Living in rural Virginia, ten-year-old Jess and Leslie become special friends as they create a magical secret world that they call Terabithia. But when a tragic accident causes Leslie's death during a storm, Jess is forced to face life alone. "This Newbery Medal-winning novel by bestselling-author Katherine Paterson has been a modern classic about friendship and loss for forty years. Jess Aarons has been practicing all summer so he can be the fastest...

"Since her mother's death, Madeline "Gwen" Hathaway has been determined that nothing in her life will change ever again. She keeps extensive lists in journals, has had only one friend since childhood, and looks forward to the monotony of working the ren faire circuit with her father. They arrive at the end-of-tour stop to find the faire is under new management and completely changed. Arthur, the son of the new owners and an actual lute-playing bard,...

"One autumn morning, Jia Jia walks into the bathroom of her lavish Beijing apartment to find her husband dead. One minute she was breakfasting with him and packing for an upcoming trip, the next, she finds him motionless in their bathtub. Like something out of a dream, next to the tub Jia Jia discovers a pencil sketch of a strange watery figure, an image that swims into Jia Jia's mind and won't leave. The mysterious drawing launches Jia Jia on an...

After the death of her mother, eleven-year-old Gopi, who has been playing squash since she was a small child, is enlisted in a quietly brutal training regimen by her father, and soon the game becomes her world as she slowly distances herself from her sisters in hopes of becoming the best.

In 1987, Miri Ammerman returns to her hometown of Elizabeth, New Jersey, to attend a commemoration of the worst year of her life. Thirty-five years earlier, when Miri was fifteen, and in love for the first time, a succession of airplanes fell from the sky, leaving a community reeling. Against this backdrop of actual events that Blume experienced in the early 1950s, when airline travel was new and exciting and everyone dreamed of going somewhere, she...

With insight and a light touch, best-selling, Newbery Honor-winning author Gary D. Schmidt tells two poignant, linked stories: that of a grieving girl and a boy trying to escape his violent past. Following the death of her closest friend in summer 1968, Meryl Lee Kowalski goes off to St. Elene's Preparatory Academy for Girls, where she struggles to navigate the venerable boarding school's traditions and a social structure heavily weighted toward students...

"Nicole "Coco" Martin is destined to have it all. As the only child of doting and successful parents, she has been given every opportunity in life. Having inherited her mother's stunning beauty and creativity, along with her father's work ethic and diligence, she has the world at her feet. Her graduation from Columbia is fast approaching, and with it the summer job of her dreams working at a magazine. Between work, leisurely weekends at her family's...

Camino Rios lives for the summers when her father visits her in the Dominican Republic. But this time, on the day when his plane is supposed to land, Camino arrives at the airport to see crowds of crying people... In New York City, Yahaira Rios is called to the principal's office, where her mother is waiting to tell her that her father, her hero, has died in a plane crash. Separated by distance -- and Papi's secrets -- the two girls are forced to...

When her much-loved musician father dies in a suicide pact, Yoshie's attempts to start over in a traditional Tokyo community are challenged by recurring dreams that her father's ghost is trying to communicate with her.

As twelve-year-old Brooklyn goes head-to-head against her rival to win her school's cookie-selling competition, her friends help her cope with the death of her mother and help her try to clinch the Cookie Queen title.