Showing results by publisher "Recorded Books" in Coming of Age

Inspired by Egyptian mythology and young America’s coming-of-age story, AMERICUS follows the lives of rambunctious identical twins Asar and Set Americus. After Set contracts vitiligo (a skin disease that fades body pigmentation in patches), he goes from family favorite to stare-provoking freak at 10-years-old. When Set’s super-capable mother can’t keep her promise to cure him, Set blames her, but not more than she blames herself.

The Mockingbird family has always lived peacefully in Jubilee, Kentucky, despite the divisions that mark their small town. Until the tense summer of 1963, when their youngest child, Isaac, falls gravely ill. Middle sister Grace, nearly fourteen, is determined to do whatever it takes to save her little brother. With her father and mother away at the hospital, Grace is left under the loving but inexperienced eye of her aunt June, with little to do but wait and worry. Inspired by a young teacher’s mission for change, she begins to flirt with danger—and with a gifted boy named Golden.

As a twelve-year-old escaping a disordered and unhappy home and parents who loved hard but couldn’t make it work, Travis left the Midwest to spend a summer with his grandparents in the Deep South. There he met Delia, the love of his life, who, tragically, was beyond his reach for two reasons—she was his aunt and she was sixteen years old. That summer made Travis guilty of crimes discovered and undiscovered. For his public wrongs, he did time, six years in a Nebraska reform school. For his undiscovered wrongs, he suffers mightily and wants desperately to be shriven.

Aleksandar and Isobel are siblings and former classical music prodigies, once destined for greatness. As the only Eastern European family growing up on their block on the far southside of Chicago, the pair were inseparable until each was forced to confront the absurdity of tragedy at an early age and abandon their musical ambitions. Now in their twenties, they find themselves encountering ridiculous jobs, unfulfilling romantic relationships, and the outrageousness of ordinary life.

Mel Ellis knows that her eating disorder is ruining her life. But she can't bring herself to go to rehab so someone else can fix her mess. Broken and empty in more ways than one, Mel makes one last-ditch effort to make hers a story worth telling. She will walk her own road to recovery along the lesser-known trails of the North American wilderness. Though she is physically and mentally unprepared to face the difficulties that lay ahead, she sets off on foot from Grand Rapids, Michigan, and heads toward Mount Rainier National Park in Washington State.

In Tamil Nadu, India, a boy is born with blue skin. His father sets up an ashram, and the family makes a living off of the pilgrims who seek the child’s blessings and miracles, believing young Kalki to be the 10th human incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu. In Kalki’s 10thyear, he is confronted with three trials that will test his power and prove his divine status and, his father tells him, spread his fame worldwide. While he seems to pass them, Kalki begins to question his divinity.

In Masks, Mara Holdfast's life changed forever. As the daughter of the Autarch’s Master Maskmaker, she had a clearly defined future: a quiet, ordered life in the capital, making Masks with her father and doing work important to the ruling Autarch. But when her Mask, specially made by her own father, cracked and fell to pieces during her Masking ceremony, Mara was exiled from everything she once knew.Now she has become part of an underground rebellion, rejecting the unjust rules of a Masked society.

Coming-of-age meets coming-of-middle-age in this tender exploration of what it means to reinvent yourself. A teenage girl runs away from a life of boredom and poverty, with dreams of becoming a smoke jumper. A middle-aged mother escapes to the mountains to explore her artistic side. Thanks to a snowstorm, Ivy and Mary Ellen find themselves trapped together in an isolated home in the Poconos. Now lying to each other, and themselves, they must confront what kind of people they want to be and - when a near-fatal accident forces them to face the truth - who they really are.

Gork isn't like the other dragons at WarWings Military Academy. He has a gigantic heart, two-inch horns, and an occasional problem with fainting. His nickname is Weak Sauce, and his Will to Power ranking is Snacklicious - the lowest in his class. But he is determined not to let any of this hold him back as he embarks on the most important mission of his life: Tonight, on the eve of his high school graduation, he must ask a female dragon to be his queen. If she says yes, they'll go off to conquer a foreign planet together. If she says no, Gork becomes a slave.

Can she piece together a dream on a shoestring? As new owner of the falling-apart family homestead in West Texas, Dee Bennett is wrangling ways to earn a living, mend fences with farm and family, and manifest her dreams as a writer - all while nurturing the budding relationship with her beau, outdoorsy photographer Max Miller. But when a drop-dead-gorgeous, high-powered handler for a candidate in a key statewide election blows into Claxton, rivalries bigger than politics and football develop.

Vincent Appleton smiles at his daughters, raises a gun, and blows off his head. For the Appleton sisters, life had unraveled many times before. This time it explodes. Eight-year-old Hariet, known to all as Ari, is dispatched to Cape Breton and her Aunt Mary, who is purported to eat little girls. With Ari on the journey is her steadfast companion, Jasper, an imaginary seahorse. But when they arrive in Pleasant Cove, they instead find refuge with Mary and her partner Nia.

Reliance, Illinois tells the story of a young woman faced with choices that will alter the course of her own future, and offers a brilliant window into American life during a period of tumultuous change. Illinois, 1874: With a birthmark covering half her face, 13-year-old Madelyn Branch is accustomed to cold and awkward greetings, and expects no less in the struggling town of Reliance. After all, her mother, Rebecca, was careful not to mention a daughter in the Matrimonial Times ad that brought them there.

A nameless 15-year-old runs away to Los Angeles, seeking life beyond the harsh constraints of her evangelical upbringing. She is the narrative of her passage, from her escape on a bus through her quiet, determined progress across the city's unforgiving terrain. The journey takes her into and around the lives of Angelinos from all walks....

Loreena Picket is a young blind woman with a gift. In the rare moments when she's not wearing her gloves, if she takes your hand, she travels with you to your own personal afterlife. Loreena will return - you won't. Loreena's minister uncle says her power is a gift from God, and together they help terminally ill people die peacefully. Still, Loreena is conflicted, because she's seen the afterlife, and it's nothing like her uncle says it is.

Rachel feels like she doesn't fit in - until she finds heavy metal and meets Fern, a kindred spirit. The two form their own band, but the metal scene turns out to be no different from the misogynist world they want to change. Violent encounters escalate, and the friends decide there's only one way forward....

>In 1938, 19-year-old cowboy Bud Frazer sets his sights on becoming a stunt rider in the movies. Fantasizing about rubbing shoulders with the great screen cowboys of his youth, he leaves his home in Echol Creek, Oregon, and heads for Hollywood. On the long bus ride south, Bud meets a young woman who also harbors dreams of making it in the movies, though not as a starlet but as a writer, a real writer.

On a mangy beach in Key West, 16-year-old Myra meets Elijah, a Tanzanian musician twice her age. Trapped on a Spring Break family vacation, Myra longs to lose her virginity to Elijah, and is shocked to learn he lives with Gayl, a secretive, violent woman with a strange power over him. When Myra and her splitting-up family return home, she falls in with a pot-smoking anarchist crowd. But when Gayl and Elijah follow her north, she walks willingly into their world, engaging in more and more abject sexual games. As Myra enters unfamiliar worlds of sex, porn, race, and class, she explores territories unknown in herself.

From syndicated humor columnist Marc Acito comes a wildly inventive and hysterically funny novel that is equal parts Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Fame, Risky Business, Dead Poets Society, and The Catcher in the Rye.

This is the tale of the Chavez family of Michoacan, Mexico. Members of this family cross over the border to work in the United States, only to encounter hardship and tragedy. It is an exploration of what drives poor Mexican families to risk their lives to come north. Emmy Award-winning journalist and poet Rubén Martínez is the associate editor at Pacific News Service.

El Vendedor de Suenos evoca las tribulaciones de Chino, un joven del Harlem hispano en busca del amor, de reafirmacion de identidad. Su relacion con Bodega, un capo magnanimo, un bandido generoso, lo sumerge en un mundo de intrigas y violencia.