When teenagers in a California coastal community challenge each other to "jump the Nail"--leap from dangerous cliffs into the ocean--group pressure and manipulative relationships quickly drive the game out of control.

Although she has recently completed a 400-page romance novel, Princess Mia, in her last month of high school, has yet to pick a college, find a prom dress, or decide if her boyfriend J.P. is really The One.

"In New Orleans' Ninth Ward, twelve-year-old Lanesha, who can see spirits, and her adopted grandmother have no choice but to stay and weather the storm as Hurricane Katrina bears down upon them"--Title verso page.

It's 1993, and Generation X pulses to the beat of Kurt Cobain and the grunge movement. Sixteen-year-old Maggie Lynch is uprooted from big-city Chicago to a windswept town on the Irish Sea. Surviving on care packages of Spin magazine and Twizzlers from her rocker uncle Kevin, she wonders if she'll ever find her place in this new world. When first love and sudden death simultaneously strike, a naive but determined Maggie embarks on a forbidden pilgrimage...

The story of an eleven year old boy whose one intense desire is that he have a colt of his own. The whole action of the story takes place against the pattern of a ranch devoted to raising blooded horses, out in Wyoming. At last his wish is granted, and he chooses his yearling, against all advice. The story is centered on the process of winning 'Flicka' and of proving the rightness of his choice.

When Sonia's father loses his job and she must move from her small, supportive private school to a public middle school, the half-Jewish half-Indian sixth-grader experiences culture shock as she tries to navigate the school's unfamiliar social scene, and after her father is diagnosed with clinical depression, she finds herself becoming even more confused about herself and her family.

"Pippa Park picks up right where she left off...trying to balance basketball, school, friends, working at the struggling family laundromat, and fitting in. Eliot, her math tutor--and the cutest boy at school--is finally paying attention to her. And Marvel--her childhood friend--is making her required volunteering much more interesting. But things with the Royals, her new friends and teammates who rule the school, still feel a bit rocky. Especially...

Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm Eleven-year-old Rebecca is leaving Sunnybrook Farm to live with her spinster aunts and become the educated daughter her family needs. Her aunts resent her father, who left behind nothing for his wife and seven children but a forty-eight-dollar mortgage. When Rebecca climbs out of the stagecoach with her pink parasol, wide-eyed and nervous about her new life, she is quickly met with the strict rules of Aunt Miranda, who has...

As a slag heap, the result of strip mining, creeps closer to his house in the Ohio hills, fifteen-year-old M. C. is torn between trying to get his family away and fighting for the home they love.

"Once in your life, sometime after your first memory but before you can drive a car, something is going to happen to you that doesn't happen to anyone else you know. It might be something good. It might be something bad, or special, or funny, or shocking. For Millie, it's something really sad. Lolo, her neighbors' infant daughter, dies--unexpectedly, suddenly, inexplicably--on the night Millie babysits. There's nothing she could have done. There's...