Just before his thirteenth birthday, Jeremy Fink receives a keyless locked box--set aside by his father before his death five years earlier--that purportedly contains the meaning of life.

All twelve-year-old Josh wants to do is play baseball, but when his father, a minor league pitcher, signs him up for a youth championship team, Josh finds himself embroiled in a situation with potentially illegal consequences.

Teens D.J. and Russell, life-long friends and neighbors, had drifted apart but when their firefighter fathers are both killed, they try to help one another come to terms with the tragedy and its aftermath.

Cameron is used to moving at a moment's notice because he and his mother are always running away from his supposedly violent father, but he is disturbed by their latest refuge, a creepy, deserted farmhouse, haunted by bloodthirsty dogs--and when he sees a boy hiding in the barn, and finds an old picture of the same boy, he starts wondering about the possibility of human ghosts.

While preparing for a role in the school play, twelve-year-old Leo finds an autobiography that his father wrote as a teenager and ponders the ways people change as they grow up. Includes the text for the play, "Rumpopo's Porch."

While a serial killer stalks his small Georgia town, sixteen-year-old Henry tries to find the truth about the terrible accident that robbed him of his mother and his memories, aided by his friend Justine but not by his distant father.

"As a young boy, Bao Phi awoke early, hours before his father's long workday began, to fish on the shores of a small pond in Minneapolis. Unlike many other anglers, Bao and his father fished for food, not recreation. Between hope-filled casts, Bao's father told him about a different pond in their homeland of Vietnam"--

While training for a triathlon, seventeen-year-old Bo attends an anger management group at school which leads him to examine his relationship with his father.

When, on his eighteenth birthday, Jack Polovsky's almost-suicide is interrupted by his ex-girlfriend Jess's call saying she is in labor, he impulsively snatches the baby and hits the road with his best friend Tommy and Jess to introduce baby Socrates to Jack's aging grandmother.

After a near-fatal car accident, twelve-year-old Ryder's mother needs an operation they cannot afford and while a new friend tries to raise funds, Ryder travels with a grouchy, disabled neighbor, from Yankee Stadium to Turner Field seeking the major league baseball player who might be Ryder's father.