San Antonio College Library

With their mother dead and their father working nights, Retta tries to be mother to her two younger brothers but somehow things just don't seem to be working right.

Filmed in Chattanooga, Tennessee, this documentary is a personal journey that follows a year in the life of Katrina Gilbert, a 30-year-old woman earning just above the minimum wage as a certified nursing assistant. Katrina never expected to be a single mother of three young children, living paycheck to paycheck and barely scraping by. But after leaving her husband Jeremy - whose addiction to painkillers destroyed their marriage and gutted their finances...

Children describe their own families and explain concepts like "birth mom," "mixed race," "gay and lesbian," and "stepdad."

Twelve-year-old Jane, who lives at the beach in a run-down old house with her mother, two brothers, and sister, has an eventful summer accompanying her pastor on bible deliveries, meeting former boyfriends of her mother's, and being coerced into babysitting for a family of ill-mannered children.

Now almost fourteen, Joel becomes a local hero to his small Swedish town when he saves an old man from freezing to death in the woods.

The four Penderwick sisters are faced with the unimaginable prospect of their widowed father dating, and they hatch a plot to stop him.

Living in the inner city amidst guns and poverty, fifteen-year-old LaVaughn learns from old and new friends, and inspiring mentors, that life is what you make it--an occasion to rise to.

Through the voice of 11-year-old Reuben Land, an asthmatic boy obsessed with cowboys living in 1960s Minnesota, the story is told of the Land family's cross-country search for Reuben's outlaw older brother, who has been charged with murder.

The interwoven lives of a community in Colorado. The characters include two cattle farmers who take in a girl, thrown out of her house for becoming pregnant. The novel describes the girl's impact on their lives, both men being bachelors.