Crowley County Combined Library

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...

It's been five years since Elsie's twin brother Eddie drowned in the North Sea. Now she's sixteen, and doing whatever she can to cope with the heaviness and void left behind. And when she meets Tay, a freediver, Elsie finds herself back in the waters that took her brother's life, confronting truths about herself and her family.

Sixteen-year-old Riley copes with the loss of her mother two years earlier with the help of a support group, which gets involved in a mystery surrounding a relic of St. Ignatius.

Zoe, a teenager in Bath, England, writes letters to a death-row inmate in Texas, hoping to find comfort in sharing her guilty secret over the death of a friend with someone who can never tell her family.

In a small Kansas town, sixteen-year-old Mary-Elizabeth "Mike" Szabo tries to come to terms with her father's suicide and her own homosexuality.

Seeking to get away from debutante balls and her pregnant young stepmother in Nashville, seventeen-year-old Delk Sinclair goes to Connemara, Ireland for a semester of study, where she falls for a handsome young Irishman and finally begins to recover from the death of her mother.

In a small East Texas town largely ruled by prejudices and bullies, fourteen-year-old Austin sets out to win a ride in the next parade and, in the process, grows in her understanding of friendship and helps her widowed mother through her mourning.