NNELS Upgrade

Looks at what divides as well as unites us, including the problems of family life; difficulties confronting today's parents; challenges faced by the disabled and the aging; and issues of injustice that affect the way we understand the world and our lives.

In 1982 Buncombe County, North Carolina, sixteen-year-old Alex Stromm writes of the aftermath of the accidental drowning of a friend, as his English teacher reaches out to him while he and a fellow boarding school student try to cover things up.

Spoiled teens Crystal and Sahara get sent to live with their grandmother, Ma Ray, for a summer without cell phones, Internet, or boys. Upset their summer is ruined, the girls attempt to rebel against their grandmother's strict rules. But they don't succeed, because Ma Ray was once a wild child like her granddaughters--and she knows every trick in the book.

Stuck babysitting during the summer while her friends take glamorous vacations, fourteen-year-old Irene learns some lessons about life after meeting a beautiful, yet troubled, girl.

Presents four short stories by the 19th century New England writer.

Stosh travels back to 1969 to try to prevent the untimely death of Roberto Clemente, a legendary baseball player and humanitarian, but upon his return to the present, he meets his own great-grandson who takes him into the future, and what he finds there is more shocking than anything he has encountered in his travels to the past.

Horton, an upstanding kitchen boy in a castle in nineteenth-century England, becomes embroiled in a mystery surrounding a series of thefts, which is also connected to the pursuit of a very eligible and wealthy young lady's affections.

A Brown University and Harvard Law School alum, Harper is also a passionate public servant. In this book he offers comforting advice for today's youth through his own wisdom as well as that of such luminaries as Michelle Obama and Angela Bassett.

Lynch introduces practical techniques, attitudes, and skills that can help to reduce the pain of the past and fear of the future, eliminate negativity and guilt, promote optimism, build confidence, and create abundance.

Just before his thirteenth birthday, Jeremy Fink receives a keyless locked box--set aside by his father before his death five years earlier--that purportedly contains the meaning of life.