Family Life Classics

As a young girl Sandy Price dreamed of owning a pony like Misty of Chincoteague. Journeying to Chincoteague for the annual pony penning, a grown Sandy decides to make her dream come true. At the end of the auction she brings home not just one but four beautiful ponies, including Sunshine, a direct descendant of Misty. When Twilight, Sunshine’s foal, first appears from her stall, the fire of the wild ponies of Assateague is in her eyes. She races and rears herself into a lather, bucking at even the temporary confinement when the farrier examines her hooves.

This favorite book for children, based on the author's own youthful experiences, describes the family life of the Marches in a small New England community. Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy are raised in genteel poverty by their loving mother, Marmee, while their father serves as a chaplain during the Civil War. The story explores their domestic adventures, their attempts to increase the family's income, their friendship with the neighboring Laurence family, and their later love affairs and destinies as women.

A Nebraska native, Claude Wheeler wants to attend the State University but instead lives a typical college life as a Temple College student. However, when his successful father decides to expand the family farm, Claude's reality is changed forever as he's forced to drop out to help realize his father's dream. Later, as war wages on in Europe, he enlists, hoping to escape his dreary fate and find purpose.

Winner of: The Pulitzer Prize The National Book Critics Circle Award The Anisfield-Wolf Book Award The Jon Sargent, Sr. First Novel Prize A Time Magazine #1 Fiction Book of the Year One of The New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century One of the best books of 2007 according to: The...

Generations of young readers continue to fall in love with Marguerite Henry’s “horse stories.” In one of her most famous, King of the Wind, the author traces the ancestry of the great Kentucky Derby winner, Man o’ War, whose mysterious pedigree is linked to the noble line leading from the Godolphin Arabian.

Anne is growing up and leaving the Island to spend four years of her life at Redmond College. She meets a wonderful new friend in Philippa Gordon, offspring to an old and exclusive "bluenose" family. Phil's family ties, combined with her beauty and charm, open the gates of all the social cliques and clubs at Redmond. And where Phil went, Anne went. Thus, Anne found her social pathway at Redmond made very easy while other freshettes were doomed to remain on the fringe of things.

Summer, 1947. Kate Herrick, a war widow, returns to her childhood home for a final visit before the house is sold. But Rose Cottage is not the idyllic paradise she remembers from her youth and someone has been there before her. As Kate uncovers an old secret that haunts the home she thought she knew, she is forced to confront a dark truth from her own past.... Beyond the weedy garden with its riot of rose bushes, nothing had changed. And someone was crossing the bridge to approach the garden gate. Someone I knew well....

Elsie Dinsmore is an endearing 8-year-old girl with several bewildering problems. She has never known her mother, who died when Elsie was a baby, and she longs for a close, loving relationship with her father. He, however, has sent her off to be raised at Roselands, his brother's Southern plantation, where her teacher, Miss Day, harshly criticizes her and her cousins tease her relentlessly.

When published in 1868, the world fell in love with this semiautobiographical story of the March sisters, and to this day the classic story is beloved and frequently adapted for the stage and screen. Little Women tells the story of Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March, sisters who love each other and work hard building their earnest lives in Massachusetts during the Civil War.

Lucy Maud Montgomery's classic tale, with its engaging heroine and evocative description of the Prince Edward Island landscape, never fails to delight youngsters. When Matthew Cuthbert goes to the train station to pick up the orphan he and his sister Marilla plan to adopt, he expects to meet a boy who can help on the family farm. Instead it's Anne - a talkative, dreamy, red-haired, freckle-faced 11-year-old little girl who transforms the Cuthberts' life forever and fills it with love and joy.

Emily Starr, a young orphan girl growing up in the town of New Moon, acclimates to her new surroundings and gets to know the other children around her. An avid writer, Emily works hard to hone her skills and also learns more about the skills of her newfound friends.

Mrs. Pepper, a widow, and her five children lived in a plain little brown house, where she struggled to feed and clothe her lively brood. The family had little in the way of luxury and hardly any of the things that many of us today take for granted, but they had such fun and good times together, and loved one another so dearly that, when a very rich little boy discovered the warmth and happiness that flooded the little brown house, he felt himself lucky to be in it.

Anne Shirley has come a long way since her days as a mischievous orphan living in the house at Green Gables. She is now 18 and headed to faraway Redmond College in Kingsport. Anne's college years are sure to be full of fun, but they will also be a time for soul-searching and big decisions. When her longtime friend Gilbert Blythe proposes, Anne feels they can never be more than friends. But is her new admirer, the handsome and wealthy Roy Gardner, really the man of her dreams?

Historic Prince Edward Island in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence is the scene of this charming romance, which has captivated generations of readers young and old. Anne, the orphan child who brings happiness and love into the lives of her foster parents, is one of the most beloved heroines in all literature. But life was not kind to her at the start of her great adventure. For when Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert, living alone, decided to adopt a child from the local orphanage, they asked for a boy.

A beautiful and brilliant portrait of two generations of women. Set in India’s railway colonies, this is the story of Kamini and her mother Saroja, nicknamed Tamarind Mem due to her sour tongue. While in Canada beginning her graduate studies, Kamini receives a postcard from her mother saying...

Ben has been tramping for two weeks when he's discovered, nearly starving, by a widow and her two little girls. Mrs. Moss feeds and clothes him and gets him a job with the local Squire. But herding cows is boring for an active boy and he's about to take to the road again when the lovely Miss Celia, owner of the Big House (bordered by lilacs!) arrives and hires him to do odd jobs and be the company for her teenage invalid brother.

Sara Stanley is only 14, but she can weave tales that are impossible to resist. In the charming town of Carlisle, children and grown-ups alike flock from miles around to hear her spellbinding narratives. And when Bev King and his younger brother, Felix, arrive for the summer, they, too, are captivated by the Story Girl.

Young, attractive and wealthy, Alice Vavasor is a woman in the prime of her life. And yet one question torments her: "What should a woman do with her life?" Torn between the kind but dull Mr. Grey and her dangerous and exciting cousin George, she is prone to constant indecision and uncertainty, much to the detriment of Mr. Grey. Can You Forgive Her? is a crisp and engaging novel, brimming with romance, humor, and pathos. It is the first of six in Trollope's celebrated Palliser series.

In the seventh book of the Anne of Green Gables series, Anne and Gilbert Blythe have been happily married for over a decade and have six children. The children take center stage in this story, as they befriend the four children of a new minister in tow, John Meredith. After John’s wife died, he has buried himself into theological studies, and lets his children run free. And though the children are generally kind and loyal, the townsfolk only really notice them on the occasions where they’re getting into trouble.

Adam Bates, the Land King of Hartley, Indiana, rules his 16 children with a firm hand and a tight purse. All work tirelessly on the family farm until the sons, at 21, are given 200 acres of land with a house and barn (they pay the taxes while their father holds the deeds). The daughters, at 18, get a term at Normal School to train as schoolteachers, a position they hold until they marry. Kate, the youngest, has always bristled at her father's preference for his sons but eagerly awaits her chance for further education. Her father has other plans.