Pines and Plains Libraries

A dark and romantic epic fantasy retelling of the Cinderella story, about a girl who must team up with the prince she despises to defeat an evil creature threatening their kingdom. The fourth standalone novel in the New York Times bestselling Ravenspire series by C. J. Redwine.

Blue de la Cour has her life planned: hide the magic in her blood and continue trying to turn metal into gold so she can help her city's homeless.

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Tree-ear, a thirteen-year-old orphan in medieval Korea, lives under a bridge in a potters' village, and longs to learn how to throw the delicate celadon ceramics himself. When Min takes on Tree-ear as his helper, Tree-ear is elated--until he finds obstacles in his path: the backbreaking labor of digging and hauling clay, Min's irascible temper, and his own ignorance. However, Tree-ear is determined to prove himself.

In 2018 the number of people displaced worldwide by violence, persecution, or natural disaster had reached 68.5 million. The world faces an unprecedented crisis as people flee their homes, seeking safety, peace, and a better future for themselves and their families. Refugees set off, often on foot or by boat, on dangerous journeys to cross international borders where they can apply for asylum, or protection, in a new country. While many countries...

The story weaves a vivid and engrossing tale of one man's search for love and his struggle to come to terms with a childhood of poverty and neglect. As he journeys from the Hispanic barrio in Los Angeles to the killing fields of Vietnam to the frenetic life of a lawyer in San Francisco, Gregory Reeves loses himself in an illusory and wrongheaded quest. Only when he circles back to his roots does he find the love and acceptance he has been looking...

"When Stephanie Land set out to write her memoir Maid, she never could have imagined what was to come. Maid was a story about a housecleaner, but it was also a story about a woman with a dream. In Class, Land takes us with her as she finishes college and pursues her writing career. Facing barriers at every turn including a byzantine loan system, not having enough money for food, navigating the judgments of professors and fellow students who didn't...

Left on their own seventeenth-century London, three impoverished children draw upon all their resources to stay together and make their way to the Virginia colony in search of their father.

In the 1950s, Jennifer Worth was a district midwife in East London. She worked with an order of nursing nuns, learning how to cope with midwifery in slum conditions. In the course of her training she met many interesting characters, whose stories are told in this book. When the workhouses of Britain officially closed in 1930, there was nowhere for inmates to go. So workhouses merely changed their names and carried on much the same as before. The conditions,...

"Because I was bad in my last life." "Because Allah has willed it." "Because the rich do nothing for the poor." "Because the poor do nothing for themselves." "Because it is my destiny." These are just some of the answers to the simple yet groundbreaking question William T. Vollmann asks in cities and villages around the globe: "Why are you poor?" In the tradition of James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, writer Vollmann struggles to confront poverty...

Maddie is living on the streets, trying to protect herself and make enough money to get a place to stay and find a way to go back to school. When she meets Q, she is wary but welcomes his friendship. And then she meets Dylan, a six-year-old boy, living on the streets with his family. When Dylan's father asks Maddie to watch the boy for a while, she is happy to help. But Dylan's parents don't come back; and Maddie and Q are left looking after him....

Bone, an illegitimate child in a family of social outcasts, sees her mother's happiness with her new husband and will not tell when the stepfather begins abusing her in the 1950s.