Each year on his birthday, a young Mexican American boy looks forward to seeing how his grandfather has decorated the tree he planted on the day the boy was adopted.

Charles meets Cooper, a spunky Corgi, while rehearsing for a play, and needs the little dog in order to stay comfortable while onstage.

"Aimee Pokwatka's novel Self-Portrait with Nothing is "fraught and deeply moving...the work of a genuinely exciting new talent." (Booker Prize winner, George Saunders). If a picture paints a thousand worlds... Abandoned as an infant on the local veterinarian's front porch, Pepper Rafferty was raised by two loving mothers, and now at thirty-six is married to the stable, supportive Ike. She's never told anyone that at fifteen she discovered the identity...

"Macey and Ben Samuelson have much to be thankful for: great friends, a beautiful - if high-maintenance - Victorian house on idyllic Tybee Island, and a rock-solid marriage. The only thing missing is what they want the most. After her fifth miscarriage in six years, Macey worries that the family they've always dreamed of might be out of reach. Her sister suggests adoption, but Macey and Ben aren't interested in pursuing that path... until a three-legged...

Mom Peterson has trouble finding a family good enough to adopt the adorable Labradoodle Gus.

"Written from the perspective of a child, Adoption is a Lifelong Journey provides insight into emotions and thoughts an adoptee or foster child might encounter while also equipping caregivers with timely responses and resources" -- cover, page [4].

"The sun beamed down on Melissa Henderson's shining dark hair, pinned up on her head in a loose knot, as sweat ran down her face, and the muscles in her long, lithe arms were taut with effort as she worked. She was lost in concentration, sanding a door of the house in the Berkshire Mountains in Massachusetts that had been her salvation. She had bought it four years before. It had been weather-beaten, shabby and in serious need of repair when she found...

More than anything Lola would like a cat, but first she must learn how to care for it.

"In the wake of a tragedy and fueled by guilt from a secret she's kept for years, a woman discovers how delicate the thread that binds family is in this powerful novel by Lyn Liao Butler. Two days before Tam and Tony Kwan receive their letter of acceptance for the son they are adopting, Tony and his estranged cousin Mia are killed in an accident. A shellshocked Tam learns she is named the guardian to Mia's five-year-old daughter, Angela. Tam has no...

"When the man she loved years ago returns to town, one young woman's complicated past rises again, threatening to expose her well-kept secrets. If Maxine could put her finger on the moment when her life went into a tailspin, she would point back twenty years to the day her daddy died. She tells herself he's the only person who ever really knew and loved her, and if he hadn't left her behind, her future would've taken a different path. No absentee...