Showing results by publisher "Black Rose Writing" in Coming of Age

With all his family and friends gone, one-hundred-year-old Murray McBride is looking for a reason to live. He finds it in Jason Cashman, a ten-year-old boy with a terminal heart defect and a list of five things he wants to do before he dies. Together, they race against the limited time each has left, ticking off wishes one by one. Along the way, Murray remembers what it's like to be young, and Jason fights for the opportunity to grow old. But when tragedy strikes, their worlds are turned upside-down, and an unexpected gift is the only thing that can make Jason's final wish come true.

Hapless Nate Hester yearns for the safety and affection of a group. He sets off on a hitchhiking trip to escape bad parenting and the Vietnam draft. Nate soon longs to be off the road. A drug dealer befriends him and introduces him to the Hells Angels. The Angels introduce him to the wonders of drug use and free sex, but the effects wane, and Nate leaps from mania to depression.

Ruby Lee Becker can't breathe. It's 1935 in the heart of the Dust Bowl, and the Becker family has clung to its Texas Panhandle farm through six years of drought, dying crops, and dust storms. On Black Sunday, the biggest blackest storm of them all threatens ten-year-old Ruby with deadly dust pneumonia and requires a drastic choice —one her mother, Willa Mae, will forever regret.

Summertime 1929. Hattie Mae Sizemore lives with her family in a Kentucky holler. Her father is a coal miner and a moonshiner. Determined to shield his oldest from the influence of outsiders, he declares Hattie won’t return to school. She is distraught, not even having a single book of her own.

A barrage of threatening letters, a car bomb, and a heart attack rip apart what was once a close-knit family of adopted brothers.Randy and Bobby, along with fellow band member and best friend, Danny, receive fan mail that turns menacing. They ignore it, but to their detriment. The sender turns up the heat. Violence upends their world. It rocks the relationship between the boys and ripples through their family, nearly killing their dad.

Jill is a resilient woman who faces life's toughest challenges head-on. After years of struggle and perseverance, she receives an unexpected request from her past that shakes her to the core. Her ex-husband Michael left twenty years ago, and now he wants to walk their daughter down the aisle on her wedding day. While Jill agrees, her family despises her for doing so, and what should be a happy day for mother and daughter turns into whispers of failures and regrets.

In a neighborhood nondescript except for how often small houses are being torn down to make way for big houses, a beautiful woman too young to be widowed waits for her husband to come home from prison.

Carlie is not merely traveling. A child trauma survivor as a teen, she steals ten thousand dollars and runs away to Asia. Through Hong Kong, The Philippines, Bali, and Thailand, the Lonely Planet path of hookups, heat, alcohol, and drugs takes on a terrifying reality for the young survivor. Trading sex for protection, Carlie retreats to alcohol and self-starvation. Finally, on the tiny island of oh Phangan, Thailand—home to the infamous Full Moon party—Carlie falls in with an international crew of Tai chi-practicing backpackers.

Charlie Fightmaster is on the verge of achieving his lifelong dream—playing Major League Baseball. But when his younger sister needs him, he walks away from fame and returns home. There, a reclusive legend teaches him three secrets to finding harmony at the plate... and in life. As Charlie faces heartbreak and guilt, those lessons become his lifeline—not just to baseball, but to becoming the man he was meant to be.

Lucas is thrilled when his grandmother comes to live with him. She’s his best friend after Justin from down the street. Only it turns out she’s dying, and no one—not his parents and certainly not Lucas—is ready to accept that. Then one night, his grandmother pulls out a memory, prompting a seemingly straightforward request—she wants to see her sister one last time.

The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin: musicians who reached the pinnacle of their profession. Their stories are familiar, but careers like theirs are rare. Far more common are musicians who toil in relative obscurity, scraping a living from meager club earnings and fending off the discouraging advice of friends and family to give up their dream and find a real career. Most of these unknowns eventually do just that, but what happens to those whose passion leaves them little choice in the matter?

After the U.S. declares war on Japan in 1941, all persons of Japanese descent in the Western U.S. come under suspicion. Curfews are imposed, bank accounts frozen, and FBI agents search homes randomly. Despite the fact that two generations of the Miyota family are American citizens, Fumio and his parents and sister Kimiko must pack meager belongings and are transported under military escort to the California desert to be held at Camp Manzanar, leaving their good friends and neighbors the Whitlocks to care for their farm and their dog, Flyer.

With these words we are launched into the exploits of an exceptional group of children as they play out through the Texas Hill Country and across the Blackland Prairies. Are they within the realm of science-fiction, or are they all simply due to drug-induced hallucinations that resulted from government- funded experimentation by a private laboratory, the University of Texas Psychology Department and the U.S. Air Force?

When faced with the inequities of college life for women in 1965, first-generation college student Ramona Bronson must decide whether she's willing to risk her education for the possibility of better. As fall term begins, Ramona is reassigned to the night shift waitressing at Dusty's Drive-In, which closes after the female-only campus curfew. Panicked because she needs her job to pay tuition, Ramona petitions to appeal the curfew on the advice of her friend Dimitri.

1960, Hugh and Dee sell Rothmorton Hall, near Boston, and move to a small beach community outside San Francisco to start fresh. Hugh needs to prove himself with his new business but spends too much time at the office causing tension at home. Ellen turns thirteen and unhappy she's uprooted from the only home she's ever known and worries she won't fit in at the public high school, make friends, or meet boys. Dee is bored and desperate to find her place in the community and may put her trust in the wrong person... yet again.

Smart-mouthed Maggie Moore is instantly smitten with the laid back, sometimes infuriating Bucky. Too bad he has eyes for her best friend Melinda. Their triangle of friendship and emerging romance is easily eclipsed by the free-spirited adventures of childhood, but when the turmoil of adolescence stirs unresolved feelings, and doing the right thing means betraying her own heart, Maggie must grapple with a moral dilemma that impacts them all.