Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Publishing" in Coming of Age

Now an HBO series: the first volume in the New York Times bestselling “enduring masterpiece” (The Atlantic) about a lifelong friendship between two women from Naples Beginning in the 1950s in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples, Elena Ferrante’s four-volume story...

“This country wasn’t built on good—only fought for with good intentions.” Jack’s dying mother told him, “Run and never look back.” He spent his life amassing wealth, but after losing his family, he has no one to share it with. Alone with his demons and a backpack, he heads to South America, where people with nothing teach him what matters. After thrashing his dog-abusing boss, Hunter learns of his father’s death in a mysterious fire. Biker buddies Nugget and Itch ride with him from North Carolina to California.

A teenager in pre-revolutionary Tehran, Massoumeh is an average girl, passionate about learning. On her way to school she meets a local man and falls in love, but when her family discover his letters, they accuse her of bringing them dishonor. She is badly beaten by her brother, and her parents hastily arrange for her to marry a man she has never met. Facing a life without love and the prospect of no education, Massoumeh is distraught, but a female neighbor urges her to comply: “We each have a destiny, and you can’t fight yours.”

Hawken Trent. So polite. So sweet. Such an upstanding young man. A virgin, too, I hear. He never gets naughty with a girl. Probably because Jesus told him not to. And now here he is, trying to be the hero by protecting another girl from me. He calls me a bully. Irrational. Unreasonable. A criminal. He can call me anything he wants, I’ve heard worse. And he can try to stand between me and my money, but he’s never had to fight for food. That rich, clean, school boy doesn’t have what it takes

Sally Jay Gorce is a woman with a mission. It’s the 1950s, she’s young, and she’s in Paris. Having dyed her hair pink, she wears evening dresses in the daytime and vows to go native in a way not even the natives can manage. Embarking on an educational program that includes an affair with a married man (which fizzles out when she realizes he’s single and wants to marry her); nights in cabarets and jazz clubs in the company of assorted “citizens of the world”; an entanglement with a charming psychopath; and a bit part in a film financed by a famous matador.

An unsuspecting couple is treated to a luxury vacation by their deceased neighbor. After begrudgingly agreeing to volunteer at a nursing home, a middle school girl gambles over games of bridge with elderly residents. A single mother struggles to understand the unique bond between her autistic son and his dying grandmother. Four friends experience decades of highs and lows as pawns in The Game of Life. A professional gynecology patient runs into a high school flame while at work, undressed, on the job.

Buying into the dream that education is the road out of poverty, a teen mom takes a chance on bettering herself, gets on welfare rolls, and talks her way into college. But once she's there, phallocratic narratives permeate every subject, and creative writing professors depend heavily on Freytag's pyramid to analyze life. So Ariel turns to a rich subcultural canon of resistance and failure, populated by writers like Audre Lorde, Tillie Olsen, and Kathy Acker. Wryly riffing on feminist literary tropes, We Were Witches documents the survival of a demonized single mother.

My first crush. My first kiss. The boy who ripped my heart out of my chest again and again. Over and over. I let him have it every single time. Willingly. We are that toxic high school couple you hear about, the one you witness in the hallway as they avoid each other. You laugh at them in class when they’re forced to work together, their gazes full of hatred. We are the couple you gossip about when they win homecoming prince and princess their sophomore year.... The back and forth is what kills me the most. I’m not his princess, I’m the girl he toys with when he’s bored.

Sarah never admits that she’s his mother, but the beautiful boy has watched her survive as a “lot lizard”: a prostitute working the West Virginia truck stops. Desperate to win her love, he decides to surpass her as the best and most famous lot lizard ever.

Summer vacation isn’t all fun and hanging out when you’re a wizard-in-training. For partly reformed warlock Chance Fortunato, it’s even worse. In addition to the constant study and training, he has to prove he’s ready to be a full-fledged apprentice before he starts at the Franklin Academy. Plus, he’s beginning to think someone has it out for him. If things weren’t bad enough with a snooty proctor monitoring his every move and demons trying to capture him, his father finally makes his first attempt to get his wayward son back under his control by trying to frame his mom.

On New Year’s Day, 1929, Ondro Prach, the 13-year-old son of Slovak immigrants in Pennsylvania coal country, begins a new job as mule boy. He knows the danger—his father died in the mines—but he is proud of his position handling the animal that hauls cartloads of coal from shafts deep within the earth to the surface. After Ondro earns the trust of the miners and the mule in his charge, the room the men are working collapses and their fate is sealed. From that moment onward, Ondro carries the hard memory of that day, a burden that leads to addiction and imprisonment, costing him his family.

He’s the popular jock everyone loves. Funny, gorgeous, and a flock of girls to choose from. But she’s the bullied and antisocial girl no one notices. She has no friends and she likes it that way - until he walks into her life. They shouldn’t be friends, they definitely shouldn’t be roommates, but that doesn’t stop him though. When friendship blooms into something more, she’s not sure if she should hold on or let go. She’s hiding things, secrets so dark, and deep. If he ever discovers them she is certain he won’t want her anymore.

 So Big is the unforgettable story of the indomitable Selina Peake DeJong and her struggles to stay afloat and maintain her dignity in the face of a challenging marriage, widowhood, and single parenthood. 

For the last 10 years, he never stayed with a woman longer than it took to screw them. But then she walked in. Back then she was nothing but a little girl, but now she’s all grown up, with curves, and a smile that reminds him of everything he’s spent the last 10 years trying to forget. His attraction to her is instant, and wrong, on so many levels. He’ll do anything he can to stop it, even make her hate him if he has to.

Helen DeWitt’s 2000 debut, The Last Samurai, was “destined to become a cult classic” (Miramax). The enterprising publisher sold the rights in twenty countries, so “Why not just, ‘destined to become a classic?’” (Garth Risk Hallberg) And why must cultists tell the uninitiated it has...

Ella has a Thing. She sees a classmate grow up to become a caring nurse. A neighbor's son murdered in a drive-by shooting. Things that haven't happened yet. Kev, born while Los Angeles burned around them, wants to protect his sister from a power that could destroy her. But when Kev is incarcerated, Ella must decide what it means to watch her brother suffer while holding the ability to wreck cities in her hands. Rooted in the hope that can live in anger, Riot Baby is as much an intimate family story as a global dystopian narrative.

Jake Callahan. Prince of the popular crowd. My mortal enemy. Gorgeous. All the girls want him. Quarterback. All the boys want to be his friend. He’s the most popular boy in the senior class. And he hates me. Or so I thought. What I mistook for hatred turns out to be…interest. There’s that thin line, right? It makes me crazy. I can’t stand it. Attraction, chemistry, whatever it is, I also can’t resist it. And neither can he.

Aleksy still remembers the last summer he spent with his mother in Northern France. At eighteen, eager to fly the nest and escape a family still grief-stricken by the death of his sister years earlier, these lazy months in the countryside are akin to torture. And then, his mother tells him she’s dying.

With his father missing and his mother gravely ill, William Carter is struggling to keep his family’s cotton farm afloat in the face of drought and foreclosure. As his options wane, William receives a mysterious letter that claims to know his father’s whereabouts. Together with his best friend Ollie, a mortician in training, William sets out to find his father and bring him home to set things right. But before the boys can complete their quest, they must navigate the labyrinth of the Big Thicket, some of the country’s most uncharted, untamed land.

This book of interconnected stories depicts the chaotic life of a young boy on the run with his teenage mother. When Sarah reclaims Jeremiah from his foster parents, he finds himself catapulted into her world of motels and truck stops, exposed to the abusive, exploitative men she encounters. As he learns to survive in this harrowing environment, Jeremiah also learns to love his mother, even as she descends into drug-fueled madness.