A middle-grade novel by James Bird about a boy sent to his Ojibwe family to straighten out his life. Benjamin Waterfalls comes from a broken home, and the quickest fix he’s found for his life is to fill that emptiness with stuff he steals and then sells. But he’s been caught one too many times, and when he appears before a tough judge, his mother proposes sending him to “boot camp” at the Ojibwe reservation where they used to live. Soon he is on his way to Grand Portage, Minnesota, to live with his father – the man Benny hasn’t seen in years. Not only is “boot camp” not what he expects, but his rehabilitation seems to be in the hands of the tribal leader’s daughter, who wears a mask. Why? Finding the answer to this and so many other questions prove tougher than any military-style boot camp. Will answers be enough for Benny to turn his life around and embrace his second chance?

Taylor Edwards family might not be that close - everyone is a little too busy and overscheduled, but for the most part, they get along just fine. Then Taylor's dad gets some devastating news, and her parents decide that the family will spend on last summer together at their old lake house in the Pcocono Mountains. Crammed into a place much smaller than they are used to, they begin to get to know each other again, but as the summer progresses they're more aware than ever that they're battling a ticking clock. And as Taylor tries to deal with the drama at home, she is faced with the fact that the friends she thought she'd left behind haven't actually gone anywhere. Her former summer best friend is still living across the lake and still as mad with Taylor as she was five years ago, and her first boyfriend has moved in next door… but he's much cuter at seventeen than he was at twelve. Can one summer be enough time to get a second chance - with family, friends, and love?

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the governor of Maryland, the “compassionate” (People), “startling” (Baltimore Sun), “moving” (Chicago Tribune) true story of two kids with the same name: One went on to be a Rhodes Scholar, decorated combat veteran, White House Fellow, and business leader. The other is serving a life sentence in prison. The chilling truth is that his story could have been mine. The tragedy is that my story could have been his. In December 2000, the Baltimore Sun ran a small piece about Wes Moore, a local student who had just received a Rhodes Scholarship. The same paper also ran a series of articles about four young men who had allegedly killed a police officer in a spectacularly botched armed robbery. The police were still hunting for two of the suspects who had gone on the lam, a pair of brothers. One was named Wes Moore. Wes just couldn’t shake off the unsettling coincidence, or the inkling that the two shared much more than space in the same newspaper. After following the story of the robbery, the manhunt, and the trial to its conclusion, he wrote a letter to the other Wes, now a convicted murderer serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole. His letter tentatively asked the questions that had been haunting him: Who are you? How did this happen? That letter led to a correspondence and relationship that have lasted for several years. Over dozens of letters and prison visits, Wes discovered that the other Wes had had a life not unlike his own: Both had had difficult childhoods, both were fatherless; they’d hung out on similar corners with similar crews, and both had run into trouble with the police. At each stage of their young lives they had come across similar moments of decision, yet their choices would lead them to astonishingly different destinies. Told in alternating dramatic narratives that take readers from heart-wrenching losses to moments of surprising redemption, The Other Wes Moore tells the story of a generation of boys trying to find their way in a hostile world.

In a novel set in an indefinite, futuristic, post-apocalyptic world, a father and his young son make their way through the ruins of a devastated American landscape, struggling to survive and preserve the last remnants of their own humanity

First published in 2006. This is Volume 3 of the Official Journal of the Society for the Study of Human Development from 2006. It includes a special edition collection of articles covering second chances as transformative stories, looking at the redemptive self, emotion and transformational processing, narrating self in the past and the future, low income fathers and prison conversions and the crisis of self-narrative.

He didn’t know that his death could change his life. Second Chance is an emotional and thought-provoking tale of an arrogant businessman, Shekhar Kapoor. Shekhar is a kind of man you would never want to meet with. He respects no one in the whole wide world. He is selfish, insensitive and has no moral value. He is a billionaire but he does not know what life is. He has not been talking to his paralysed bedridden father for ten long years and he only has his father to call “a family”. He ruins life of his business rival, Ashutosh Upadhyay, and never feels even a bit of regret. BUT something happens in his life that changes everything, something beyond his imagination. He gets a mysterious phone call and after that, an accident. He experiences a rare phenomenon he has never even thought of. What he experiences teaches him that the life he is living is not called a life. He realises that his life lacks the best and the most important ingredient. Does he find the ingredient that makes the life a delicious feast? Does he learn to laugh and to cry? Does his father get his son back? Read Shekhar’s life-changing story, although fiction, might change something in your life. Story that will give you the essence of real meaning of life. Story of love, and life; story of father and son; story of living for others; story of change; story of karma and story of being a human. Grab your copy now.