Cindy Gibson, an African-American teenager struggling with her mother's neglect and her mother's boyfriend's emotional abuse, must find strength she did not know she had when the boy she thought would be her savior begins beating her.

Darcy's distress over her boyfriend Hakeem's move to Detroit, her grandmother's increasing frailness, and other changes in her life, leads her to make a big error in judgment when she becomes involved with the brother of a young woman who is employing Darcy as a babysitter.

"It's a blazing summer when two men arrive in a small village in the West of Ireland. One of them is coming home. Both of them are coming to get rich. One of them is coming to die. Cal Hooper took early retirement from Chicago PD and moved to rural Ireland looking for peace. He's found it, more or less: he's built a relationship with a local woman, Lena, and he's gradually turning Trey Reddy from a half-feral teenager into a good kid going good places....

In this achingly romantic, tender tale set against the backdrop of the AIDS epidemic in 1980s America, Aristotle and Dantetwo boys in a border town fell in love. Now they must learn what it means to stay in love-and to build their relationship in a world that doesn't seem to want them to exist. In their senior year at two different schools, the boys find ways to spend time together, like a camping road trip they take in the desert. Ari is haunted...