Young Francie Nolan, having inherited both her father's romantic and her mother's practical nature, struggles to survive and thrive growing up in the slums of Brooklyn in the early twentieth century.

Young man's inheritance of his father's estate depends upon the conditions of his marriage. Dickens's last complete and full length novel, first published in 1865.

Published in 1839, Nicholas Nickleby is Charles Dickens' third novel. In it, Nicholas Nickleby must earn a living to support his mother and sister after his father dies unexpectedly. Turning to a wealthy uncle in London for help, Nicholas is hired on as assistant to Wackford Squeers, a sadistic and small-minded schoolmaster. Meanwhile, his sister must take a job in a milliner's studio and is occasionally pressed into service by their uncle who exploits...

Kozol returns to the scene of his prize-winning books Rachel and her children and Amazing Grace, and to the children he's portrayed there, to share their journeys and unexpected victories as they grow into adulthood.

"Set in Brooklyn in the 1920's Tomorrow will be better tells the story of Margy Shannon, a shy, joyfully optimistic young woman just out of school who lives with her parents and witnesses how a lifetime of hard work and poverty has worn them down. Determined not to end up like them, Margy takes refuge in her dreams of a better life. Her goals are simple: to find a husband she loves, have children, and live in a nice home. When she meets Frankie Malone,...

"A new edition of this award-winning modern classic, with new introduction, excerpt, and discussion guide. Pakersfield, Georgia, 1958: Thirteen-year-old Tangy Mae Quinn is the sixth of ten fatherless siblings. She is the darkest-skinned among them and therefore the ugliest in her mother, Rozelle's, estimation, but she's also the brightest. Rozelle--beautiful, charismatic, and light-skinned--exercises a violent hold over her children. Fearing abandonment,...

Set in 1950's Chicago, an African-American family tries to have a better life, while living amongst poverty and racism.

To some she's intelligent and beautiful. To others she's proud and dangerous. At the historically black college of Dillard University in the lush mystical city of New Orleans, the beautiful and serious Leslie Beaudet is struggling with a dark secret of power in a world that is pulling her in many different directions. In the eyes of her Haitian immigrant father, Leslie is a queen who deserves more than the broken dreams and carnage of poverty. To...

A miser learns the true meaning of Christmas when three ghostly visitors review his past and foretell his future. Includes an account of Dicken's first reading of the story, and a biographical sketch.