Burlington Public Library

Thirteen-year-old Stark "Stick" McClellan's brother has always defended him against those who tease him for his thinness and facial deformity, so when Bosten, having admitted he is gay, must leave home and their abusive parents, Stick sets out to find him.

Describes seventeen ways in which some people are unlike everyone else because of differerences in their bodies or their brains, and interviews people with these conditions, many of whom did not know there was anyone else like them.

A marooned outpost of humanity struggles to survive on a startlingly alien world.

In China, a foundling girl with a deformed hand raised in secret by an American woman must navigate China's strict adoption system when she is torn away from the only family she has ever known.

Many will recall the powerful impact The Fifth Child, Doris Lessing's 1988 novel, made on publication. Its account of idyllic marital and parental bliss irredeemably shattered by the arrival of the feral fifth child of the Lovatts made for unnerving and compulsive reading. That child, Ben, now grown to legal maturity, is the central character of this sequel, which picks up the fable at the end of the childhood where the first book ended and takes...

In Victorian London, a lonely band of misfits trapped in a sideshow decides to put their extraordinary talents to use to solve the mysteries that no one else cares about, starting with the stealing of poor children from the banks of the Thames.

Luc, a youth born with one ear and raised by a drunken father in fifteenth-century France, finds a better home with fisherman Pons, his sister Mattie, and their ward Beatrice, the daughter of a disgraced knight, and even after being kidnapped and sold into slavery in Africa, he remains remarkably fortunate.

"Born with a deforming disease known as CLOVES syndrome, Alex Bruorton has learned to deflect the hurtful comments slung his way and focus on the beautiful, brave person he truly is. From birth, his illness, which causes severe overgrowth in his face, was painfully evident. He has endured twenty-five surgeries to correct the growths, but nothing lasts for long. At a very young age, he realized he had to accept his face as it is. Fortunately, his family's...

In 1965, a year after Arianne thinks she sees a shooting star land in the fields surrounding her family's horse farm, a baby centaur is born and the family, already under scrutiny because Arianne's six-year-old brother has birth defects, struggles to keep the colt a secret.