Seventeen-year-old Lovisa King leaves Missouri for the Oregon Territory in 1845. A Heart for Any Fate, based on the history of a company of real pioneers, tells the story of the King family, whose careful plans are challenged by the harsh, unforeseen realities of overland travel. The family makes the unfortunate decision to follow guide Stephen Meek, who leads them into blistering weather, drought, and treacherous river crossings along a shortcut that becomes known as the Terrible Trail.

Twelve-year-old Shelby has always looked forward to vacations at the family's beach cabin on the Oregon coast, but this year, everything's different. Everything's wrong. Why do so many things have to be changing all at once?

"With insight and sensitivity, Crew captures the pain of growing up, along with it's inherent humor.Lively, believable characters, universal experiences and Shelby's own narration of her summer highlight this uplifting story." Publisher's Weekly

"The author of Children of the River has created a wonderfully complex character in Shelby...Crew invigorates her plot with a fully realized setting and people who interact with the grace of real family members." Kirkus

"Underlying everything is the story's celebration of family and its capacity to support and sustain even in the midst of squabble and irritating idiosyncrasies." Booklist

"Set in the Oregon woods of 1933, this swift paced novel gives us a young girl living a life she loves in a remote logging camp...When the fabled Tillamook Burn begins with a small blaze in Gales Creek Canyon, we feel the danger, care about the people and the woods. Along with the characters, we hope for the best, continue to live their lives with them, and finally must face the ultimate horror. An expertly written, realistic, and altogether impressive novel. It teaches, but it also excites and cuts to the heart. Get it for your kids. And read it yourself." Dan Hays, Salem Stateman Journal.

Grades 7 and up


Sundara fled Cambodia with her aunt's family to escape the Khmer Rouge army when she was thirteen, leaving behind her parents, her brother and sister, and the boy she had loved since she was a child.



Now, four years later, she struggles to fit in at her Oregon high school and to be "a good Cambodian girl" at home. A good Cambodian girl never dates; she waits for her family to arrange her marriage to a Cambodian boy. Yet Sundara and Jonathan, an extraordinary American boy, are powerfully drawn to each other. Haunted by grief for her lost family and for the life left behind, Sundara longs to be with him. At the same time she wonders, Are her hopes for happiness and new life in America disloyal to her past and her people?