally high and dry. As Natalie sifts through her past and her present, she confronts her complicated feelings about her plus-sized figure, her bisexuality, and her thwarted career in fashion design.

Insightful and full of understanding and warmth, Patrick Gale's FRIENDLY FIRE is a richly compelling story of adolescence, sexuality and the lessons we carry forever. 'An intense tale of love, life, intellectualism and passion. Inspirational' Daily Express 'Utterly compelling from first to last'...

Twenty-two-year-old Oscar is a lost cause. He roams central London, looking for love and distraction. But this isn't quite Bright Lights, Big City: Oscar is gay but feels disconnected from London's gay scene. He is naive and rootless, an emotionally stunted young man who lives in upscale Kensington with his foster mother, novelist Charlotte Fontaine. But all of this changes when he meets Tim, Charlotte's 3--something literary agent with whom Oscar becomes hopelessly infatuated.

A former star and high school standout, first-year student, Kennedy, is quickly humbled by her new surroundings. Classes, team politics, and even simple friendships are difficult to pace, let alone master. Initially, she grins and bears it, mostly because that is what the ultraconservative college leadership encourages. “Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer.” Besides, new obstacles give Kennedy something to focus on other than the cute girls sitting in her lectures, sporting spandex at practice, and moving in right next door.

Henley sits on the sideline of life. What else is a fat kid to do? He's determined to make a change as he enters high school and summons the courage to take a chance only to have super-jock Axel O'Connell go off on him for being a pathetic slug. Henley nearly calls it quits, but pushes forward, and then something amazing happens; Axel does an abrupt about-face and offers to help Henley lose weight and get in shape. Henley is suspicious of Axel's motives, but so desperately needs help he takes him up on his offer.