At first Curtis isn't that worried when his mother doesn't come home from her all-night job at the local gas bar. She'll be back, he's ten out of ten positive. After all, she promised she would never leave him again.Besides, Curtis is used to looking after himself and his five-year-old brother, Artie, and for a time he manages things on his own, keeping their mother's absence a secret. He knows exactly what will happen if any of the teachers find out the truth. He still remembers his last horrible foster home all too clearly.Curtis gets pretty good at forging his mother's signature, but when the credit card maxes out and the landlord starts pressuring for the rent, it's more than a twelve-year-old can handle. Just in time, Curtis and Artie make friends with Mrs. Burt, the cranky, lonely old lady who lives across the street. And when the authorities start to investigate, the boys agree to go with Mrs. Burt to her remote cabin by the lake, and the three of them abscond in her 1957 Chevy Bel Air.At the lake, the boys' days are filled with wood-chopping, outhouse-building, fishing, swimming and Mrs. Burt's wonderful cooking. But as the summer sails by, Curtis can't stop thinking about his mother's promise.Then the weather grows colder, and Mrs. Burt seems to be preparing to spend the winter at the cabin, and Curtis starts to worry.Have they really all just absconded to the lake for a summer holiday? Or have the two boys been kidnapped?Set in Vancouver and the B.C. wilderness (the trip to the cabin involves a hilarious white-knuckled road trip through Hope), this is a book that reflects Caroline Adderson's many writerly strengths — her "wit and a facility for dialogue, good pacing and a brisk, clean prose style" (Globe and Mail), her "close observation of telling details" (Quill & Quire) and her ability to "celebrate a child's imagination in a realistically humorous way" (Canadian Materials).

Product Description: It’s autumn in Tokyo, and 12-year-old Akira and his younger siblings Kyoko, Shige, and little Yuki have just moved into a new apartment with their mother. Akira hopes it’s a new start for all of them. But their mother soon begins to spend more and more time away from the apartment, and then one morning Akira finds an envelope of money and a note...read more

"I had everything I needed to run a household: a house, food, and a new family. From now on it would just be me and Sammy–the two of us, and no one else."A tragic accident has turned eleven-year-old Aubrey’s world upside down. Starting a new life all alone, Aubrey has everything she thinks she needs: SpaghettiOs and Sammy, her new pet fish. She cannot talk about what happened to her. Writing letters is the only thing that feels right to Aubrey, even if no one ever reads them.With the aid of her loving grandmother and new friends, Aubrey learns that she is not alone, and gradually, she finds the words to express feelings that once seemed impossible to describe. The healing powers of friendship, love, and memory help Aubrey take her first steps toward the future.Readers will care for Aubrey from page one and will watch her grow until the very end, when she has to make one of the biggest decisions of her life.Love, Aubrey is devastating, brave, honest, funny, and hopeful, and it introduces a remarkable new writer, Suzanne LaFleur. No matter how old you are, this book is not to be missed.

At the top of a medieval cathedral, a stone figure named Raphael, a griffin with the head of a dragon, dreams of fulfilling his destiny, and he believes his opportunity has arrived when a widow abandons her child just before Christmas.

When she is abandoned by her alcoholic mother, high school senior Ruby winds up living with Cora, the sister she has not seen for ten years, and learns about Cora's new life, what makes a family, how to allow people to help her when she needs it, and that she too has something to offer others.

Ten years after the Civil War's end, twelve-year-old Addy, abandoned by her parents, is taken from the horrid town of No-Bob by schoolteacher Frank Russell and his bride, but when her father returns to claim her she must find another way to leave her O'Donnell past behind.Ten years after the Civil War's end, abandoned Addy is taken from the horrid town of No-Bob by schoolteacher Frank Russell and his bride, but when her father returns to claim her she must find another way to leave her past behind.

Product Description: A rather large problem has befallen the Huit girls. (Sisters, actually. Octuplets to be exact.) One particular New Year’s Eve, the girls wait for their mommy to bring them hot chocolate and their daddy to return with more wood for the fire...read more

Product Description: What would you do? As far as I'm concerned, there's no excuse not to be decent...Especially when you're responsible for a kid. It just figures that fifteen-year old Victoria's dad fails once again to be at the train station like he's promised...read more

When seventeen-year-old Madge, a bi-racial girl living in a small Pennsylvania town populated by bigots, decides to change the world for the better, she starts by 'adopting' a four-year-old boy she finds abandoned in New York City.

Left on a church doorstep and raised by two loving servants, Annika's happy life is greatly altered when a rich aristocrat arrives at her door, tells her that she is her real mother, and takes her to live in a crumbling castle far away from the only family she has ever known. An ALA Notable Book. Reprint.

Ten-year-old Willow and her difficult little brother Twig, abandoned on the streets of Vancouver, take a chance and get in touch with a grandmother Willow barely remembers, crossing Canada to make a new home in the Ontario countryside with a peculiar group of people and animals.

Do you have to lose everything to see what truly matters? Find out in the seventh and final installment of Cynthia Voigt’s Tillerman cycle.Dicey Tillerman has big dreams. She’s started a boatbuilding business, and she’s determined to prove she can succeed on her own. That’s why she resists the offer of help from Cisco, the mysterious stranger who turns up one day at her shop.     But running a business doesn’t leave much time for the people Dicey treasures—her grandmother, her younger siblings, and her boyfriend, Jeff. Then it turns out that Dicey has placed her trust with the wrong person. Suddenly she stands to lose everything….Has Dicey discovered too late what really matters to her?     Cynthia Voigt deftly navigates nuances of identity and resilience in this triumphant conclusion to her acclaimed Tillerman cycle.