Ridgway Public Library

"Life and a dismal last name are the only two things Beyah Grim's parents ever gave her. After carving her path all on her own, Beyah is well on her way to bigger and better things, thanks to no one but herself. With only two short months separating her from the future she's built and the past she desperately wants to leave behind, an unexpected death leaves Beyah with no place to go during the interim. Forced to reach out to her last resort, Beyah...

Living out her days in a remote part of her South American homeland, Violeta finds her life shaped by some of the most important events of history as she tells her story in the form of a letter to someone she loves above all others. Violeta comes into the world on a stormy day in 1920, the first girl in a family with five boisterous sons. From the start, her life is marked by extraordinary events, for the ripples of the Great War are still being felt,...

"Vance, a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, provides an account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America's white working class. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like...

In this story based on the author's life, a young homeless girl finds a different kind of home in the library.

What Harry Potter did for magic, Max Einstein does for kids' imaginations! Max leads a group of kid geniuses in this #1 New York Times bestseller officially approved by the Albert Einstein archives.
Max Einstein is not your typical genius. She . . .

Hacks the computer system at NYU to attend classes

Builds inventions to help the homeless

And talks to Albert Einstein! (Okay, that's just in her imagination)

But...

"Because I was bad in my last life." "Because Allah has willed it." "Because the rich do nothing for the poor." "Because the poor do nothing for themselves." "Because it is my destiny." These are just some of the answers to the simple yet groundbreaking question William T. Vollmann asks in cities and villages around the globe: "Why are you poor?" In the tradition of James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, writer Vollmann struggles to confront poverty...

Living with his alcoholic father on a broken-down sailboat on Puget Sound has been hard on seventeen-year-old Chance Taylor, but when his love of running leads to a high-paying job, he quickly learns that the money is not worth the risk.

"More than forty-five million Americans attempt to survive under the poverty line, day by day. Nearly 60,000 people sleep in New York City-run shelters every night--forty percent of them children. This Is All I Got makes this issue deeply personal, vividly depicting one woman's hope and despair and her steadfast determination to improve her situation, despite the myriad setbacks she encounters. Camila is a twenty-two-year-old new mother. She has no...

Ten-year-old Birdie Boyer can hardly wait to start picking strawberries. But her family has just moved to the Florida backwoods, and they haven't even begun their planting. Making the new farm prosper is not easy. There is the heat to suffer through, and droughts, and cold snaps. And, perhaps most worrisome of all for the Boyers, there are rowdy neighbors, just itching to start a feud.

The People of the Abyss (1903) is a work of nonfiction by American writer Jack London. Written after the author spent three months living in London's poverty-stricken East End, The People of the Abyss bears witness to the difficulties faced by hundreds and thousands of people every day in one of the wealthiest nations on earth. Inspired by Friedrich Engels's The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) and Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives,...