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Eleven-year-old Ellie Sanders is forced to grow up quickly when her pregnant mother develops health problems and her father's attentions become diverted by a teenage produce peddler. To escape, Ellie creates a secret world of her own, where life still seems normal.

In the 1950s, Abraham Okimasis becomes the first Indian ever to win the Trapper's Festival Dog Sled Race and, as tradition dictates, he is kissed by the festival's beautiful Fur Queen. Nine months afterward, Abraham's wife Mariesis gives birth to their son, Champion, in a tent on a trapline in snowy northern Manitoba. Later, three-year-old Champion watches his brother Ooneemeetoo come into the world in the same tent. The boys grow up in a magical Cree Garden of Eden: stars, fish and caribou are their playmates; canoes and dogsleds transport their nomadic family.

Looking back at a tragic event that occurred during his thirteenth year, Frank Drum explores how a complicated web of secrets, adultery, and betrayal shattered his Methodist family and their small 1961 Minnesota community.

Tom Harry and his son Rusty live alone and run a bar in a small Montana town in the early 1960s. Their lives are upended when a woman from Tom's past and her beatnik daughter breeze into town.

A single mom and her seventeen-year-old daughter learn how to let go in that precarious moment before college empties the nest.

In the late 1960s, a group of young idealists form a commune in western New York State. Into this group is born Bit, who grows into a quiet, distant man. Over the course of 50 years, Bit witnesses the utopia crumble and the world change in unimaginable ways.

A series of poems describes all the baffling changes at home and at school in twelve-year-old Joylin's transition from tomboy basketball player to not-quite-girly girl.

Campbell's heroine is 16-year-old Margo Crane. Complicit in her father's death, Margo flees home for the Stark River. And as she follows the current, she learns the ways of the world from the eccentric characters she meets.

Teenaged Isobel "Belly" Conklin, whose life revolves around spending the summer at her mother's best friend's beach house, reflects on the tragic events of the past year that changed her life forever.

Simon Jester's past is full of secrets. Ony his step-children, 12-year-old Alice and her older brother Boone, know the true darkness that lies in his heart. When terror invades their lives, the two children are forced to attempt daring escapes and acts of betrayal in order to survive.