Easy reading & heartwarming but not sappy

I've just finished my third book by Catherine Ryan Hyde and would recommend them (and probably others by this very prolific writer), if you're looking for something uplifting but not too sweet.

The plot lines are different, but I've noticed that in each of these books, strangers are brought together and become closer than family -- then circumstances intervene that separate them. Resolution doesn't come quickly; often years go by before the characters find out what happened to each other.

In Take Me With You, August Shroeder, a burned-out teacher, has been sober since his nineteen-year-old son died. Every year he’s spent the summer on the road with his son, but now August is making the trip with Philip’s ashes instead. An unexpected twist of fate lands August with two extra passengers for his journey, two half-orphans with nowhere else to go.

In When I Found You, childless, middle-aged Nathan McCann finds a newborn abandoned in the woods. Fifteen years later, the widowed Nathan discovers the child abandoned once again—this time at his doorstep. The teenager has grown into a sullen delinquent whose grandmother can no longer tolerate him. Nathan agrees to care for him, and the two engage in a battle of wills that spans years. Still, the older man repeatedly assures the youngster that, unlike the rest of the world, he will never abandon him ...

In Don't Let Me Go, Former Broadway dancer and current agoraphobic Billy Shine has not set foot outside his apartment in almost a decade. He has glimpsed his neighbors—beautiful manicurist Rayleen, lonely old Ms. Hinman, bigoted and angry Mr. Lafferty, kind-hearted Felipe, and 9-year-old Grace and her former addict mother Eileen. But most of them have never seen Billy -- until Grace begins to sit outside on the building’s front stoop for hours every day, inches from Billy’s patio. When Billy makes it far enough out onto his porch to ask Grace why she doesn’t sit inside where it’s safe. Her answer: “If I sit inside, then nobody will know I’m in trouble. And then nobody will help me.”

These have been my "in-between" books recently. Now on to something else. I'm anxious to find out what we'll be reading for Feb.!