"Teen mother Emoni Santiago struggles with the challenges of finishing high school and her dream of working as a chef." -- Ever since she got pregnant freshman year, Emoni Santiago has been doing what has to be done for her daughter and her abuela. The one place she can let all that go is in the kitchen, where she adds a little something magical to everything she cooks, turning her food into straight-up goodness. She dreams of working as a chef after...

"A riveting debut novel about a couple whose dream of adopting a baby is shattered when the teenage mother reclaims her child"--

"Eighteen years ago a teenage pregnancy changed Kate Worthington's life forever. Faced with many difficult decisions, she chose to follow her heart and embrace an uncertain future with Glenn Ferguson, her devoted first love ... and the father of her baby. At the same time, in another part of the world, sixteen-year-old Ryan Hamilton makes his own share of mistakes, but learns important lessons along the way. Soon Kate's and Ryan's paths cross in a...

"When two Depression-era migrant workers, Paul and Vern, find an abandoned baby in the woods, they take it upon themselves to care for the mysterious child. When fifteen-year-old Marigold, reviled by her family after an unwanted pregnancy, loses her baby in the forest, her whole world is painted black. She's still fraught with despair when she discovers what seems to be a miraculous power within her. Coot, a child preacher on the Kansas plains, escapes...

Chicago, 1979. Halfway through her senior year of high school, Pryor discovers that she is pregnant-- a fact her parents are determined to keep a secret from her friends, siblings, and community forever. Driving across three states, her mother drops her off at what Liz thinks is a Catholic home for unwed mothers but is, in truth, a locked government-run facility for delinquent and impoverished pregnant teenage girls. She's alone and terrified, a fa...

She sees the teenage girl on the train platform, standing in the pouring rain, clutching an infant in her arms. She boards a train and is whisked away. But she can't get the girl out of her head... Heidi Wood has always been a charitable woman: she works for a nonprofit, takes in stray cats. Still, her husband and daughter are horrified when Heidi returns home one day with a young woman named Willow and her four-month-old baby in tow. Disheveled and...

After being away for two years, Riley Young returns to Lawton, Alabama, with her fifteen-month-old daughter to help take care of her grandmother who has Alzheimers, even though it means she has to face the lies that forced her to leave town in the first place and a blossoming friendship with the high school football star Brady Higgens, who is dealing with his own family problems. Two years after being raped, Riley Young returns to Lawton, Alabama,...

"The shocking truth about postwar adoption in America, told through the bittersweet story of one teenager, the son she was forced to relinquish, and their search to find each other-- As Baby Boomers became teenagers in 1960s America, women were encouraged to stay home and raise large families, but sex and childbirth were taboo subjects. Premarital sex was common, but birth control was hard to get and abortion was illegal. In 1961, sixteen-year-old...

In 1987, obese, illiterate, black 16-year-old Claireece 'Precious' Jones lives in Harlem with her dysfunctional family. She has been raped and impregnated twice by her father, Carl. She suffers constant physical, mental and sexual abuse from her unemployed mother, Mary. After getting pregnant for the second time, Precious is suspended from her school. Her principal arranges to have her attend an alternative school where her new teacher, Ms. Rain,...