Best friends Isaac and Marco face various challenges in sixth grade, such as Isaac getting better grades, Marco winning a spot on the basketball team, and both seeing their efforts make a change in their respective family lives. They hope their friendship and support for one another will be enough to help them from falling short.

Jillian Slater hadn't seen her father or his mother in almost 20 years until, on the news that her father had finally drunk himself to death, Adella Atwater, the manager of her grandmother's apartment house, calls and says Jillian's expenses would be paid if she'd fly in to New Orleans for the burial. What Adella didn't tell her was that the apartment house bears the dead weight of a long and painful history. As an investigation into her father's...

Chronicling the adventures of an eccentric, resilient and tight-knit family. A remarkable story of unconditional love. A young woman who, influenced by the joyfully wild nature of her deeply dysfunctional father, found the fiery determination to carve out a successful life on her own terms.

Georgia can almost feel her heart cracking a little more every day. With Daddy sinking deeper into alcoholism and Mama struggling to keep the family afloat, Georgia is sent to stay with her mysterious great aunt in her old country house. Soon, lonely Georgia meets Angela, a girl with secrets of her own, and they discover a magical lake. At first, the lake offers a thrilling escape, but as things grow worse at home, a troubled boy appears at the...

When eleven-year-old Ivy Blake leaves the nice farm family where she has been living in upstate New York and moves back in with her mother she is finally forced to face up to the fact that her alcoholic, dysfunctional parent will never be able to provide her with a stable home--and if she wants to achieve her dreams she is going to have to take charge of her own future.

Widowed, pregnant, and penniless, Marilee returns home to Cross Roads, New Mexico, only to find that her father has been dead for six months and that her mother hasn't been sober since. But Marilee's determined to make a good life for herself and her baby. Her first order of business: fix up the family's Wayside 66 Motor Court, now rundown and overrun by outlaws. It's dangerous with bootlegger Jeb Pierce around; he'd taken charge of the place and...

Wild, beautiful, and rumored to be experienced, Hayden Vargas learned the hard way that the only person you can count on is yourself. She is hell-bent on earning enough money to leave her small, judgy Texas town as fast as possible. When nerdy Emmaline Martin offers to pay Hayden for lessons in seduction, the money is so easy, there must be a catch. There is: Emmaline's older brother Nolan, who doesn't want his sister's reputation tarnished by the...

"McFadden's reissued second novel takes an unflinching look at the corrosive nature of alcoholism . . . This is not a story of easy redemption . . . McFadden writes candidly about the treacherous hold of addiction."
—Publishers Weekly
"Riveting. . . . So nicely avoids the sentimentality that swirls around the subject matter. I am as impressed by its structural strength as by the searing and expertly imagined scenes."
—Toni

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Pretty middle-school girl Sophie feels trapped by that adjective, pretty, even though she is confident, easygoing, and stylish. However, her home life is dominated by her mother's alcoholism. When her aunt steps in to help, she teaches Sophie that she doesn't have to be just pretty, but beautiful as well, and beauty means having a purpose.