Faced with the difficulties of growing up and choosing a religion, a twelve-year-old girl talks over her problems with her own private God.

While visiting the small town of Yonwood, North Carolina, eleven-year-old Nickie makes some decisions about how to identify both good and evil when she witnesses the townspeople's reactions to the apocalyptic visions of one of their neighbors.

"A story about a girl who, with the help of the dog of her dreams, discovers that family doesn't always have to be related--they are simply people who love you for who you are"--

While preparing for a role in the school play, twelve-year-old Leo finds an autobiography that his father wrote as a teenager and ponders the ways people change as they grow up. Includes the text for the play, "Rumpopo's Porch."

Suds learns that his best friend is wrong. You don't have to be a tough guy, a "rat, " to be a grown up fourth grader.

Placed in a group foster home, eleven-year-old Cal Lavender learns how to cope with life from the four other girls who live there and from their storytelling guardian, the Knitting Lady.

When the eighth grade civics class of Miami's Culver Middle School goes on a trip to Washington, D.C., Wyatt Palmer finds himself in deep trouble before the plane even lands because his best friend Matt's decided the men sitting behind them are terrorists--and it's up to the boys to stop them.

Shortly before her thirteenth birthday, shy and withdrawn Tara is sent to stay with her aunt, uncle, and cousin in her parents' hometown of Willow Falls, where she makes friends and becomes involved with an elderly buyer and seller of collectibles, who seems to be trying to give Tara some kind of mysterious message.

Budding con artists Archie and Vivien spend a summer at a dilapidated, mismanaged Vermont camp competing to get whatever they want from their fellow campers.

Thirteen-year-old Nina is imprisoned by the Population Police, who give her the option of helping them identify illegal "third-born" children, or facing death.