Friendship

TITLE & AUTHOR

SYNOPSIS

Among Friends*

Emily, Hillary and Jennie were always best friends, the "Awesome Threesome." But at the beginning of their junior year in high school Hillary and Emily are resentful of Jennie's ever-increasing success. Jennie, sought after by almost all the boys, goes after the one who won't have her.

Bean Trees

KINGSOLVER, B

Taylor Greer flees her harsh life in Appalachia and heads west in this memorable novel of love and friendship, abandonment and belonging.

Belle Prater's Boy*

When Belle Prater disappears, her son Woodrow comes to live in Coal Station, Virginia - next door to his cousin Gypsy. The two cousins become best friends and together they are able to face and transcend tragedy.

Best Of Friends

Blue Rapture*

A friend's suicide leads TJ to rethink both his motives and his actions in helping his learning-disabled but athletically gifted friend Tyrone through the college recruitment process.

Breathing Lessons

Ira and Maggie Moran have been married for 28 years. The journey to the funeral of Maggie's best friend's husband, takes several unexpected detours and leads them into memories of the past and a reconciliation with the present.

Brian's Song

Two football players conquer the differences of race, personality and place of birth to support each other.

Broken Chords*

Talented 17-year-old Clara Lorenzo wonders if she has the dedication and passion to pursue a career as a concert pianist.

Bud, Not Buddy*

When his mother dies in 1936, Bud hits the road, convinced that his mother's posters of a jazz band would lead him to the father he has never met.

Carolina Autumn*

Carolina slowly emerges from her grief after her father and sister's death in a plane crash, forging new relationships with her mother and friends.

Cay*

A prejudiced, blind white boy is stranded on a Caribbean Island with an old black man.

Crash*

John "Crash" Coogan has always been comfortable with his tough, aggressive behavior until his relationship with a Quaker boy makes him consider the meaning of friendship and family.

Dancing Carl

A haunted, battle-scarred man who tends the ice rinks teaches Marsh and his friend Willy something about the horrors of war - and the healing power of love.

Ethan Between Us*

MYERS, A

Everytime A Rainbow Dies

After witnessing a rape and interceding on the victim's behalf, 16-year-old Jamaican Thulani begins to move beyond his grief over his mother's death as he builds a relationship with the Haitian girl he helped.

Falling Leaves

Adeline Yen Mah, the youngest daughter of an affluent Chinese family, endured a childhood of appalling emotional abuse. Her struggles reveal the harsh realities of growing up female in 20^th century China.

Fast Sam, Cool Clyde And Stuff

When Francis, alias Stuff, moves to 116^th Street, he joins forces with Cool Clyde, Fast Sam, Gloria, BB, Angel and Maria, and learns the true meaning of friendship.

Foxman

Foxman, hideously mutilated in the war, lives an isolated life deep in the woods. When two boys stumble upon his cabin, his life becomes entangled with theirs.

Freak The Mighty*

A brilliant poignant novel about a friendship between two boys - a slow learner too large for his age, and a tiny, crippled genius - who pair up to create one formidable human force known as "Freak the Mighty".

Fried Green Tomatoes At The Whistle Stop Cafe

FLAGG, F

A folksy, funny and endearing story of life in a small town in Alabama in the Depression and in the 1980s.

Getting In

Four high school seniors take the road with their chaperones to interview at nine prestigious New England colleges while trying to hide their low SAT scores.

Ghost Boy

Harold, an albino, joins a visiting circus to escape the taunts of townspeople and to find a place that seems like home.

Gideon's People

Torn between youthful rebellion and their traditional heritage, two boys from very different cultures, one Amish and one Jewish, discover how similar they really are.

Go And Come Back*

Teenage Alicia narrates the story of her developing friendship with two women anthropologists who have come to study her tribe in the Amazon jungle.

Hard Love*

John's friendship with Marisol helps him deal with his buried feelings about his family in this honest and engaging look at a teenage boy's first love.

Harris And Me*

Harris introduces his city cousin to farm-life - from slippery pigs to daredevil leaps out of a barn loft.

Heart Of A Champion

Best friends, Seth Barham and Jimmy Winter, share a passion for baseball. While Seth struggles to accept his father's death, Jimmy seems destined to become a major league until he embarks on a self-destructive path.

Hidden Talents*

When "smart mouthed" Martin Anderson meets up with five misfits at the Edgeview Alternative School, he realizes each possesses a special psychic talent, and undertakes to help them all.

Honk And Holler Opening Soon

The "Honk" is a roadhouse - a little run-down, the center of a small universe. A young drifter happens upon the Honk and, in no time, brings more business and vitality to the place than it's seen in the last dozen years. A feel-good story, centered in America's heartland, where dreams can still come true and people still care enough about each other to give a leg up when it is needed.

I Hadn't Meant To Tell You This*

Two girls, one a poor abused white girl, the other a middle class African American whose mother had left the family, build a friendship in spite of their cultural and racial differences.

Joy Luck Club

Chronicles the lives of four Chinese women, their forty-year friendship, and how the death of one member brings her daughter into the group, creating a new understanding for each.

Just As Long As We're Together

Stephanie’s relationship with Rachel, her best friend, changes as she tries to conceal a family problem and meets a new girl from California.

Keeping The Moon

Sent to spend the summer with an eccentric aunt, Colie, an overweight girl, expects her life as an outsider to continue. A job and new friends help her to see herself in a new light, and to appreciate the qualities she has always had.

Kit's Wilderness

The bonds of family from one generation to the next are examined when Kit Watson allows his new friend Askew to take him into the coal mine, where their relatives have worked and died.

Lefty Carmichael Has A Fit

When Lefty Carmichael learns he has epilepsy, he believes he can handle the possibility of unexpected seizures. But can his family, his friends and his girlfriend?

Lesson Before Dying

Set in the 1940's, this is a heartbreaking story of friendship between two black men, one condemned to die.

Lords Of Discipline

Matter Of Time*

An unlikely match, Laura is a new student at an exclusive boarding school and Ben is a local farm boy who divides his time between his horse and mechanic work. Two extraordinary teenagers who somehow manage to cross the many boundaries in their worlds to find each other - and themselves.

Max The Mighty*

Grieving over the loss of his best friend, Max Kane befriends a lonely girl nicknamed "Worm", who needs a friend to protect her from her stepfather.

Mind's Eye

A novel in play form in which 16-year-old Courtney, paralyzed in an accident, learns about the power of the mind from an elderly blind woman who takes Courtney on an imaginary journey to Italy using a 1910 guidebook.

Morning Is A Long Time Coming*

Although Anton, the escaped German POW whom Patty sheltered when she was a 12-year-old girl, has been dead for six years, her feelings for him will not die. Driven by a need to find the love her parents denied her, Patty decides to go to Germany in search of Anton's mother, desperate for a connection to the man she loved and lost.

Mother Of Pearl

Set in the Deep South in the late 1950s, Mother of Pearl vividly brings to life the extraordinary inhabitants of the small town of Petal, Mississippi.

Moves Make The Man

A black boy and an emotionally troubled white boy in North Carolina form a precarious friendship. Fast action on and off the basketball court.

Music From A Place Called Half Moon

Edie Jo and her father fight anti-Native American tension in North Carolina in the 1950’s. Her friendship with Cherokee Fish will be one that she never forgets.

Night Hoops*

Both Nick and Brent, the troubled teen from across the street, make the varsity basketball team and slowly form an uneasy friendship different from anything they've ever known.

Other Bells For Us To Ring*

When her father is transferred to an army camp in Massachusetts during the Second World War, Darcy feels isolated in her French-Canadian neighborhood until she meets the vivacious Kathleen Mary O'Hara and learns about Catholicism.

Outer Banks

As sorority sisters in the 1960s, four young women came together and were bound by rare, blinding, early friendship. The two spring breaks they spent at Nag's Head were idyllic. Now they return to the North Carolina setting to recapture those early years - and to set free the pain that caused them all to drift apart.

Pedro And Me

A heartfelt memoir about the author's friendship with AIDS educator Pedro Zamora, who died of the disease after appearing on MTV's Real World.

Pigman

Two lonely high school students meet Mr. Pignati, an old man who lives in his dreams and makes daily visits to the baboons at the zoo. The three find love and laughter, but only for a short time.

Pigman And Me

A tender yet fast-paced and funny biography revealing a sensitive boy struggling to overcome the cruelties of life with humor and a little bit of help from the wise "pigman".

Pigman's Legacy

In this sequal to Pigman, Lorraine and John are forced to face the death of the old man they had befriended.

Remembering The Good Times

Three friends consider their past together and wonder how well they really know each other.

River Midnight

Robber Bride

Remembering their painful experiences of the past in which they were each manipulated and betrayed by the same woman, Roz, Charis and Tony are relieved at Zenia's funeral, and are shocked when Zenia turns up alive and well.

Runner

Bullet Tillerman is a track team who answers to no one. He'd rather be cut from the team than work with the promising new runner, Tamer Shipp. But Bullet finds his own rules are becoming too painful to live by.

Scorpions*

Jamal knows that being the leader of the Scorpions is a bad idea, but he wants to anyway. It's only Tito who knows the real Jamal; it is Tito who steps in when Jamal's life is threatened.

Someone Like You*

Quiet Halley and popular Scarlet strive for a new balance in their friendship junior year when Scarlett's boyfriend dies in a motorcycle accident and Scarlett discovers that she is pregnant, and really needs her best friend.

Speak

Melinda enters high school as an outcast - silent, angry and traumatized by rape. Her black humor and honest depiction of the high school experience will resonate with many teens.

Spite Fences

Maggie Pugh has lived in Kinship, Georgia, all her life. Nothing has changed until the summer of 1960 when Maggie's friendships within the black community threaten an entire society's way of life.

Staying Fat For Sarah Burnes

When smart, sarcastic Sarah Burns was three years old, her face and hands were badly burned in a mysterious accident. 15 years later, Sarah's horrific past finally catches up with her, and it becomes her friend Eric's mission to help her through the pain.

Sugar

The story of two women: a modest, churchgoing wife and mother, and the young prostitute she befriends.

Sula

Traces the lives of two black women from their youth in small-town Georgia, through their divergent paths of womanhood to their ultimate confrontation and reconciliation.

Summer Of My German Soldier

An unlikely friendship between an awkward, lonely Jewish girl and a German POW during WW II leads to tragedy.

Summer Sisters

Summer Sisters chronicles the lifelong friendship between two women, from their girlhood summers together on Martha's Vineyard to their more complicated adult relationship.

Tell Me If The Lovers Are Losers

That Was Then, This Is Now

Mark and Bryon were like brothers, joining in gang warfare in their neighborhood. But sudden death and betrayal changes things for Bryon.

Time For Dancing*

Juliana is dark and serious, close to her family and recently dumped by her beloved boyfriend Jack; Samantha is blonde and outrageous, playing the romantic field and angered by her own family's dissolution. It's the summer before their senior year, and the two girls, longtime best friends, take turns narrating the events that unfold when Julie discovers that she has cancer.

To Sir With Love

The classic and inspiring story about school room savages, and the teacher who tames them.

To: Jay Kae - Life Stinx

Tulip Touch*

Natalie, who lives in the large hotel managed by her father, has a dangerous friendship with Tulip, the wildly uncontrollable girl on a neighboring farm. Eventually Natalie becomes frightened by her friend's reckless acts, and pulls away from her, but this self-rescue comes at the price of great guilt.

Two Moons In August

After her mother dies, Sidonie's father retreats into his work, leaving Sidonie and her older sister, Bobbi, to their own devices. Sidonie gets involved in an ornery - but finally rewarding - romance with Kieran, the new boy in town. Gradually, the grief that has frozen Sidonie and her family begins to thaw.

Voice On The Radio*

In this companion to The Face on the Milk Carton, Janie confronts her past again when her boyfriend Reeve uses it as dramatic filler for his job as a disc jockey at his college radio station.

Waiting To Exhale

MCMILLAN, T

Walk Two Moons

Salamanca travels from Ohio to Idaho with her eccentric grandparents. A richly layered novel that is funny, mysterious and touching.

What Became Of Her*

When Zachary Beaver Came To Town

Toby Wilson struggles to find himself in an imperfect world where his mother is leaving, his best friend's brother is in Vietnam, and Zachary Weaver, the fattest boy in the world, cannot easily be dismissed as only a freak attraction in a traveling show.

Where The Boys Are*

Where The Heart Is

17-year-old, seven months pregnant Novalee Nation finds herself stranded at a Walmart in Sequoyah, Oklahoma. In this small southwestern town she discovers the hidden treasures of a group of down-to-earth, deeply caring people willing to help a homeless, jobless girl.

Whistling Toilets*

Called in to coach his friend Ginny, a nationally ranked junior tennis, when her game hits a slump, 16-year-old Stan Claxton reevaluates their friendship and his future.

White Fang

White Romance*

As her all-black high school becomes more racially mixed, Talley befriends a white girl, who shares her passion for running, and becomes romantically involved with a drug dealer.

Who Do You Think You Are?

ROCHMAN, H & MCCAMPBELL, D (eds.)

Thought-provoking collection of stories that explore the complexities of friendship that challenge teenagers everywhere.

Wild Kid

This coming-of-age story tells of the friendship forged between Sammy, who is mildly retarded, and the "wild child" he meets when he gets lost in the wilderness.

Wind Blows Backward*

Witch Of Blackbird Pond*

A young girl's rebellion against her Puritan surroundings culminates in a witch-hunt and a trial.

Wringer

Palmer LaRue does not want to be a wringer, one of the boys who breaks the necks of pigeons wounded at the annual pigeon shoot. When his three bullying friends suspect that he is sheltering a stray pigeon, Palmer decides to take a stand against this annual rite of passage.