Zahra wishes for a sister, never dreaming that volunteering with her mother at a refugee shelter might make her wish come true.

Rick, a fourteen-year-old foster child, escapes from a juvenile detention facility near Las Vegas and travels to Canyonlands National Park in Utah where he meets a bird biologist working on a project to reintroduce condors to the wild.

Referring to the I-Ching and a trio of good-luck pennies whenever she is bounced to a new foster home, Marin finds herself in a place that feels like a forever home while trying to find her birth mother, before receiving unwelcome news.

Eleven-year-old December waits to sprout wings and fly away, until a new foster mother changes her perspective on home and family.--

Taking a winter trip to bond with his new foster family, Jayden and his siblings Maggie and Connor are forced by a terrible car accident into a bleak storm to search for help and survive the elements.

A confused and misguided youngster stays with a Christian family while his mother is institutionalized. They help him discover the source of the nearby river and the source of Christian life.

Eleven-year-old Yonder stopped talking when her mother died, and she stopped going to school because of the bullies, knowing that her father would never even notice (although the social worker did); indeed the only creature that seems to care about her is the one-eyed Shetland pony called Dirt who lives on the neighboring farm -- so when she discovers that Dirt is about to be sold for horsemeat she is determined to find a way to save him.

Presents the story of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" as told by young Teddy's governess, who came to work at the Vaughn family "cottage" shortly before a golden-haired girl, ragged and dirty, entered the home and soon became a beloved foster child, until evil characters tried to take her away.

Through letters to his little sister, who is living in a different foster home, sixth-grader Lonnie, also known as "Locomotion," keeps a record of their lives while they are apart, describing his own foster family, including his foster brother who returns home after losing a leg in the Iraq War.

Sixteen-year-old Darcy Jones knows little about her past except that she was abandoned outside a Chicago firehouse at age five, but when the mysterious Conn arrives at her high school she begins to discover things about her past that she is not sure she likes.