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.

Stephanie's relationship with her best firend, Rachel, changes during her first year in junior high as she tries to conceal a family problem and meets a new girl from California. Rachel is Stephanie's best friend, and ever since second grade they've shared each other's secrets, good and bad. When Alison moves into the neighborhood, Stephanie hopes they can all be best friends. After all, they have even more to share now, including seventh grade and...

After finally getting noticed by someone other than school bullies and his ever-angry father, seventeen-year-old Tyler enjoys his tough new reputation and the attentions of a popular girl, but when life starts to go bad again, he must choose between transforming himself or giving in to his destructive thoughts.

When eighteen-year-old Mallory begrudgingly agrees to return to chess in one last charity tournament, her surprise upset against Nolan Sawyer, the reigning world champ and bad boy of the chess world, sets her on an worldwin adventure as she rediscovers her passion for the game.

When sophomore Shane Hunter's father is arrested for money laundering at his Lexus dealership, the star pitcher's life of affluence and private school begins to fall apart.

After his estranged soldier son, Danny, is charged with murder while serving in Iraq, Tom Bedford must come to terms with his own past--during which a shocking act of violence ended his parents' idyllic Hollywood union--if he is going to help exonerate Danny.

Christopher Flynn is trying to get it right. After years of trouble and rebellion that enraged his father and nearly cost him his life, he has a steady job in his father's company, he's seriously dating a woman he respects, and, aside from the distrust that lingers in his father's eyes, his mistakes are firmly in the past. One day on the job, Chris and his partner come across a temptation almost too big to resist. Chris does the right thing, but

...

Fourteen-year-old Kevin is very good at lying and doing so makes life easier, but when he finds himself in big trouble with his friends, family, and teachers, he must find a way to end his lies forever.

Marooned in a broken-down Houston neighborhood--and in a Mexican immigrant family where making ends meet matters much more than making it to college--smart, talented Marissa seeks comfort elsewhere when her home life becomes unbearable.

Zach, Alice, and Poppy, friends from a Pennsylvania middle school who have long enjoyed acting out imaginary adventures with dolls and action figures, embark on a real-life quest to Ohio to bury a doll made from the ashes of a dead girl.