Washoe County Library System

"Miss Venus Merriwell has been waiting for her prince to come since the tender age of fourteen. She wants a man who is a selfless academic like her, and free from all the wretched vices her gambler father enjoyed far too much before he left the Merriwellsisters practically destitute. Unfortunately, after a slew of romantic disappointments, there is still no sign of that prince at twenty-three and the only one true love of her life is the bursting-at-the-seams...

Dr. Wilbur Larch, saint and obstetrician, founder and director of an orphanage in rural St. Cloud, Maine in first half of this century, is an ether addict and abortionist. He is also the mentor of Homer Wells, an orphan who is never adopted.

Chika Jeune was born three days before the devastating earthquake that decimated Haiti in 2010. She spent her infancy in a landscape of extreme poverty, and when her mother died giving birth to a baby brother, Chika was brought to The Have Faith Haiti Orphanage that Albom operates in Port Au Prince.With no children of their own, the forty-plus children who live, play, and go to school at the orphanage have become family to Mitch and his wife, Janine....

Story of Father Flanagan and his founding of Boys Town, a home for juvenile delinquents.

For almost three decades, Georgia Tann ran a children's home in Memphis, Tennessee, selling her charges to wealthy clients nationwide. Part social history, part detective story, part expos, this is a riveting investigative narrative that explores themes that continue to reverberate in the modern era.

In a future New York where most people can fly and cats are a rarity, a nondescript resident of Hope House for the Homeless and Hopeless discovers that although she is shunned as a "leadfoot," she has the surprising ability to become invisible.

"In a foster home outside Oslo, a twelve-year-old boy is causing havoc. The institution's steely director, Agnes Vestavik, sees something chilling in Olav's eyes: sheer hatred. When Vestavik is found murdered at her desk, stabbed in the back with an Ikea kitchen knife--with Olav nowhere to be found--the case goes to maverick investigator Hanne Wilhelmsen, recently promoted to chief inspector in the Oslo Police. Could the child be a murderer? As police...

In 1936, three children meet at the Mercy Home for Negro Orphans in New York State, and while not all three are orphans, they are all dealing with grief and loss which together, along with the help of a sympathetic staff member and the boxing matches of Joe Louis, they manage to overcome. Includes author's notes.

With the United States on the verge of World War II, eleven-year-old Gusta is sent from New York City to Maine, where she discovers small-town prejudices and a huge family secret. It's 1941, and tensions are rising in the United States as the Second World War rages in Europe. Eleven-year-old Gusta's life, like the world around her, is about to change. Her father, a foreign-born labor organizer, has had to flee the country, and Gusta has been sent...