A young black boy learns the pain of humiliation and anger when his father is given an unjust jail sentence for stealing a ham from a white man. Learning to read and discovering that things do not die but become part of other things, brings the youngster new hope.

Of all the folks in the mountain shacks, the Casteels are the lowest - the scum of the hills. Heaven Leigh Casteel is the prettiest, smartest girl in the backwoods, despite her ragged clothes and dirty face ... despite a father meaner than ten vipers ... despite her weary stepmother, who works her like a mule. For her brother Tom and the little ones, Heaven clings to her pride and her hopes. Someday they'll get away and show the world that they are...

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.

When eighth-grade school bully Tod and his friends get caught committing a crime on school property, his penalty--staying after school and writing in a journal under the eye of the school guidance counselor--reveals aspects of himself that he prefers to keep hidden.

From age six through her high school valedictory speech, believing she and her mother are wizards helps young Echo cope with poverty, hunger, her mother's drug abuse, and much more.

A young woman, looking back on her childhood, recounts her farm family's poverty, her father's cowardice, and her younger brother's obsession for digging tunnels and living underground.

When his father is arrested as a debtor in 1849 London, fourteen-year-old John Huffman must take on unexpected responsibilities, from asking a distant relative for help to determining why people are spying on him and his family.

"Life is hard for ten-year-old Safiyah in the Kibera slum outside Nairobi. Too poor to go to school, she makes a meager living for herself and her grandmother by selling things she finds at the garbage dump. The pages of the glossy magazines she finds at the dump are full of pictures of beautiful people doing things Safiyah can only dream about. But the magazines also inspire Safiyah to create something that may give her and Cucu the chance of a better...

In Amsterdam in the mid-1600s, Cornelia's life as the illegitimate child of renowned painter Rembrandt is marked by plague, poverty, and despair at ever earning her father's love, until she sees hope for a better future in the eyes of a weathy suitor.

Twelve-year-old Rory and his friend Izzy try to foil the plans of Lord Foxglove, for whom Rory works as a valet, and his inhuman accomplices from taking over the world.