NCW Libraries

New Bremen, Minnesota, 1961. The Twins were playing their debut season, ice-cold root beers were at the ready at Halderson's Drug Store soda counter, and Hot Stuff comic books were a mainstay on every barbershop magazine rack. It was a time of innocence and hope for a country with a new, young president. But for thirteen-year-old Frank Drum it was a summer in which death assumed many forms. When tragedy unexpectedly comes to call on his family, which...

Even though she is still grieving over her sister's death, eighteen-year-old Meredith Fox plans to reconnect with family and friends when they gather on Martha's Vineyard for her cousin's big wedding--unless she gets distracted by a week-long game of Assassin and a handsome groomsman. This summer at Martha's Vineyard is the first one back since the death of Meredith Fox's sister, Claire. It will all be overwhelming, but even more since the entire...

“Warm, original, funny and heartbreaking, this novel made me drop everything so I could read it in one lovely afternoon. When You Read This is inventive and witty, but more importantly it’s honest and wise. I adored it.” — Jennifer Close, author of Girls in White Dresses and The Hopefuls 

For fans of Maria Semple and Rainbow Rowell, a comedy-drama for the digital age: an epistolary

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Autumn, Shay, and Logan, whose lives intersect in complicated ways, each lose someone close to them and must work through their grief.

Twelve-year-old Coyote and her father rush to Poplin Springs, Washington, in their old school bus to save a memory box buried in a park that will soon be demolished.

"Set in a not-too-distant America, I Cheerfully Refuse is the tale of a bereaved and pursued musician embarking under sail on a sentient Lake Superior in search of his departed, deeply beloved, bookselling wife. Rainy, an endearing bear of an Orphean narrator, seeks refuge in the harbors, fogs, and remote islands of the inland sea. Encountering lunatic storms and rising corpses from the warming depths, Rainy finds on land an increasingly desperate...

Devastated when her parents are killed in a car accident, sixteen-year old Jackie moves from New York City to Colorado to live with her mother's best friend, who has twelve children, including two boys who start to show an interest in Jackie that goes beyond brotherly. Jackie's goal include perfect grades, the perfect look, getting into the perfect school. If she can achieve that, then maybe her too-busy mom and dad will take notice. When her parents...

After leaving her life behind to go to college in New York, Marin must face the truth about the tragedy that happened in the final weeks of summer when her friend Mabel comes to visit.

"Sixteen-year-old Biz sees her father every day, though he died when she was seven. When he suddenly disappears, she tumbles into a disaster-land of grief and depression from which she must find her way back"--