In a scheme to reunite with her estranged biological mother, foster kid Jess joins a cosplay team working toward a competition in New York, but along the way she learns the value of the family you choose for yourself.

Set in contemporary Northern California, The Harder They Come explores the volatile connections between three damaged people -- an aging ex-Marine and Vietnam veteran, his psychologically unstable son, and the son's paranoid, much older lover -- as they careen towards an explosive confrontation.

A humorous account of a New York City teenager's battle with depression and his time spent in a psychiatric hospital.

When Maria Ruiz and her young son, Mario, leave their home in southern California, their past follows them to a small town in the Midwest. Against a backdrop of the late 1950s - the ascending consumer society, autos, TV, rock 'n' roll, and the Cold War, the story portrays the town, its people, and the measures of tolerance and prejudice in facing racial and cultural differences, mental illness, and respect for a suffering hero from the Greatest Generation...

"From the New York Times bestselling author of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet comes a powerful novel about the love that binds one family of women across generations. Dorothy Moy breaks her own heart for a living. As Seattle's former poet laureate, that's how she describes channeling her dissociative episodes and mental breakdowns into her art. But when her five-year-old daughter, Annabel, exhibits the same behavior and begins remembering...

After Rachel Childs, a former journalist, suffers an on-air mental breakdown, she lives as a virtual shut-in. In all other respects, however, she enjoys an ideal life with an ideal husband. Until a chance encounter on a rainy afternoon causes that ideal life to fray. As does Rachel's marriage. As does Rachel herself. Sucked into a conspiracy thick with deception, violence, and possibly madness, Rachel must find the strength within herself to conquer...

Lana Granger lives a life of lies. She has told so many lies about where she comes from and who she is that the truth is like a cloudy nightmare she can't quite recall. About to graduate from college and with her trust fund almost tapped out, she takes a job babysitting a troubled boy named Luke. Expelled from schools all over the country, the manipulative young Luke is accustomed to controlling the people in his life. But, in Lana, he may have met...

After sixteen-year-old Ivy's twin sister, Iris, moves in with her and their father, Ivy learns that Iris is trying to push her out of her own life--and may be responsible for their mother's death. "After their parents divorced, 10-year-old twins Ivy and Iris were split up--Ivy lived with Dad, Iris with Mom. Now, after a tragic accident takes their mom's life, the twins are reunited and Iris moves in with Ivy and their dad. Devastated over Mom's death,...