Maverick Falconer is just starting middle school and he wishes he were a hero like his father because maybe then he could deal with his mother's drinking and series of abusive boyfriends, not to mention the kids who bully him in middle school (pretty much the same ones who bullied him in elementary school)--but as the year passes he begins to realize that other kids have problems too, and maybe if they can all survive sixth-grade things will get better....

Stephanie's relationship with her best friend, Rachel, changes during her first year in junior high as she tries to conceal a family problem and meets a new girl from California.

When twelve-year-old Boomerang Broom discovers a wish-granting baby mermaid, he takes her home and his little sister begs to keep her, with unexpected consequences.

A twelve-year-old boy named Moose moves to Alcatraz Island in 1935 when guards' families were housed there, and has to contend with his extraordinary new environment in addition to life with his autistic sister.

"When an otherworldly library called the Archive is compromised from within, sixteen-year-old Mackenzie Bishop must prevent violent, ghost-like Histories from escaping into our world"--

In this twist on "The Nightingale, " Little John, despite his own poverty and grief, reaches out to Gayle, an unhappy foster child living next-door who sings beautifully and hides a great secret.

Katie and Ana are the kind of friends who share everything with each other. But there are some things you can't even share with your best friend. Katie has always known she was adopted, but recently she's been wondering about her birth parents and her birthplace. She worries that saying this out loud -- even to her best friend -- could mess up the perfect family she has now. Ana's family has been falling apart ever since her dad left, and it's up...

Twelve-year-old Jewel was born on the day her brother Bird died and lives in a house of silence and secrets, but a new boy in her Iowa town may help find the answers Jewel wants despite her Jamaican grandfather's warning that he is a "duppy," a malevolent spirit.

As a project for her "creative non-fiction module" at a school for the arts, Normandy Pale chronicles the work of the Truth Commission, through which she and her two best friends ask classmates and faculty about various open secrets, while Norm's famous sister reveals some very unsettling truths of her own.

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.