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.

"When six students are chosen to participate in a weekly talk with no adults allowed, they discover that when they're together, it's safe to share the hopes and fears they have to hide from the rest of the world"--

"Three sisters in San Antonio are shadowed by guilt and grief over the loss of their oldest sister, who still haunts their house"--

Future interior designer Maggie, a sixth-grader, focuses on an upcoming design contest to cope with friendship and family troubles, including having Tony, a half-brother she never knew existed, move in.

Thirteen-year-old Ari faces what it is to be a man while dealing with a cross-country move, his parents' separation, being bullied for his weight, and belatedly starting bar mitzvah preparations.

When a dive off the coast of Alabama goes horribly wrong, twelve-year-old Julie and one of her father's scuba clients struggle to survive after reaching an abandoned oil rig.

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.

Now in sixth grade, Izzy continues to face the ups and downs of everyday life in middle school including dances, her brother's increasing distance, and her father's serious relationship.

Angry that her father has left, twelve-year-old Alice swears that she will live in her family's old Renaissance tent until he agrees to return; but after she meets her mute four-year-old neighbor Piper she finds herself becoming involved in the child's life--and when she hears the little girl speak a word for the first time in years she sets out to prove to Piper's parents that the dismal diagnosis they received for their daughter may be all wrong....

Five urban middle school students, their teacher, and other community members relate how a school project to build the world's largest tetrahedron affects the lives of everyone involved.