Told in their separate voices, thirteen-year-old soccer star Kevin and police sergeant Brown, who knew his father, try to keep Kevin out of juvenile hall after he is arrested on very serious charges.

While hoping to work as the clown in an amusement park dunk tank on the New Jersey shore the summer before his junior year in high school, Chad faces his best friend's serious illness, hassles with police, and the girl that got away.

Dealing with family problems, girls, and their own competitive natures, high school seniors Ivan Korske and Bobby Zane face each other in the final match of the New Jersey State Wrestling Championship.

Mike lives for baseball and hopes to follow his idol into the major leagues one day. But he is distracted by a new player who might take his place in center field, an ankle injury, problems at home, and a growing awareness that something sinister is happening at school.

A year after Superstorm Sandy, Lucy's life is returning to normal at the New Jersey shore, where she has grown up surfing with her twin brother, crabbing and long-boarding with friends, and working at Surf Taco, but the torch she holds for summer resident Connor, the center of The Big Mistake, still burns.

"For eleven year-old Hugo Ballard, flying on the Hindenburg is a dream come true. Hugo, his parents, and his four-year-old sister Gertie, are making the thrilling four thousand mile journey across the Atlantic in a zeppelin as big as the Titanic. But as the zeppelin gets ready to land, a blast rocks the Hindenburg and fire consumes the ship. The entire disaster lasts a mere thirty-two seconds, but in those few seconds, Hugo finds himself separated...

High school juniors and best friends Finn and Chloe hatch a daring plot to fake Chloe's disappearance from their rural New Jersey town in order to have something compelling to put on their college applications, but unforeseen events complicate matters.

It is 1983 and Vanessa Martin, a thirteen-year-old African American girl in Newark's public housing, dreams of following in the footsteps of the first black Miss America, Vanessa Williams; but with a dysfunctional family (mother in jail, father withdrawn, drunken grandfather, gay cousin) the odds are against her--until a new teacher at school organizes a beauty pageant and encourages Vanessa to enter.

Using the power of a magic recipe box belonging to her hippie grandmother straightens out some of the problems in twelve-year-old Franny Flanders' life, but she learns that when you tamper with karma, it can strike back in unexpected ways.

After the death of his estranged father in the World Trade Center on 9/11, thirteen-year-old Bart, still struggling with his feelings of guilt, sorrow and loss, wins a scholarship to the local preparatory school and there encounters a vicious bully whose cruelty compounds the aftermath of the tragedy.