Fourteen-year-olds Raphael and Gardo team up with a younger boy, Rat, to figure out the mysteries surrounding a bag Raphael finds during their daily life of sorting through trash in a third-world country's dump.

In New England in the late nineteenth-century, a fatherless family, happy in spite of its impoverished condition, is befriended by a very rich gentleman and his young son.

Living with his alcoholic father on a broken-down sailboat on Puget Sound has been hard on seventeen-year-old Chance Taylor, but when his love of running leads to a high-paying job, he quickly learns that the money is not worth the risk.

Thirteen-year-old Jeff's life spirals downward into homelessness after his alcoholic mother loses her job.--

"When sixteen-year-old Georgia Avis finds the dead body of thirteen-year-old Ashley James outside the gates of an exclusive resort, she teams up with Ashley's older sister Nora to find the killer, and she is thrown into a world of unimaginable wealth and privilege--and the fight for her life."--

When Thomas Peaceful's older brother is forced to join the British Army, Thomas decides to sign up as well, although he is only fourteen years old, to prove himself to his country, his family, his childhood love, Molly, and himself.

"After the ice cream stand where she works is robbed, seventeen-year-old Minerva Gutiérrez plans to get revenge on her predatory boss while navigating grief, anger, and dreams of escape from her dead-end hometown." --

"Poverty-stricken Joseph bravely rides out all the storms life keeps throwing at him."--

In 1933, when twelve-year-old Hallie Turner and her brothers, Tom and Benny, take to the road seeking whatever work they can get, they find kindness in small-town Kansas.

Unable to stand his overcrowded and noisy home any longer, a poor man goes to the Rabbi for advice.