Orem Library

Though he may not speak of them, the memories still dwell inside Jacob Jankowski's ninety-something-year-old mind. Memories of himself as a young man, tossed by fate onto a rickety train that was home to the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. Memories of a world filled with freaks and clowns, with wonder and pain and anger and passion; a world with its own narrow, irrational rules, its own way of life, and its own way of death. The world...

Young widow Eliza, left alone to run Wyatt Orchards and raise three children, does not know how she is going to manage, when a stranger, Gabe, appears at her doorstep and turns out to be the answer to her prayers.

Augie March is a Jewish-American boy growing up fatherless and poor in Depression-era Chicago. He seeks a "special destiny," although his circumstances seem to position him for a uniquely disappointing life: his family consists of a simple-minded mother, a brother and "grandmother" who prove to be Machiavellian in their intentions, and an "idiot" youngest brother, Georgie.

During the Great Depression, when his father moves away to find work and his mother becomes ill, Danny struggles to help his family.

Like her first two award-winning novels (Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman), A Cure for Dreams is set in the rural and small-town South and draws richly upon the author's ear for comic turns of phrase and her sure grasp of the humor, pathos, and dignity of supposedly "ordinary" people. The determination of the women of the story to assert themselves in confining, dependent situations makes for uplifting, enjoyable reading.

The Shiloh Legacy series covers the lives of four young soldiers and their families through these great events: the end of World War I in France, the return of the soldiers to America, the Roaring Twenties, the stock-market crash, the resulting Great Depression, and the rebuilding of lives that must follow. Yet with all the racial, social, and cultural intolerance that marked the dayseemingly immovable mountains in the lives of these charactersGod...

Fifteen-year-old Josh struggles to survive and come to terms with inner conflicts in the desperate world of the 1932 Depression.