May 24, 2016 | strande
From age three, McCutcheon Daniels, now sixteen, has been trained in mixed martial arts and must keep winning to feed his five-year-old sister and father, but chance presents an opportunity to get out of the Detroit slums using his brain instead of his fighting skills.
Seventeen-year-old Astrid Sullivan belongs to a family of compulsive gamblers, and now that her father has been laid off from his job in Detroit and lost all their money betting on the Titans, which are half-horse, half car, and race around impossible tracks, her family is falling apart--but when Astrid's new friends give her the chance to participate in this year's Titan races, she thinks she sees a way to win some money and keep her family together.
Missing city life after moving to a sleepy town in Michigan, Maggie bonds with restless but dutiful Pauline during a summer that is shattered by a serial killer who is targeting teen girls.
Although he is still a freshman, basketball star Isaiah is on the varsity team at a private Detroit high school, even though he lives in suburban Auburn Hills, but he faces new challenges as his parents separate.
Chanti Evans moves from the streets of Detroit to the exclusive Langdon prepatory school, where her upbringing immediately makes her a suspect in the string of thefts occurring on campus, and she must find the culprit to clear her name.
When life in Detroit becomes too hard to bear, Daphne flees to her Uncle Floyd's home in Carbon County, Wyoming, but instead of solace she finds tumult as the townsfolk declare that the End Times are here, and she may be the only person who can read the signs and know the truth.
Twelve-year-old Abbey North deals with her feelings about her father's cancer and its aftermath while also navigating the problems of growing up.
Eden, Michigan, high school student Kate Winters strikes a bargain with Henry, Greek god of the underworld, if he'll cure her dying mother of cancer. The bargain she strikes with him is a grim one, but the full enormity of what she has undertaken-- "live forever or die trying"-- is not revealed until it's too late to recant.
Fifteen-year-old Essie Green, an orphan who has been raised by her secular Jewish grandparents in Michigan, experiences conflicting loyalties and confusing emotions when her aunt, uncle, and cousin move back from New York, and her very religious cousin tries to fit in with the other football players at Essie's high school, one of whom is Essie's popular new boyfriend.
Eighteen-year-old Christopher, who plans to be a spy, learns of a murder cover-up through his summer job as a morgue assistant and teams up with Tina, a gorgeous newspaper reporter, to investigate, despite great danger.
One snowy night a famous Hollywood actor slumps over and dies onstage during a production of King Lear. Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. Moving back and forth in time-from the actor's early days as a film star to fifteen years in the future, when a theater troupe known as the Traveling Symphony roams the wasteland of what remains-this suspenseful, elegiac, spellbinding novel charts the strange twists of fate that connect five people: the actor, the man who tried to save him, the actor's first wife, his oldest friend, and a young actress with the Traveling Symphony, caught in the crosshairs of a dangerous self-proclaimed prophet.