Cranston Public Library

The tale of a grumpy academic and the lower-class woman who joins his household staff. He bucks the class prejudices of the time by showing compassion and trying to educate her children.

Cynthia Rylant returns to her home state of West Virginia with this powerful and evocative collection of poems. In a heartbreaking narrative that flows like a novel, we follow Ludie from childhood to falling in love and getting married, through the birth of her own children, and on into old age. This is the story of one woman's experiences in a hard-scrabble coal-mining town, a story that brims with universal themes about life, love, and family-and...

In this new novel from the national bestselling author Francis Ray, a bad girl falls on hard times, and forgiveness and redemption are the only things she has left. Broke and living in a shabby motel, beautiful bad girl Jana Franklin has become an outcast in the elite Dallas society she once ruled. With her divorce from wealthy Gray Livingston, her dubious past, and no skills to claim, Jana is unable to support herself. Without friends and without...

"Seth Broden needs this last deal to achieve the success he's always desired - but to close it, he must make the one acquisition he's never wanted: a wife! A chance meeting with pretty but penniless Imogen Hayes gives Seth the chance to propose a mutually beneficial arrangement... Jilted bride Imogen vowed to save herself for her wedding night - but she never expected to be walking down the aisle to Seth! With the brooding tycoon waiting for her at...

Presents an annotated edition of the nineteenth-century novel about Maggie, a beautiful tenement girl whose life takes a downward spin when she becomes involved with Pete; and includes backgrounds and sources, reviews, critical essays, and a history of the novel's composition and revision.

When she was very young, Baby Halder was abandoned by her mother and left with a cruel, abusive father. She was married off at twelve to a man twice her age who beat her. At fourteen, she was a mother herself. Her early life was marked by overwhelming challenges and heartbreak until, exhausted and desperate, she fled with her three children to Delhi, to work as a maid in some of the city's wealthiest homes. Expected to serve her employers' every demand,...

Presents Stephen Crane's 1893 novel about Maggie, a beautiful young tenement girl whose life takes a downward spin when she becomes involved with Pete; and features additional writings by Crane, including "George's Mother" and other Bowery tales, and a selection of New York journalism.

Although he's best known for his Civil War classic "The Red Badge of Courage," Crane wrote other novels of literary importance, including "Maggie: A Girl of the Streets" and "George's Mother." -- From publisher's description.