Colorado Parks & Wildlife Research Library

His birth ended his mother's life in Tennessee. Scrawny and wiry, he runs away at the age of 14. As he makes his way westward, the impoverished and illiterate youth finds trouble at every turn. Then he's recruited by Army irregulars, lured by the promise of spoils and bound for Mexico. Churning a dusty path toward destiny, he witnesses unknown horrors and suffering--and yet, as if shielded by the almighty hand of God, he survives to breathe another...

"Late October. After midnight. You’re waiting up for your seventeen-year-old son. He’s late. As you watch from the window, he emerges, and you realize he isn’t alone: he’s walking toward a man, and he’s armed. You can’t believe it when you see him do it: your funny, happy teenage son, he kills a stranger, right there on the street outside your house. You don’t know who. You don’t know why. You only know your son is now in custody....

A Boy's Own Story, with equal parts stunning lyricism and unabashed humor, traces a nameless narrator's coming-of-age in the 1950s. Struggling with his homosexuality, the narrator seeks the consolations of a fantastic imagination and fills his head with romantic expectations (“I believed without a doubt in a better world, which was adulthood or New York or Paris or love.”) His distant, divorced parents exacerbate his hunger for emotional...

"All it takes is one hit on the football field, and suddenly Ash's life doesn't look quite the way he remembers it. Impossible though it seems, he's been hit into another dimension--and keeps on bouncing through worlds that are almost-but-not-really his own. The changes start small, but they quickly spiral out of control as Ash slides into universes where he has everything he's ever wanted, universes where society is stuck in the past...universes...

With Saint Dane seemingly on the verge of toppling all of the territories, Pendragon and Courtney set out to rescue Mark and find themselves traveling--and battling--their way through different worlds as they try to save all of Halla.

A mysterious island. An abandoned orphanage. A strange collection of peculiar photographs. A horrific family tragedy sets sixteen-year-old Jacob journeying to a remote island off the coast of Wales, where he discovers the crumbling ruins of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. As Jacob explores its decaying bedrooms and hallways, it becomes clear that Miss Peregrine's children were more than just peculiar. They may have been dangerous. They...

As further evidence of his family's bad fortune which they attribute to a curse on a distant relative, Stanley Yelnate is sent to a hellish correctional camp in the Texas desert where he finds his first real friend, a treasure, and a new sense of himself.

When his best friend, April, disappears from her bedroom in the middle of the night, thirteen year old Theo uses his legal knowledge and investigative skills to chase down the truth and save her. Book #2

"Seventh grader Jordan Banks loves nothing more than drawing cartoons about his life. But instead of sending him to the art school of his dreams, his parents enroll him in a prestigious private school known for its academics, where Jordan is one of the few kids of color in his entire grade. As he makes the daily trip from his Washington Heights apartment to the upscale Riverdale Academy Day School, Jordan soon finds himself torn between two worlds--and...

Arthur Parkinson tells how his family fell apart, his problems when he turned fifteen, and how the murder of Annie Marchand, his old babysitter affected him.