Every Falling Star, the first book to portray contemporary North Korea to a young audience, is the intense memoir of a North Korean boy named Sungju who is forced at age twelve to live on the streets and fend for himself. To survive, Sungju creates a gang and lives by thieving, fighting, begging, and stealing rides on cargo trains. Sungju richly re-creates his scabrous story, depicting what it was like for a boy alone to create a new family with his...

Documents the author's adventures growing up in Botswana with her eccentric family, an upbringing marked by her doctor father's yearnings to be a vet, her holistic and home-schooling mother, and the apartheid mind-set embraced by their white neighbors.

Explores the childhood of Santa, including his love of standing in front of the refrigerator, giving away his birthday presents, and his adoring parents.

Forget the moon landing, the Nobel prizes, and the famous inventions. When the world's most brilliant scientists were growing up, they had regular-kid problems just like you. Albert Einstein daydreamed instead of paying attention in class. Jane Goodall got in trouble for bringing worms and snails in her house. And Neil deGrasse Tyson had to start a dog-walking business to save up money to buy a telescope.

A celebration of childhood offers the author's account of growing up during the 1950s in the small town of Tomah, Wisconsin, relating his adventures and mishaps along the way.

"A deeply funny and bittersweet memoir of having grown up in an eccentric family of faded wealth and gentility (think shades of Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums) in which the father's failed dreams of being a writer put the family in the poor-house, drove the mother to weepy alcoholism, and provided Jeanne with a highly unusual approach to life--and a wicked sense of humor"--Provided by publisher.

Includes stories that detail Alphabet series heroine Kinsey MIllhone's origins, as well as true tales of the author's past.

"Kate Mayfield's first foray into nonfiction is a vivid Southern memoir that reads like a novel, about growing up in Jubilee, Kentucky as the daughter of a charismatic but troubled small-town undertaker--imagine Mad Men's Sally Draper growing up in the world of The Help"--