In the summer of 1963, nine-year-old spitfire Starla Claudelle runs away from her strict grandmother's Mississippi home. Afraid Mamie will make good on her threat to send her to reform school, Starla starts walking to Nashville to find her momma, who went there when Starla was three. Out in the country, she accepts a ride from a black woman traveling with a white baby. And the trio embarks on a road trip that will change Starla's life forever.

Facing trouble at home with his father gone and his mother and sister uninterested in him, Max runs away from home during an argument only to end up in the island of the Wild Things. Soon Max becomes the king of the island. But things get complicated when Max realizes his subjects want as much from him as he wants from them.

Dee has been left in charge of her little brother, Eddie, before. But never for this long. Six weeks ago, their father vanished into the baking Arizona desert. The money is drying up and the rent is coming due, but it's a visit from the social worker that scares Dee enough to flee with Eddie to Canada, their birthplace and former home. There's just one problem - Dee doesn't have a driver's license.

After the sudden collapse of her family, Mim Malone is dragged from her home in northern Ohio to the "wastelands" of Mississippi, where she lives in a medicated milieu with her dad and new stepmom. Before the dust has a chance to settle, she learns her mother is sick back in Cleveland. So she ditches her new life and hops aboard a northbound Greyhound bus to her real home and her real mother, meeting a quirky cast of fellow travelers along the way....

Howie and Laura, two misfits among a camping group, are left on an island overnight as a practical joke but the pair escape during the night and are forced to lie, steal, and dodge the police as they search for safety.

A fifteen-year-old runaway discovers that a carnival's razzle-dazzle doesn't shield it from the cruelties of life.