Joe Winston is the type of guy that girls flock to.  He has no problem with getting his pick of the litter until he meets Luna Clark.   Luna knows better than to fall for Joe’s usually irresistible charms and, of course, this drive’s Joe crazy.  He pursues and she ignores until Luna finds herself the new guardian of her two young cousins.   Now Luna needs Joe’s help to protect the kids.   The group becomes an instant family as Joe and Luna grow closer, realizing their true feelings.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC-Chapel Hill Library catalog.

Posted: November 2nd, 2009 under 2000-, 2003, Foster, Lori, Romance/Relationship.
Comments: none

Trapeze artist Frankie is the young, orphaned star of the Doub Circus. When Frankie’s parents died they left her in the care of the circus owner and he and the other performers became her family. That Frankie is African American does not matter to them, but since she can pass as white, it is kept a secret in order to avoid controversy. On the circus’s first trip into the South, Frankie’s background is revealed and she is taken from the circus by members of the Granston, NC community. She is placed in an orphanage but after standing up for herself to a cruel authority figure, she is moved to a reform school. Eventually she is adopted, renamed Thomasena, and allowed to finish growing up outside institutions, but it is more than six years before she is free to leave Granston again.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC-Chapel Hill Library catalog.

Posted: June 17th, 2009 under 2000, 2000-, Bowen, Sandra E., Historical, Novels Set in Fictional Places, Piedmont.
Comments: none

Mr. Pendleton must have read the Bard of Avon because this book has many of the elements of a Shakespeare play: mistaken identity, confused lovers, a kidnapping, a child rescued from danger and raised by guardians. As a toddler, Corona is saved from death by the mountaineer Gideon McLeod. She grows up, happy, with the McLeod family in Lonely Cove until a journalist who’s touring the mountains plays with her heart and spreads lies about the family. One consequence of the journalist’s visit is that the botanist Edward Darnell hears about the flora, fauna, and family in Lonely Cove. Darnell, who was also adopted, is taken with Corona. As the plot unfolds, they find that they have much in common.

Check this title’s availability and access an online copy through the UNC-Chapel Hill Library catalog.

Posted: October 9th, 2008 under 1890-1899, 1895, Macon, Mountains, Novels to Read Online, Pendleton, Louis.
Comments: none

Wilmington resident and mortician’s wife Shelley Marino desperately wants a child and after several miscarriages and failed domestic adoptions, she begins trying to adopt a little boy from Vietnam. While this strains her relationship with her husband, it helps her forge a new friendship with Mai, a local woman who fled Vietnam in the late 1970s. The narration switches between the voices of Shelley and Mai, both as the women get to know one another in the United States and later when they travel to Asia.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC Library Catalog.

Posted: June 27th, 2008 under 2000-, 2007, Coast, New Hanover, Sachs, Dana.
Comments: none

This book tackles some big topics–adoption, racial stereotypes, family dynamics, and small-town secrets. Young NCSU student Isaac Hunt confronts them all after his dying grandfather tells him is not the child of the well-to-do and politically connected Chloe Hunt, but instead the son of Betty Douglas of Pettigrew, North Carolina.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC Library Catalog.

Posted: May 29th, 2008 under 2000-, 2007, Coastal Plain, Hargrove, Linda Leigh, Novels Set in Fictional Places.
Comments: 1

Loosely based on the life of frontiersman William Holland Thomas, narrator Will Cooper provides a detailed picture of life in western North Carolina in the early nineteenth-century. After working as a “bound boy” at a “trade post at the edge of the Nation,” Will is adopted by a Cherokee elder, Bear. Will eventually leads the clan as a white Indian chief and then as a Colonel for the Confederacy. Still haunted by the memory of his one true love, Claire, Will escapes solitude through his travels.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC Library Catalog.

Posted: April 16th, 2008 under 2000-, 2006, Frazier, Charles, Historical, Mountains.
Comments: none