Karin Lin-Greenberg

“There’s a boy here for your mother’s dog.” Franny’s father is only supposed to call her at work if there’s something wrong—and a lot had gone wrong in the last year, as her mother had become more and more ill—but now her mother is gone, and Franny assumed her father had figured out how to …

Vanessa’s mother’s house is a disaster. There are newspapers—not even real papers, but Pennysavers—piled in the living room, some of them from years ago. “They’re for lining the birdcages,” her mother insists, but the birds are not in the cages, and Vanessa suspects they are never in the cages, which are piled one on top …