Unlike the other Birthmothers in her utopian community, teenaged Claire forms an attachment to her baby, feeling a great loss when he is taken to the Nurturing Center to be adopted by a family unit.

"Jen has dumped Andy, and he's handling the breakup in exactly the way all his friends and family might have expected: very, very badly. Crashing at his mother's house and obsessively photographing his hairline, Andy embraces the rites and rituals of every breakup--the ill-advised decision to move onto a houseboat, the forced merriment of a lads' night out, the accidental late-night text to the ex--all resulting in a never-ending shame spiral. Even...

Eleven-year-old Celeste Marconi is a dreamer, a writer, a collector of words. But then a new whispered word trickles into her life: "Subversives." Her beloved country of Chile has been taken over by a military dictatorship, and subversives--people considered a threat to the new government--are in increasing danger. Celeste's doctor-parents must go into hiding to remain safe, and Celeste, heartsick, must say good-bye to them. But the situation continues...

Long-distance relationships have become a popular area of study, although limited work has been published. In response to this state of scholarship, Laura Stafford summarizes literature across the social sciences on various types of long-distance relationships and extracts themes and patterns across the relational types, relating them to theory.

Missing her mother who has returned to Turkey to resolve an immigration problem, sixth-grader Sila welcomes a very large distraction in her life when she helps a surprising new friend rescue a circus elephant. It's been almost a year since Sila's mother traveled halfway around the world to Turkey, hoping to secure the immigration paperwork that would allow her to return to her family in the United States. The long separation is almost impossible...

Suzy spends her year in first grade waiting for her father, who is serving in Vietnam, and when the postcards stop coming she worries that he will never make it home.

"A boy wakes up one morning to find his father gone. At first, he feels lost. But his father has left him a letter filled with advice to guide him through the times he cannot be there"--