Mae moves in with fifteen-year-old Jules' family and seems to be taking over Jules' life, but Mae's past in a nearby cult soon threatens them all

"In the middle of the night, in a house on a quiet street in suburban Minneapolis, intruders silently murder Luke Ellis's parents and load him into a black SUV. The operation takes less than two minutes. Luke will wake up at The Institute, in a room that looks just like his own, except there's no window. And outside his door are other doors, behind which are other kids with special talents-telekinesis and telepathy-who got to this place the same way...

Abducted youth Luke Ellis is imprisoned in an inescapable institute, where children with the abilities of telekinesis and telepathy are subjected to torturous manipulation.

In 1969, Dixie Dupree is eleven years old and already an expert liar. Sometimes the lies are for her mama, Evie's sake-to explain away a bruise brought on by her quick-as-lightning temper. And sometimes the lies are to spite Evie, who longs to leave her unhappy marriage in Perry County, Alabama, and return to her beloved New Hampshire. But for Dixie and her brother, Alabama is home, a place of pine-scented breezes and hot, languid afternoons. Though...

Precious Jones, a sixteen-year-old girl who is pregnant with her second child by her father, is pushed by her courageous African-American teacher to learn to read, and discovers the truth about herself and her life.

"Their foster mother, Carol, has always been fanatical, but with Jazz grown up and out of the house, Carol takes a dangerous turn that threatens thirteen-year-old Joaquin's life. Over and over, child services fails to intervene, and Joaquin is running out of time. Then Jazz gets a blocked call from someone offering a solution. There are others like her--people the law has failed. They've formed an underground network of "helpers," each agreeing to...

"In a small rural town outside Seattle, Joanna, an Ethiopian girl adopted by a white fundamentalist Christian family, is found dead of hypothermia in her own backyard--setting in motion a gripping journey into the complexities of human emotion. How does it feel to be a child taken into a family that doesn't share her background, her religion, or the color of her skin? What does it mean to be a mother on trial for murder? And why would a lawyer choose...

"This book is much more than a survivor's story. It is an affecting work that will surprise readers as much with the equality of its prose as with the dramatic nature of the story it tells. She can't feel the jellyfish twisting inside her on that day; she can't feel the long, transparent tentacles penetrating her. She doesn't know that their filaments are going to drag her, little by little, into a story that isn't her own, that doesn't concern her....

"Twenty-one-year-old Hardy 'Hardly' Reed--good-natured, easygoing, usually stoned--is drifting through life. A minimum-wage scare actor at an amusement park, he avoids unnecessary effort and unrealistic ambitions. Then one day he notices two children, around six or seven, sitting all alone on a bench. Hardly checks if they're okay and sees injuries on both children. Someone is hurting these kids. He reports the incident to Child Protective Service....

When a school-wide personality test reunites Nova with Sam - and reveals they are each other's top matches - they begin to remember why they were such close friends all those years before and why a romantic relationship betweenthem would never work out - or so they think.