If you have the soul of a hippie and wish you were born in the 1960s, then this book is for you. It guides you gently into hippie ways of thinking, sharing, and living, keeping you closer to nature and encouraging you to live a kinder and more beautiful life. Never fear; the hippies are still here, and you can be one of them. Stay wild, flower child, and be a hippie! Peace and love.

'A work of stunning lyricism and intense originality' (Mary Gordon, author of Pearl). From an award-winning short story writer comes this spare, lively, moving novel, quickly embraced by critics and readers, portraying the strangely celebrated and unsupervised childhood of four hippie offspring in the 1970's and 80's. Based on the author's own upbringing, Flower Children tells the story of four children growing up in rural Pennsylvania, impossibly at odds with their surroundings. In time, as the sheltered utopia their parents have created begins to collapse, the children long for structure and restraint-and all their parents have avoided.

A dying blues singer is murdered and private detective Jake Falcon, introduced in Missing in Paradise, goes all out to track down the killer and find the victim’s daughter, who seems not to exist. The search leads to the dregs of a black-market adoption ring that once flourished within the shadows of the segregated South. An underworld syndicate of hardened criminals (drug smugglers, human traffickers, murderers, and militant white supremacists), led by vicious, one-eyed Willie Abraham, stands in Falcon’s way and leaves a trail of dead bodies to deter him. Crime-busting former Governor John Patterson brings a powerful ally to Falcon’s side when he joins the battle to bring down Abraham’s army of thugs and rescue Falcon to fight another day.

Much has been written about America's troubled teens, particularly endangered teenage girls. Works like Mary Pipher's Reviving Ophelia and many others have contributed to the general perception that contemporary young women are in a state of crisis. Parents, educators, social scientists, and other concerned individuals worry that our nation's girls are losing their ambition, moral direction, and self-esteem as they enter adolescence--which can then lead them to promiscuous sex, anorexia, drug abuse, and at the very least, declining math scores. In spite of evidence to the contrary in life and literature, this bleak picture is seldom challenged, but a good place to begin may be with recent literary representations of young women, fictional and autobiographical, which show proud young women who are highly focused and use their brains and good humor to work toward satisfying adult lives. This book addresses the ways in which 12 women writers use their heroines' stories to challenge commonly held and frequently damaging notions of adolescence, femininity, and regional identity. The book begins with a chapter on sociological and literary theories of adolescent female development. This chapter also includes theoretically informed discussions of young adult fiction and Southern literature. Chapters that follow focus on adolescent heroines in the novels and autobiographies of the contemporary Southern women writers Anne Tyler, Bobbie Ann Mason, Josephine Humphreys, Dorothy Allison, Kaye Gibbons, Tina Ansa, Janisse Ray and Jill McCorkle and young adult writers Katherine Paterson, Mildred Taylor and Cynthia Voigt. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.