Growing Relationship

Tips, tools, advice, and activities for raising eco-friendly kids while nurturing compassion, resilience, and community engagement.

Catholic priests don't generally have children, but Australian legend Father Chris Riley has brought up about 60,000 – and they're some of the toughest kids around. He regularly encounters some of the most troubled children on Earth – kids who have given up or refuse to talk to others, who steal, take drugs, see themselves as irredeemable failures, hate everyone and everything, self-harm, have been abused or abuse other kids, and prostitute themselves.

When 16-year-old Alice is diagnosed with leukemia, her prognosis is grim. To maximize the time she does have, she vows to spend her final months righting wrongs - however she sees fit. She convinces her friend Harvey, who she knows has always had feelings for her, to help her with a crazy bucket list that's as much about revenge (humiliating her ex-boyfriend and getting back at her archnemesis) as it is about hope (doing something unexpectedly kind for a stranger).

Ella Jensen is an old soul stuck in a teenager's body, and she doesn't make friends easily. In her senior year of high school, her family moves across the country to Seattle, turning her already-small world upside down. She feels alone and lost.... But then she finds a box of decades-old love letters between Martha and Frederick; she becomes best friends with her tiny new neighbor, Miss T; and she gets her first kiss from Hans, a very symmetric German exchange student. But summer ends abruptly when she is forced to make a decision that will change her life. Forever.

Everyone knows that Chelsea Knot can't keep a secret.... Until now. Because the last secret she shared turned her into a social outcast - and nearly got someone killed. Now Chelsea has taken a vow of silence - to learn to keep her mouth shut, and to stop hurting anyone else. And if she thinks keeping secrets is hard, not speaking up when she's ignored, ridiculed and even attacked is worse. But there's strength in silence, and in the new friends who are, shockingly, coming her way - people she never noticed before; a boy she might even fall for. If only her new friends can forgive what she's done.

In order to support her family and maintain their ancient castle in Lesser Hoo, 17-year-old Althea bears the burden of finding a wealthy suitor who can remedy their financial problems.

Merilee leads a Very Ordered Existence: V.O.E. for short. She does not have time for Biswick O'Connor. She does not have time for Miss Veraleen Holliday. He with his annoying factoids and runny nose; she with her shining white shoes as big as sailboats. Both of them strangers who, like the hot desert wind that brings only bad news, blow into town and change everything.

Emily Abbott has always been considered the Girl Most Likely to Be Nice - but lately being nice hasn't done her any good. Her parents have decided to move the family from Chicago back to their hometown of Boston in the middle of Emily's senior year. Only Emily's first real boyfriend, Sean, is in Chicago, and so is her shot at class valedictorian and early admission to the Ivy League. What's a nice girl to do?Then Sean dumps Emily on moving day and her father announces he's staying behind in Chicago "to tie up loose ends," and Emily decides that what a nice girl needs to do is to stop being nice....

Giselle Boyer and her identical twin, Isabelle, are as close as sisters can be, even as their family seems to be unraveling. Then the Boyers are caught in a car crash that will shatter everyone's world forever. Giselle wakes up in the hospital, injured and unable to speak or move. Trapped in the prison of her own body, Giselle must revisit her past in order to understand how the people closest to her - her friends; her parents; and above all Isabelle, her twin - have shaped and defined her. Will she allow her love for her family and friends to lead her to recovery?

Georgie Burgess has known only neglect and abuse during his seven and a half years of life. His alcoholic mother does little to prevent the bruises and scars inflicted on Georgie by her brutal boyfriend. With each blow, the little boy withdraws further into his dreams. When he wins a small rose bush in a lottery, it seems as if one of his dreams has finally come true. But after a particularly savage beating, he is taken from his mother and placed in a home for boys.

Keri Cleary is worried about her brother, Alistair. Everyone is worried about Alistair. As the one witness to a shooting, he has been shocked into silence. But everyone needs to know three things: Who shot Kyle Dwyer? Where is Charlie Dwyer? What does this all have to do with the disappearance of Fiona Loomis? Perhaps the answers lie in stories. As Alistair makes strange confessions to his sister, Keri becomes inspired.

Marcelo Sandoval hears music no one else can hear - part of the autism-like impairment no doctor has been able to identify - and he's always attended a special school where his differences have been protected. But the summer after his junior year, his father demands that Marcelo work in his law firm's mailroom in order to experience "the real world."

Isabelle Scott and Mirabelle Monroe are still reeling from the revelation that they share more than just the roof over their heads. The media has pounced on their story and the girls are caught up in a flurry of talk-show appearances and newspaper interviews. They’ve put on a happy public face, but someone is leaking their true feelings to the press. While it seems like the world is watching their every move, at least they have each other. But with cotillion season right around the corner, Izzie and Mira have barely had time to process their newfound sisterhood.

After years of living in America, Clare Macleod and her father are returning to Ireland, where they'll inhabit the house Clare was born in - a house built into a green hillside with a tree for a wall. For Clare, the house is full of memories not only of her mother but also of a mysterious boy with raven-dark hair and dreamlike nights filled with stars and magic. Clare soon discovers that the boy is as real as the fairy-making magic and that they're both in great danger from an ancient foe.

Als Junge hat man am Anfang der Pubertät viele Fragen - hier kommt endlich ein moderner Ratgeber, der mit "Echte Kerle"-Rollenbilderquatsch aufräumt. Während weibliche Genderklischees langsam verschwinden, werden Jungs meist immer noch mit Survival-Tricks und Steinzeit-Ratschlägen abgespeist. Echt jetzt, 2021?? Doch Felix Treder knöpft sich die klassischen Lügen über Jungs vor, nimmt sie auseinander und verabschiedet sich mit einem Augenzwinkern von veralteten Rollenbildern und heteronormativen Denkmustern. Echt woke und gar nicht cringe, dieser Typ!

Carson Mastick is entering his senior year of high school and desperate to make his mark, on the reservation and off. A rock band - and winning the local Battle of the Bands, with its first prize of a trip to New York City - is his best shot. But things keep getting in the way. Small matters like the lack of an actual band, or the fact that his brother just got shot confronting the racist owner of a local restaurant.

On August 18, 1920, American women finally won the right to vote. Ratification of the 19th Amendment was the culmination of an almost 80-year fight in which some of the fiercest, most passionate women in history marched, protested, and sometimes broke the law in to achieve this huge leap toward equal rights. In this expansive yet personal volume, author Winifred Conkling covers not only the suffragists' achievements and politics but also the private journeys that fueled their passion and led them to become women's champions.

Taylor Markham is now a senior at the Jellicoe School, and has been made leader of the boarders. She is responsible for keeping the upper hand in the territory wars with the townies, and the cadets who camp on the edge of the school's property over summer. She has to keep her students safe and the territories enforced and to deal with Jonah Griggs - the leader of the cadets and someone she'd rather forget. But what she needs to do, more than anything, is unravel the mystery of her past and find her mother.

Sheils is very pleased with her perfectly controlled life (controlling others while she's at it). She's smart, powerful, the student body chair, and she even has a loving boyfriend. What more could a girl ask for? But everything changes when the first-ever interspecies transfer student, a pterodactyl named Pyke, enrolls at her school. There's something about him - something primal - that causes the students to lose control whenever he's around.

Stella was born to sing. Someday Broadway. But everything changes when a tragic accident renders her deaf; she cannot hear, much less sing. Trapped in a strange new world of total silence, she must face not only the loss of her friends, her hopes, and her voice but also the loss of her identity and her life's purpose. Who is she if she's not a singer? Hayden is a quiet loner, an outcast, and the only person Stella can communicate with; his profound stutter makes him speak so slowly, she is able to easily read his lips.