When twelve-year-old Della Kelly finds her mother furiously digging black seeds from a watermelon in the middle of the night and talking to people who aren’t there, Della worries that it’s happening again—that the sickness that put her mama in the hospital four years ago is back. That her mama is going to be hospitalized for months like she was last time. With her daddy […]
Libby Lochewood is twelve years old when her grampa dies of a heart attack. She is devastated at losing her best friend. Now that he’s passed on, it’s just her and her father, and he is so overcome by grief that he can barely get out of bed in the morning. The night of the funeral, though, Grampa’s spirit appears in Libby’s bedroom and tells […]
Katie and Ana are the kind of friends who share everything with each other. But there are some things you can’t even share with your best friend. Katie has always known she was adopted, but recently she’s been wondering about her birth parents and her birthplace. She worries that saying this out loud—even to her best friend—could mess up the perfect family she has now. […]
Twelve-year-old Maddie has a quirky sense of humor and loves making her classmates laugh by slapping on fake mustaches every chance she gets. Being funny gets her noticed by class queen Cassie, and things are looking up when Maddie is cast as Juliet in the school play. Maybe Juliet could wear a mustache? When Maddie starts tripping when she walks and her hand starts curling […]
Twelve-year-old Olivia Hales has a foolproof plan for winning a million dollars so that she and her little sister, Berkeley, can leave behind Sunny Pines Trailer Park. But first she has to: • Fix the swamp cooler and make dinner and put Berkeley to bed because her mom is too busy to do all that • Write another letter to her dad even though he […]
Astronomy-loving Calliope June has Tourette syndrome, so she sometimes makes faces or noises that she doesn’t mean to make. When she and her mother move yet again, she tries to hide her TS. But it isn’t long before the kids at her new school realize she’s different. Only Calliope’s neighbor, who is also the popular student body president, sees her as she truly is—an interesting […]
It’s time for the Battle of the Books! When no one from their school signs up for the annual competition, BFFs Piper (The Drama Lover) and Olivia (The Bookworm) decide to put their talents to good use by creating a video to get their classmates excited about the contest. Only things don’t go exactly as planned… The video goes viral, thrusting Olivia into a spotlight […]
What’s special about Cassandra? Absolutely nothing. She’s as ordinary as any other fifth grader. And yet her ordinary life is riddled with hilarious and sometimes heart-breaking mishaps as she guides herself through the world of pre- teens on the brink of adulthood. She’s the new girl at school, uprooted from her beloved state of Texas and relocated to the hillbilly Ozarks of Springdale, Arkansas. She […]
When her best friend’s house is threatened with foreclosure, young Annie Jenkins is full of ideas to save the home: selling her appendix on eBay, winning the lottery, facing down the bankers… anything to keep Jason from moving. But Jason’s out-of-work dad blows up at the smallest things, and he’s not very happy with Annie’s interventions, which always seem to get them into more trouble. […]
Sometimes it takes a new friend to bring you home. It’s the first real summer since the accident that killed Cedar’s father and younger brother, Ben. Cedar and what’s left of her family are returning to the town of Iron Creek for the summer. They’re just settling into their new house when a boy named Leo, dressed in costume, rides by on his bike. Intrigued, […]