The family routine is upset during Ramona's year in second grade when her father unexpectedly loses his job.

Seventh-grader Zoey Albro focuses on caring for three younger siblings and avoiding rich classmates at school until her fascination with octopuses gets her on the debate team and she begins to speak out.

Expelled from boarding school, Charles' presence at home proves disruptive, especially for sister Rachel, a gifted seventh grader juggling friendships and school activities.

A story of Americans living on the French Riviera in the 1930s is a portrait of psychological disintegration as a wealthy couple supports friends and hangers-on financially and emotionally at the cost of their own stability

While confined to a mental hospital, thirteen-year-old Callie slowly comes to understand some of the reasons behind her self-mutilation, and gradually starts to get better.

Beverly Tapinski has run away from home plenty of times, but that was when she was just a kid. By now, she figures, it's not running away. It's leaving. Determined to make it on her own, Beverly finds a job and a place to live and tries to forget about her dog, Buddy, now buried underneath the orange trees back home; her friend Raymie, whom she left without a word; and her mom, Rhonda, who has never cared about anyone but herself. Beverly doesn't...

Between school and Al-Anon meetings, Jenna helps Mrs. Gladstone cope with escalating problems that result from the merger of Gladstone Shoes with Shoe Warehouse Corporation, while managing a new employee with a shoplifting record.

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.

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....

Seventh-grader Sharkita "Kita" embarks on a tumultuous journey to keep her family together while handling the consequences of her mother's alcoholism.