With insight and a light touch, best-selling, Newbery Honor-winning author Gary D. Schmidt tells two poignant, linked stories: that of a grieving girl and a boy trying to escape his violent past. Following the death of her closest friend in summer 1968, Meryl Lee Kowalski goes off to St. Elene's Preparatory Academy for Girls, where she struggles to navigate the venerable boarding school's traditions and a social structure heavily weighted toward students...

Identical twin teenagers Giselle and Isabelle Boyer have always been inseparable, and expected to stay that way even though their Haitian American parents are separating--but when the entire family is caught in a car crash, everyone's world is shattered forever.

"Fourteen-year-old Sofia Wolfe has her fair share of problems, and she doesn't have anyone to talk to...until she finds "Dear Kate." The teen advice columnist provides Sofia with an anonymous outlet where she can express everything she's been holding inside. But then "Dear Kate" shows up on her doorstep. With her dad. As his girlfriend. With the keeper of all of her secrets now dating her dad, how on earth will Sofia make it through the year?"--

"Iris opens her eyes to hard truths and the power of her voice when her father dies of AIDS in 1987"-- 1987. Iris tries to act normal at school, going through the motions and joking around with her friends, but it feels like she'll never laugh again. How can she, when her dad is dying of a virus that is off-limits to talk about? When she knows that soon all she will have left of her kind, loving dad are memories, photos, and a binder full of the...

Juliet still writes letters to her mother after her death and when Declan finds one beside her mother's grave, he writes back, sharing his pain with her, but soon real life interferes, and Juliet and Declan discover truths that may tear them apart.

Soon after his mother's death, Matt takes a job at a funeral home in his tough Brooklyn neighborhood and, while attending and assisting with funerals, begins to accept her death and his responsibilities as a man.

Overwhelmed by grief and guilt over her brother's death and its impact on her mother, and at odds with her best friend, thirteen-year-old Dellie reaches out to a neglected boy in her building in the projects and learns from a new neighbor to have faith in herself and others.

Rumi Seto plans to spend her life writing music with her younger sister, Lea. When Lea dies in a car accident, her mother sends Rumi to live with her aunt in Hawaii while she deals with her own grief. Struggling with the loss of her sister, abandoned by her mother, and without music in her life, Rumi turns to the friendship of a teenage surfer named Kai, and an eighty-year-old named George Watanabe. And Rumi is determined to write the song she and...

Still mourning the death of their mother, three brothers go with their father on an extended sailing trip off the Florida Keys and have a harrowing adventure at sea.

In 1919, independent-minded fifteen-year-old Rosalind lives in India with her English parents, and when they fear she has fallen in with some rebellious types who believe in Indian self-government, she is sent "home" to London, where she has never been before and where her older brother died, to stay with her two aunts.