Central Skagit Library District

When lonely Ravani Foster discovers his new friend Virginia and her six mysterious runaway companions are in danger, he must fight to keep them safe, or lose the only person who has ever understood him In the dead of night, a truck arrives in Slaughterville, a small town curiously named after its windowless slaughterhouse. Seven mysterious kids with suitcases step out of the vehicle and into an abandoned home on a dead-end street, looking over their...

"Grandpa's in the hospital and hating it. He swears at the nurses and makes trouble for everyone. Dad finds it too stressful to visit, but Gottfried Junior visits Grandpa as often as he's allowed, and when he's not allowed, he goes anyway. Grandpa thinks only of the place he was happiest—the island where he lived with Grandma before she died. He wants to go back one last time, but they won't let him out of the hospital. Gottfried Junior and...

P.I. Angie DeRose strives to find and rescue endangered runaways--work that stands in stark contrast to her own safe, idyllic childhood. But in the wake of her mother's sudden death, Angie makes a life-altering discovery. Hidden among the mementos in her parents' attic is a photograph of a little girl, with a code and a hand-written message on the back: May God forgive me. Angie has no idea what it means and her father claims to know nothing....

"It's been two months since private investigator Cal Weaver's teenage son Scott died in a tragic accident. Ever since, he and his wife have drifted apart, fracturing a once-normal life. Cal is mired in grief, a grief he can't move past. And maybe his grief has clouded his judgment. Because driving home one night, he makes his first big mistake. A girl drenched in rain taps on his car window and asks for a ride as he sits at a stoplight. Even though...

To evade their mother's abusive boyfriend, brothers Jake, thirteen, and Taylor, eleven, venture from the suburbs of Pittsburgh toward the wilds of Wyoming in search of the father they have not seen in four years, using their wilderness skills to survive against both natural and human dangers. Includes wilderness tips.

"From Percival Everett-a recipient of the NBCC Lifetime Achievement Award and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Booker Prize, and numerous PEN awards-comes James, a retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and ferociously funny, told from the enslaved Jim's point of view. When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby...

"[This novel] follows a group of children and their families on summer vacation at a lakeside mansion. The teenage narrator Eve and the other children are contemptuous of their parents, who spend the days and nights in drunken stupor. This tension heightens when a great storm arrives and throws the house and its residents into chaos. Named for a picture Bible given to Eve's little brother Jack, A Children's Bible is loosely structured around events...

"Once a wife, mother, and witness to a gruesome crime, Leah Trenton was extended a miraculous olive branch in the form of the state's protected witness program. But for this second chance at life, Leah would have to leave behind her Midwestern roots to the northernmost tip of Maine. Alone and isolated along the banks of the Allagash River, she is determined to focus on the present, on her reclaimed future, but the demons of her past are relentlessly...

"The classic boyhood adventure tale, updated with a new introduction by noted Mark Twain scholar R. Kent Rasmussen In recent years, neither the persistent effort to "clean up" the racial epithets in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn nor its consistent use in the classroom have diminished, highlighting the novel's wide-ranging influence and its continued importance in American society. An incomparable adventure story, it is a vignette of...

Ever since her mother left, Maia has struggled with depression, which has only gotten worse since her father remarried; so Maia decides run away to Canada to find her mother, together with Billy, a boy who now lives in a group home and has his own family tragedy--but when they finally arrive in Tadoussac, Quebec, Maia discovers that even her mother has been keeping secrets.