The Silent Boy

Flowers for Algernon

Daniel Keyes · 248 pages

Until he was thirty-two, Charlie Gordon --gentle, amiable, oddly engaging-- had lived in a kind of mental twilight. He knew knowledge was important and had learned to read and write after a fashion, but he also knew he wasn't nearly as bright as most of the people around him. There was even a white mouse named Algernon who outpaced Charlie in some ways. But a remarkable operation had been performe

Out of My Mind

Sharon M. Draper · 305 pages

Eleven-year-old Melody has a photographic memory. Her head is like a video camera that is always recording. Always. And there's no delete button. She's the smartest kid in her whole school, but no one knows it. Most people — her teachers and doctors included — don't think she's capable of learning, and until recently her school days consisted of listening to the same preschool-level alphabet lesso

The Things We Cannot Say

Kelly Rimmer · 448 pages

The Thorn Birds

Colleen McCullough · 573 pages

The Thorn Birds is a 1977 best-selling novel by Australian author Colleen McCullough. Set primarily on Drogheda – a fictional sheep station in the Australian Outback named after Drogheda, Ireland – the story focuses on the Cleary family and spans the years 1915 to 1969.

Bridge to Terabithia

Katherine Paterson · 144 pages

The life of a ten-year-old boy in rural Virginia expands when he becomes friends with a newcomer who subsequently meets an untimely death trying to reach their hideaway, Terabithia, during a storm.

Peace Like a River

Leif Enger · 313 pages

"Raised on tales of cowboys and pirates, eleven-year-old Reuben Land has little doubt that miracles happen all around us, and that it's up to us to "make of it what we will." Reuben was born with no air in his lungs, and it was only when his father, Jeremiah, picked him up and commanded him to breathe that his lungs filled. Reuben struggles with debilitating asthma from then on, making him a boy

By the Shores of Silver Lake

Laura Ingalls Wilder · 290 pages

The Ingalls family had fared badly in Plum Creek, Minnesota. They were in debt. Mary was blind now. So Pa went West to work at a railroad camp in Dakota Territory where he could make as much as fifty dollars a month! Then he sent for his wife and four children, and they became the first settlers in the new town of De Smet. But the railroad brought hordes of land-hungry people from the East. Had Pa

Rules

Cynthia Lord · 200 pages

Twelve-year-old Catherine just wants a normal life. Which is near impossible when you have a brother with autism and a family that revolves around his disability. She's spent years trying to teach David the rules-from "a peach is not a funny-looking apple" to "keep your pants on in public"-in order to stop his embarrassing behaviors. But the summer Catherine meets Jason, a paraplegic boy, and Kris

Where the Red Fern Grows

Wilson Rawls · 249 pages

More than anything else in life, Billy Colman wanted a dog. When at the age of ten he saw an ad for two coon-hound pups, he resolved to its their purchase price of $50. Two years later, having scrimped and saved, he attained his goal—the dogs were his, and he named them Old Dan and Little Ann. Billy spent weeks training his dogs to hunt their ring-tailed quarry. Night after night the three of t

May B.

Caroline Starr Rose

When a failed wheat crop nearly bankrupts the Betterly family, Pa pulls twelve-year-old May from school and hires her out to a couple new to the Kansas frontier.

Of Mice and Men

John Steinbeck · 118 pages

Anne of Green Gables

L.M. Montgomery · 308 pages

Anne, an eleven-year-old orphan, is sent by mistake to live with a lonely, middle-aged brother and sister on a Prince Edward Island farm and proceeds to make an indelible impression on everyone around her.

The Fault in Our Stars

John Green · 318 pages

Despite the tumor-shrinking medical miracle that has bought her a few years, Hazel has never been anything but terminal, her final chapter inscribed upon diagnosis. But when a gorgeous plot twist named Augustus Waters suddenly appears at Cancer Kid Support Group, Hazel's story is about to be completely rewritten.

Lisa Genova eBox Set: Still Alice, Left Neglected, and Love Anthony

Lisa Genova · 1,000 pages

The Story of Beautiful Girl

Rachel Simon · 346 pages

A novel about a woman who can't speak, a man who is deaf, and a widow who finds herself suddenly caring for a newborn baby. Pennsylvania, 1968. Lynnie, and her sweetheart Homan, have escaped from The School for the Incurable and Feebleminded, an institution where people with disabilities were routinely shut off from society, and left to languish, forgotten.

Moloka'i

Alan Brennert · 389 pages

Seven-year-old Rachel is forcibly removed from her family's 1890s Honolulu home when she contracts leprosy and is placed in a settlement, where she loses a series of new friends before new medical discoveries enable her to reenter the world.

A Dog Called Homeless

Sarah Lean · 224 pages

Fifth-grader Cally Louise Fisher stops talking, partly because her father and brother never speak of her mother who died a year earlier, but visions of her mother, friendships with a homeless man and a disabled boy, and a huge dog ensure that she still communicates.

A Mango-Shaped Space

Wendy Mass · 230 pages

Thirteen-year-old Mia Winchell has a secret: sounds, numbers, and words appear to her in color. Mia has synesthesia, the mingling of perceptions whereby a person sees sounds or tastes shapes. This coming-of-age novel chronicles Mia's developing appreciation for her gift.

Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Thomas Hardy · 457 pages

An intimate portrait of a woman, one of literature's most admirable and tragic heroines...Tess Durbeyfield knows what it is to work hard and expect little. But her life is about to veer from the path trod by her mother and grandmother. When her ne'er-do-well father learns that his family is the last of a long noble line, the d'Urbervilles, he sends Tess on a journey to meet her supposed kin—a jour

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

David Wroblewski · 566 pages

A tale reminiscent of "Hamlet" that also celebrates the alliance between humans and dogs follows speech-disabled Wisconsin youth Edgar, who bonds with three yearling canines and struggles to prove that his sinister uncle is responsible for his father's death.

Old Yeller

Fred Gipson · 158 pages

At first, Travis couldn't stand the sight of Old Yeller. The stray dog was ugly, and a thieving rascal, too. But he sure was clever, and a smart dog could be a big help on the wild Texas frontier, especially with Papa away on a long cattle drive up to Abilene. Strong and courageous, Old Yeller proved that he could protect Travis's family from any sort of danger. But can Travis do the same for O

The Memory Keeper's Daughter

Kim Edwards · 408 pages

Kim Edwards's stunning family drama evokes the spirit of Sue Miller and Alice Sebold, articulating every mother's silent fear: what would happen if you lost your child and she grew up without you? In 1964, when a blizzard forces Dr. David Henry to deliver his own twins, he immediately recognizes that one of them has Down Syndrome and makes a split-second decision that will haunt all their lives fo

The Great Alone

Kristin Hannah · 504 pages

It is 1974 when Leni Allbright's impulsive father Ernt decides the family is moving to Alaska. But the Alaskan winter is just as unforgiving as Ernt, and life quickly becomes a struggle for survival.

Red Sky In The Morning

Elizabeth Laird

Although she loves her baby brother, Anna finds herself trying to hide his severe physical and mental disability from her friends.