Daphne spends a vacation with her estranged father, whom she has not seen in years, and the pair bond over their love of skateboarding.

Living near Boston, sixth-grader Emma tries to hide from family problems and changing friendships by spending the summer in Wyoming.

When her mother is injured in a car accident, twelve-year-old Franny tries to keep their fragile world intact by taking over her mom's cleaning jobs.

Twelve-year-old Della Kelly of Maryville, North Carolina, tries to come to terms with her mother's mental illness while her father struggles to save the farm from a record-breaking drought.

Future interior designer Maggie, a sixth-grader, focuses on an upcoming design contest to cope with friendship and family troubles, including having Tony, a half-brother she never knew existed, move in.

"When best friends Metai and Jamila are reunited after a summer apart, their friendship threatens to combust from the pressure of secrets, middle school, and looming auditions for a potentially life-changing new talented-and-gifted program"--

"Twelve-year-old Mysti Murphy of Texas wishes she were a character in a book. If her life were fiction, she'd know how to solve her problems at school; take care of her family when her dad has to spend time in the hospital; and deal with her family's secret: that her mother is agoraphobic and never leaves the house"--

Committed to a mental hospital against her will for something she claims she did not do, Cassie O'Malley signs herself out against medical advice when she turns eighteen and tries to start over at college, until her estranged mother appears, throwing everything Cassie believes about herself into question.

Publisher Annotation: Benjamin Waterfalls comes from a broken home, and the quickest fix he's found for his life is to fill that emptiness with stuff he steals and then sells. But he's been caught one too many times, and when he appears before a tough judge, his mother proposes sending him to "boot camp" at the Ojibwe reservation where they used to live. Soon he is on his way to Grand Portage, Minnesota, to live with his father - the man Benny hasn't...