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No Easy Circle

Feeling deserted by her divorced parents and best friend, a fifteen-year-old girl turns to the youth culture of Washington’s Dupont Circle in search of meaning to her life.

Faith, Hope and Ivy June

When push comes to shove, two Kentucky girls find strength in each other.

Ivy June Mosely and Catherine Combs, two girls from different parts of Kentucky, are participating in the first seventh-grade student exchange program between their schools. The girls will stay at each other’s homes, attend school together, and record their experience in their journals. Catherine and her family have a beautiful home with plenty of space. Since Ivy June’s house is crowded, she lives with her grandparents. Her Pappaw works in the coal mines supporting four generations of kinfolk. Ivy June can’t wait until he leaves that mine forever and retires. As the girls get closer, they discover they’re more alike than different, especially when they face the terror of not knowing what’s happening to those they love most.

Shadows on the Wall

First Book of the York Triology

Dan Roberts is unexpectedly plucked from his everyday life for a vacation in York England, with his parents. He’s delighted by the vacation, but puzzled by how his parents are acting. One minute they are gushing and effusive, the next cold and silent. He soon discovers why: His father has found that their family has a hereditary nerve disease called Huntington’s Disease, which his father might have — and might have passed on to him.

As Dan struggles with the knowledge that he might have a terrible disease, that might affect whether he can marry and have kids, he encounters a friendly cab driver named Joe Stanton, and a group of mysterious gypsies led by Ambrose Faw. The strange ways of the gypsies are intermingled with visions of Roman soldiers, and a mysterious feeling of dread that Dan gets every now and then. He is inclined to think the visions and dread are hallucinations — but Joe sees them too…

Faces in the Water

Second Book of the York Trilogy

This is the second volume in the York Trilogy; it answers some questions from Book one, leaves open new questions, and moves the overall story arc along very well. In fact, unlike the case with most second books, I like this one a little more than the first.

That said, the York Trilogy is probably for slightly older readers than the 9 years set out in the description. That’s not because of language or violence, (or scariness), but because the plot involves a fair amount of time travel and multiple characters who appear and reappear in slightly different guises during the course of the travel. It’s not simple time travel, where the hero touches something or goes through a doorway and clearly ends up somewhere else. Rather, time periods and locations overlap, so that our hero may be in the here and now, but ghostly Roman legions march by him, while the girl from then in her form as the girl from now is talking to him.

Footprints at the Window

Book Three of the York Trilogy

It’s been a stressful summer for Dan: He’s found that Huntington’s Disease runs in his family and may strike him down when he’s in his forties, his father is being tested, and he is haunted by magpies and visions of the Faws – gypsies, whom he encountered in York — even to the point of being drawn back into the waning days of the Roman Empire. Now a family of gypsies has come to the land near where his grandmother lives, and it’s making Dan nervous.

What he finds is seemingly another Faw family, a few years down the line and with radically different names. And while trying to help the girl Oriole — who bears a striking resemblance to Orlenda — Dan is drawn back in time. Now it’s the Middle-Ages, during the time of the Black Death, and he is the only person to recover from the disease. He encounters another incarnation of the Faw family, and for the second time tries to help the beautiful Orlenda escape to safety. What will happen will change Dan’s life forever…

Being Danny’s Dog

Everything’s perfect at Rosemary Acres. All the streets are named after spices. The hedges and lawns are perfectly trimmed. The townhouses are all the same color.

For T.R. and his older brother Danny, things are too perfect. They’d rather still be living in Chicago with their aunt Cis, but their mom insisted the move would be good, another step forward after her divorce from the boys’ father.

Everything Danny and TR find to do at Rosemary Acres seems to be against the rules — rules that even their moody new friend Paul Brenimer find irksome, until Paul seems almost at the breaking point. Will he get Danny into trouble, too? How can faithful T.R. protect him against that?

Danny’s Desert Rats

Everything’s Bonkers at Rosemary Acres

There are lots of rules at Rosemary Acres, where T.R. and his brother Danny live with their mother, and the “no pets” rule could mean big trouble for their friend Paul. Paul had to give away his beloved cat, Bonkers, when he and his dad moved to Rosemary Acres. Now Bonkers has managed to travel fifteen miles to get back to Paul — and Paul is not going to lose his cat a second time.

It’s up to the kids of Rosemary Acres — dubbed the “Desert Rats” by T.R.’s mom one hot summer day — to concoct a plan to save the day. But can they do it without getting themselves into as much trouble as Paul?

Cricket Man

Kenny Sykes is on a mission. He’s determined to make his mark somehow in his new town and his new school. In the meantime, he’s appointed himself the secret savior of the hundreds of crickets who seem bound to commit suicide by jumping into Kenny’s pool. Why he wants to save them, he’s not entirely sure. But once school starts again, Cricket Man finds that there are more important things that need saving.

Namely, Jodie Poindexter — beautiful junior, across-the-street neighbor, and, underneath her composed facade, the most troubled and secretive girl in school.

Night Cry

There are all kinds of fearful night noises on the backwoods farm where Ellen lives, often by herself because her salesman father travels a lot. But more than anything, Ellen is terrified of their horse, Sleet, who had thrown her brother a year ago and killed him.

Then a local boy is kidnapped, and to Ellen the woods are full of devils and demons. One morning she is awakened before dawn by a cry–is it a “night cry” or the cry of the kidnapped child? Does Ellen have the courage to venture out into the dark and find out?

The Keeper

Junior high school student Nick must face the fact that his father is plunging fast into serious mental illness.