"This final, essential chapter in Rex Ogle's memoir trilogy recounts being forced from his home and living on the streets after his father discovered he was gay. When Rex was outed the summer after he graduated high school, his father gave him a choice: he could stay at home, find a girlfriend, and attend church twice a week, or he could be gay--and leave. Rex left, driving toward the only other gay man he knew and a toxic relationship that would...

Overview: Straight from the front line of urban America, the inspiring story of one fiercely determined teacher and her remarkable students. As an idealistic twenty-three-year-old English teacher at Wilson High School in Long beach, California, Erin Gruwell confronted a room of "unteachable, at-risk" students. One day she intercepted a note with an ugly racial caricature, and angrily declared that this was precisely the sort of thing that led to the...

"A dark romance evolves between a high schooler and her English teacher, in this breathtakingly powerful memoir about a young woman who must learn to rewrite her own story. "Have you ever read Lolita?" So begins seventeen-year-old Alisson's metamorphosis from student to lover and then victim. A lonely and vulnerable high school senior, Alisson finds solace only in her writing-and in a young, charismatic English teacher, Mr. North. He praises her as...

After Zahra Paracha makes a decision at odds with her beliefs, her mother forces Zahra to make an impossible choice about her future. Zahra runs away, relinquishing her past in favor of a new future. On Long Island she stays at a bed & breakfast. Grappling with guilt, she visits the local masjid, where she is befriended by two sisters and drawn into the welcoming Muslim community. As Zahra's healing truly begins, can she create a home for herself...

"The companion to Rex Ogle's award-winning Free Lunch is a searing account of adolescence in a household torn by domestic violence. Punching Bag is the compelling true story of a high school career defined by poverty and punctuated by outbreaks of domestic abuse. Rex Ogle, who brilliantly mapped his experience of hunger in Free Lunch, here describes his struggle to survive; reflects on his complex, often paradoxical relationship with his passionate,...

As the United States enters World War II, seventeen-year-old Eleanor wants to do something to help her Jewish relatives in Poland, so she puts her brilliant math skills to work for the US army to fine-tune a top-secret weapon that will help defeat the enemy.

Three young people find themselves caught up in a love triangle after a disaster has wiped out most of civilization.

"When Laura Trujillo's mother jumps off a ledge in the Grand Canyon and falls to her death, Laura sets out to discover what drove her mother's actions, and begins to explore the painful secrets they shared. As a young girl, Laura was happy that her mother, divorced and remarried, seemed happy again, and so she hides it when her stepfather begins to abuse her. Now grown up with a family of her own, after her mother dies, Laura goes in search of the...

Maybonne Mullen is "riding on a bummer" according to her little sister Marlys. As much as teenage Maybonne prays and tries she just can't connect to the magic of living. How can she when there's so much upheaval at home and school, not to mention the world at large? And yet Marlys always seems able to tap into it. In It's So Magic, the Mullen family dynamics are in flux. Uncle John makes a brief return to town to the delight of the girls. Freddy is...

An actress and producer who suffered from crippling, undiagnosed depression in her teens recounts her harrowing experience of psychological manipulation and abuse at a "therapeutic" boarding school where every moment was a test of survival, and shares how she was able to heal in the aftermath.