Orphan Beth Harmon overcomes her fears and shyness by learning to play chess and, over the years, improves her game to become a national champion and to play the world grandmasters.

When Mary Lennox, the unloved, contrary, and spoiled ten-year-old, is found alone in the deserted house after her parents' death, she is sent to live with an uncle whom she has never known. In Yorkshire, England, at his secluded Misselthwaite Manor, Martha Sowerby, a warm-hearted chambermaid, introduces Mary to the late Mrs. Craven and her private walled garden, which has been locked for years. Published more than a hundred years ago, The Secret Garden...

"Three hundred years after the events of the Mistborn trilogy, Scadrial is on the verge of modernity, with railroads to supplement the canals, electric lighting in the streets and the homes of the wealthy, and the first steel-framed skyscrapers racing for the clouds. Kelsier, Vin, Elend, Sazed, Spook, and the rest are now part of history or religion. Yet even as science and technology are reaching new heights, the old magics of Allomancy and Feruchemy...

An orphaned boy is raised by ghosts and other denizens of the graveyard.

Discovered in the ruins of a North Carolina plantation, an old box of mementos brings to life the world of young Molly Petree, an orphan growing up in the smoldering remains of the post-Civil War American South.

"A brilliant and immersive, all-consuming read about one fourteen-year-old girl's heart-stopping fight for her own soul. Turtle Alveston is a survivor. At fourteen, she roams the woods along the northern California coast. The creeks, tide pools, and rocky islands are her haunts and her hiding grounds, and she is known to wander for miles. But while her physical world is expansive, her personal one is small and treacherous: Turtle has grown up isolated...

A sequel to Winterborne Home for Vengeance and Valor finds April unraveling family secrets, creepy legends and mysterious identities when setbacks in her plans with Gabriel force her to fight on behalf of the orphans who have become her family.

Thirteen-year-old Nicki Demere is an orphan and a kleptomaniac, making her the perfect girl to portray the Trevors' daughter in witness protection, but she soon learns that the biggest threat to her new family's security comes from her own past.

A Swiss orphan is heartbroken when she must leave her beloved grandfather and their happy home in the mountains to go to school and to care for an invalid girl in the city.

Lame and suddenly orphaned, Kira is mysteriously removed from her squalid village to live in the palatial Council Edifice, where she is expected to use her gifts as a weaver to do the bidding of the all-powerful Guardians.