Best friends are forged by fire. For Winona Olsen and Lucille Pryce, that fire happened the night they met outside the police station, both deciding whether to turn their families in for abuse and mistreatment. They realize they can't wait until graduation to start their new lives. They need out. Now. All they need is three grand, fast. And really, a stolen convertible to take them from Michigan to Las Vegas can't hurt.

Twelve-year-old María Luisa O'Neill-Morales (who really prefers to be called Malú) reluctantly moves with her Mexican-American mother to Chicago and starts seventh grade with a bang--violating the dress code with her punk rock aesthetic and spurning the middle school's most popular girl in favor of starting a band with a group of like-minded weirdos.

On a cold winter day in Chicago, Early's father disappeared, and now she, her mother and her brother have been forced to flee their apartment and join the ranks of the homeless--and it is up to Early to hold her family together and solve the mystery surrounding her father.

Ivy's summer break kicks off with an accident, a punishment, and a mystery: a stranger whose appearance in the middle of the road, in the middle of the night, heralds a string of increasingly unsettling events. As the days pass, Ivy grapples with eerie offerings, corroded memories, and a secret she's always known: that there's more to her mother than meets the eye. Back then, the summer Dana turned sixteen, her gifts bloomed into a heady fling with...

After his boyfriend Joey breaks up with him to pursue more "serious" guys, Blaine decides to run for senior class president as Joey's successor to prove his worth--but is Blaine willing to sacrifice everything about himself to do it?

Visiting her lovable, younger cousin in Chicago over the summer, twelve-year-old Leah tries to help him recover from the trauma of a school shooting.

In 2008 South Side Chicago, ten-year-old Montgomery "Monty" Carver's hunt to find the origins of a mysterious golden key leads him to discover the rich history of his community.

A genie informs twelve-year-old Amira and her younger brother Hamza that they are the chosen ones who must defeat a monstrous demon of Islamic folklore to save the Earth and a parallel dimension.

Together with Grampa, Ray Halfmoon, a Seminole-Cherokee boy, finds creative and amusing solutions to life's challenges.

In 1893, thirteen-year-old Rosie and members of her family travel from their Illinois farm to Chicago to visit Aunt Euterpe and attend the World's Columbian Exposition which, along with an encounter with Buffalo Bill and Lillian Russell, turns out to be a life-changing experience for everyone.