Washoe County Library System

"Mike Muñoz is a young Mexican American not too many years out of high school--and just fired from his latest gig as a lawn boy on a landscaping crew. Though he tries time and again to get his foot on the first rung of that ladder to success, he can't seem to get a break. But then things start to change for Mike, and after a raucous, jarring, and challenging trip, he finds he can finally see the future and his place in it"--

"As the daughter of a drug dealer, Wavy knows not to trust people, not even her own parents. It's safer to keep her mouth shut and stay out of sight. Struggling to raise her little brother, Donal, eight-year-old Wavy is the only responsible adult around. Obsessed with the constellations, she finds peace in the starry night sky above the fields behind her house, until one night her star gazing causes an accident. After witnessing his motorcycle wreck,...

"They say you can never go home again, and for Persephone Fraser, ever since she made the biggest mistake of her life a decade ago, that has felt too true. Instead of glittering summers on the lakeshore of her childhood, she spends them in a stylish apartment in the city, going out with friends, and keeping everyone a safe distance from her heart. Until she receives the call that sends her racing back to Barry’s Bay and into the orbit of Sam Florek—the...

Crystal learned long ago that love brings only pain. Then Gabriel Dalton walks into her life. Despite the terrible darkness of his past, there's an undeniable goodness to him. Crystal and Gabriel never imagined that the world, which had stolen everythingfrom them, would bring them a deep love like this. Except fate will only take them so far, and now the choice is theirs: Harden their hearts once again or find the courage to shed their painful pasts.--from...

"Set in the mid-1970s, Do What They Say or Else tells the story of a fifteen-year-old girl named Anne, who lives with her working-class parents in a small town in Normandy"-- "Originally published in 1977, Do What They Say or Else is the second novel by French author Annie Ernaux. Set in a small town in Normandy, France, the novel tells the story of a fifteen-year-old girl named Anne, who lives with her working-class parents. The story, which takes...

Alan Pauls, one of Latin American literature's rising stars, combines the intimate and the political in a novel that, although it is set in Argentina in the 1970s and '80s, will bring to mind books like Choire Sicha'sVery Recent History and Sam Lipsyte's The Ask in its subtle, brilliant depiction of the place of money in its protagonists' lives. It begins with a body: a top executive of an iron and steel company dies after his helicopter, travelling...

"Elise is out dancing the night before her graduation from college, hundreds of miles from home, when her younger sister Sophie calls to tell her that their mother has gone missing. They soon discover that she was arrested on her way home from work and deported to São Paulo, Brazil. Elise decides to return to her childhood home, Nantucket Island, for the first time in nearly three years to be with her sister and figure out how to bring their mother...

Account of a boy's growing up in a large and impoverished family in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. The novel that inspired the TV series The Waltons.''--

A painfully insecure artist falls in love with a charming, intellectual fellow university student in 1970s Pittsburgh before their relationship spirals into an all-consuming obsession that culminates in a shattering truth. "When Paul and Julian meet as university freshmen in early 1970s Pittsburgh, they are immediately drawn to one another. A talented artist, Paul is sensitive and agonizingly insecure, incomprehensible to his working-class family,...

"A new edition of this award-winning modern classic, with new introduction, excerpt, and discussion guide Pakersfield, Georgia, 1958: Thirteen-year-old Tangy Mae Quinn is the sixth of ten fatherless siblings. She is the darkest-skinned among them and therefore the ugliest in her mother, Rozelle's, estimation, but she's also the brightest. Rozelle--beautiful, charismatic, and light-skinned--exercises a violent hold over her children. Fearing abandonment,...