Hoping that if she wins a local beauty pageant her father will come home, Raymie practices twirling a baton and performing good deeds as she is drawn into an unlikely friendship with a drama queen and a saboteur.

"A newbie to the track team, Patina "Patty" Jones must learn to rely on her family and teammates as she tries to outrun her personal demons"--

Middle schooler Natalie's year-long assignment to answer a question using the scientific method leads to truths about her mother's depression and her own cultural identity.

After Astra Primm arrives at Minnesota's Base Ripley, eleven-year-old Jameson O'Malley begins to discover that people are hiding plenty from him about his father and the Mars colony where he lives, and about the strain between Jameson's parents.

Fourteen-year-old Alix is faced with a huge moral dilemma when she helps pull an illegal Iraqi immigrant from the incoming tide on the coastal English island where she lives. Hayling Island off the coast of England seems insulated from problems such as war, terrorism and refugees. But when Alix and her friend Samir go to the beach and pull a drowning man out of the incoming tide, her world changes. Mohammed, an illegal immigrant and student, has...

Although Jeff and Tad, encouraged by a new friend, Lindsey, make a deal to help one another overcome aftereffects of their cancer treatments in preparation for eighth-grade graduation, Jeff still craves advice from his older brother Stephen, who is studying drums in Africa.

Sunny, the Defenders' best runner, only runs for his father, who blames Sunny for his mother's death, but with his coach's help Sunny finds a way to combine track and field with his true passion, dancing.

"Allison is drowning under the weight of her manipulative stage magician father. When he brings home the family's first computer, she escapes into a thrilling new world where she meetings Samir, a like-minded new online friend who has just agreed to run away from home with her. After moving to a new town and leaving all of his friends behind, Richard receives a mysterious note in his locker with instructions on how to connect to 'Evol BBS,' a dial-in...