"Four sisters rely on each other--and a bit of mysterious magic--to cope with their mother's illness"--

Hoping that if she wins a local beauty pageant her father will come home, Raymie practices twirling a baton and performing good deeds as she is drawn into an unlikely friendship with a drama queen and a saboteur.

Twelve-year-old Fern feels invisible in her family, where grumpy eighteen-year-old Sarah is working at the family restaurant, fourteen-year-old Holden is struggling with school bullies and his emerging homosexuality, and adorable, three-year-old Charlie is always the center of attention, and when tragedy strikes, the fragile bond holding the family together is stretched almost to the breaking point.

Teenaged Isacc, who steals to give his younger sister the basic necessities that his alcoholic mother cannot provide, is sentenced to a juvenile detention center and during therapy sessions with fellow criminals, a repressed memory surfaces that changes everything.

When Rafe Khatchadorian enters middle school, he teams up with his best friend, "Leo the Silent," to create a game to make school more fun by trying to break every rule in the school's code of conduct.

The oldest Marriss brother, fourteen-year-old Dewey, attempts to be the "embodiment of responsibility" as he juggles the management of the family's bicycle repair business while sharing the household and farm duties with his siblings after a sudden energy crisis strands their parents far from home.

When talented, dedicated fourteen-year-old Georgia Slade becomes a student in an elite Toronto ballet academy, her confusing feelings toward one of her teachers lead to disaster.

Young Timothy is sentenced to house arrest after impulsively stealing a wallet, and he is forced to keep a journal into which he pours all his thoughts, fears, and frustrations.

"Six teenagers' lives intertwine during a summer of romantic misunderstandings and dangerous deals in this retelling of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, set in the era of Prohibition in the 1920s"--

In a small town near Chicago in 1953, twelve-year-old Tommy faces escalating problems at home, among his Catholic school friends, and with the threat of a communist living nearby, but taking over his hospitalized sister's paper route introduces him to neighbors who he comes to rely on for help.