Traveling from California to Chicago after her mother dies of a drug overdose and her grandmother of lung cancer, thirteen-year-old Rydr meets other passengers on the train and attempts to accept her own situation.

The family routine is upset during Ramona's year in second grade when her father unexpectedly loses his job. Ramona Quimby is a character intimately known by Beverly Cleary readers. In this story of Ramona's year in second grade they will come to know Mr. Quimby equally well. As it opens he loses his job without warning, and Ramona's seven-year-old view of this all-too-frequently family crisis rings every change of mood from tears to laughter. Not...

Twelve-year-old Addie tries to cope with her mother's erratic behavior and being separated from her beloved stepfather and half-sisters when she and her mother go to live in a small trailer by the railroad tracks on the outskirts of Schenectady, New York.

The happily-ever-after that teenagers Sam and Emily envisioned for themselves is turned on its head when Sam's unstable father makes a jailbreak and comes after his sons and Emily for revenge.

Told in two voices, sixteen-year-old Kennedy Jones and seventeen-year-old Nolan Chandler are drawn together by strange signals related to family tragedies, and find they are more connected than they could have imagined.

Young Timothy is sentenced to house arrest after impulsively stealing a wallet, and he is forced to keep a journal into which he pours all his thoughts, fears, and frustrations.

While writing letters to Innocence X, a justice-seeking project, asking them to help her father, an innocent black man on death row, teenaged Tracy takes on another case when her brother is accused of killing his white girlfriend.

Wheaton, Kansas seventh-grader Tucker MacBean loves comic books, so when his favorite comic has a contest to create a sidekick, he is hopeful that he can win, thereby fixing his struggling family.

Saint Maybe is the rich and absorbing story of a young man's guilt over his brother's death and his struggle to atone for the wrong he feels he has done. On a quiet street in Baltimore in 1965, seventeen-year-old Ian Bedloe lives with his family in an "ideal, apple-pie household," enjoying the comfort of family traditions and indulging in all the usual dreams of the future. Until one night, when Ian's stinging words to his brother bring tragedy --...

Twelve-year-old Sarah writes letters to her hero, To Kill a Mockingbird's Atticus Finch, for help understanding her mentally ill mother, her first real crush, and life in her small Texas town, all in the course of one momentous summer.