In the late 1980s, for reasons even she has difficulty pinpointing, fourteen-year-old Lee Fiora leaves her middle-class, close-knit, ribald family in Indiana and enrolls at Ault, an elite co-ed boarding school in Massachusetts. Both intimidated and fascinated by her classmates, Lee becomes a shrewd observer of, and ultimately a participant in, their rituals and mores, although, as a scholarship student, she constantly feels like an outsider. By the...

When teenage heartthrob Luke Stryker shows up at a small-town Indiana high school to do research for a movie role, he persuades junior Jenny Greenley to use her considerable talents to try to change things at school for the better.

In the summer of 1979, Andy and Tom are two fourteen-year-old boys -best friends, expert cave explorers, and crack shots with their Springfield M-6 Scout rifles. In rural southern Indiana, they are blissfully unaware of the local labor strife surrounding the Borden Casket Company. The fact that Andy's dad is a manager and Tom's dad is a union laborer has no bearing on their fun and adventure. But, in the building summer heat, violence quickly erupts--including...

Growing up motherless and under the thumb of a cruel stepfather in hardscrabble 1920s Kentucky, Bertie Fisher and her older sister, Mabel, are torn apart by a painful misunderstanding that reverberates through the lives of their daughters and granddaughters.

When he and his high-school basketball teammates steal from a fraternity house in their small Indiana town, Nate contends with his guilt, his loyalty to his friends, and his desire to help his older brother who comes under suspicion for the crime.

After spending over four years in a mental institution for murdering a friend in Alaska, fourteen-year-old Kip begins a completely new life in Indiana with his father and stepmother under a different name, but not only has trouble fitting in, he finds there are still problems to deal with from his childhood.