Showing results for "Running" in Coming of Age

Growing up in the mill slums of Pittsburgh, Daniel Robinson was a punching bag for his drunken father, ignored by his mentally ill mother, and trapped in the grip of poverty. He’s finally freed from the torture of that home only to crash land in another hell when he’s abused by the pastor who takes him in. Daniel escapes once again, spending the next decade wandering homeless throughout the country during the turbulent 1960s.

Mark Hayes has come up hard. Poverty. Chaos. Hunger. His mother is a junkie. His father is serving a life sentence. But as his senior year looms, Mark finds a bit of peace with his mother and her girlfriend in a farmhouse outside town. Here, he hopes to escape the upheaval that has dogged him since the day he was born, but as hard as he tries, he can't outrun his shadows.

All his life, Max Lerner has watched from the stands as the heroes and villains of professional wrestling do battle in the ring. Max happens upon the hand-painted sign outside Barry’s Flea Market: Live Pro Wrestling Tuesdays. His passion drives him to step out from the crowd and step through the ropes to experience the world of pro-wrestling for himself. Now, he just needs to figure out who to be.

Elenore struggles to heal emotionally from an accident years before that killed her boyfriend and uses substances to get through. When she becomes pregnant and her current boyfriend beats her, she flees to a man who has just been biding his time, waiting to make her life a living nightmare of which she sees no way to escape.

All Leila wants is to get through her senior year at her new high school without drawing undue attention. Not that she has any big secret to protect, but her unconventional upbringing has made her very private. At seventeen, she realizes just how odd it was that two men raised her-one black, one white-and no mother. Not to mention they were blues musicians, always on the move. When her father died, he left her with a fear of foster care and a plan that would help her fall between the cracks of the system.