A sweeping historical tale based on the life and times of the daughter of a New York merchant finds the orphaned Belle suffering at the hands of a rival cousin before working as a prostitute and transforming herself repeatedly to win the love and life she desires. In 1838, Arabella Godwin and her brother, Lewis, are orphaned and sent to live on their aunt's desolate farm in upstate New York. Time and again she will be broken and remade. She will...

Beth Lisick started out as a homecoming princess with a Crisco-aided tan and a bad perm. And then everything changed. Plunging headlong into America's deepest subcultures, while keeping both feet firmly planted in her parents' Leave It to Beaver values, Lisick makes her adult home on the fringe of mainstream culture and finds it rich with paradox and humor. On the one hand, she lives in "Brokeley" with drug dealers and street gangs; on the other,...

Max finds a new way to warm up for his Saturday baseball game--his sister's dancing class.

"The young Robert Louis Stevenson, living in a boarding house in San Francisco while waiting for his beloved's divorce from her feckless husband, dreamed of writing a soaring novel about his landlady's adventurous and globe-trotting husband--but he never got around to it. And very soon thereafter he was married, headed home to Scotland, and on his way to becoming the most famous novelist in the world, after writing such classics as Treasure Island,...

A look into the hippie revolution of San Francisco during the '60s, and how the free love and music turned into a life of drug use, violence, and broken dreams.