"I asked God if he please couldn't take my brother Matthies instead of my rabbit. 'Amen.' Ten-year-old Jas has a unique way of experiencing her universe: the feeling of udder ointment on her skin as protection against harsh winters; the texture of green warts, like capers, on migrating toads; the sound of 'blush words' that aren't in the Bible. But when a tragic accident ruptures the family, her curiosity warps into a vortex of increasingly disturbing...

"Seventeen years ago, something happened to Jess's daughter Beth. The memory of it still makes her blood run cold. Jess has tried everything to make peace with that day, and the part she played in what happened. It was only a brief moment of desire, but she'll pay for it with a lifetime of guilt. To distance herself from the mistakes of the past, Jess has moved away and started over with her family. But when terrifying things begin happening in her...

"Crippled with guilt after causing a horrific accident two years earlier, sixteen-year-old Bett's life is a series of pluses and minuses. But when the pluses become too much to outweigh the minuses, Bett is forced to confront her self-harming behavior"--

Salomé Atabong is the sixteen-year-old daughter of a Cameroonian father and a Dutch mother, living in the Netherlands. She arrives at a juvenile detention center to start a six-month sentence for a violent crime, which she did commit but does not regret. Expected to visit with a racist psychologist and perform her apologies, Salomé refuses to atone. But even if Salomé could get home, it would be no refuge: her father has recently been diagnosed...

Betsy Blake was only four years old when she vanished outside her family home in Dublin. Her father -- wracked with guilt for the past seventeen years -- still can't bring himself to admit the search is over, despite the fact his wife has moved on and police have closed off the investigation. When he is informed he must undergo major heart surgery that he only has a fifty percent chance of surviving, Gordon Blake hires a local PI to give the investigation...

"Ten-year-old Hazel takes her three-year-old sister to pick berries in a blackberry thicket in 1943, and only one of them comes home again. Young Hazel's world crumbles, the weight of the guilt from that colors every relationship in her life for the next seventy years. But now Hazel's granddaughter Meghan is a cold case agent and has an opportunity to investigate this very personal family mystery. What she uncovers could provide healing for three...

"In raw, poignant alternating first-person narratives, interspersed with e-mails, gay chat-room exchanges, and other fragments of a youth laid bare in the age of social media, The Lost Prayers of Ricky Graves unravels the mystery of a life in all its glory: despair and regret, humor and wonder, courage and connection. A heartbroken and humiliated Ricky Graves took the life of a classmate and himself. Five months later, the sleepy community is still...

"Almost twenty years after forbidding him to contact her, Vita receives a letter from a man who has long stalked her from a distance. Once, Royce was her benefactor and she was one of his brightest protégées. Now Royce is ailing and Vita's career as a filmmaker has stalled, and both have reasons for wanting to settle accounts. They enter into an intimate game of words, played according to shifting rules of engagement. Beyond their murky shared...