When the Phillipine government takes over Culion, an island for people with leprosy, Ami is put in an orphanage on another island, where she finds a friend willing to help her return before her mother dies.

Twelve-year-old Coco Hidden has grown up in her mother's chocolate shop in Colorado, along with her friend Leo de la Cueva, but recently things have not been going well; the shop is failing, and Leo is hanging out with the other boys, and barely wants to talk to her--but when they both win a culinary contest, the two children and their mothers find themselves on a trip to the Amazon in Ecuador, where Coco hopes to find the rare ceiba tree, and where...

Fourteen-year-old Ellie Magari's mother left shortly after Ellie was born, and her father has raised her, but Ellie always figured that one day she would meet her mother and ask her some pertinent questions--but now her mother has died, and Ellie does not know exactly how to feel about that, but she is determined, with the help of her friends in the St. Francis of Assisi's Howling Wolves marching band (where she plays the glockenspiel), to make some...

Cline Alden's grandmother says that music is in the family's blood, but Cline's mother is dead-set against her daughter's dreams of becoming a country music singer; Cline is determined to find the money to attend a Young Singer-Songwriter Workshop, so now she has a lot on her mind--she is hiding things from her mother, she is losing her beloved grandmother to Alzheimer's, and she has begun to acknowledge, to herself at least, that she is more attracted...

When Georgia finds a secret sketch her late father, a famed artist, left behind she begins a quest to prove his last painting would have been of her. Georgia's quest takes her around her Upper West Side neighborhood in New York City and to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which was almost a second home to Georgia, having visited favorite artists and paintings there constantly with her father. But the sketch leads right back to where she's always belonged,...

Twelve-year-old Astrid Xu stumbles upon an ancient Chinese scroll that she hopes is the key to curing her mother's depression, but when it transports her and her younger sister Marilla to a realm where Chinese legends are real, they suddenly find themselves caught in a war between good and evil.

"When Donovan left his copy of The Adventurers on the kitchen counter, he didn't think his mom would read it--much less have a problem with it. It's just an adventure novel about two characters trying to stop an evil genius. But soon the entire town is freaking out about whether the book's main characters are gay, Donovan's mom is trying to get the book removed from the school's fifth grade curriculum, and Donovan is caught in the middle"--

For two years, twelve-year-old Hazel has coped with her Mum's accidental death by overprotecting her sister and other mother, Mama. But when Mama reconnects with her first love, roles begin to shift.

"Aniana del Mar belongs in the water like a dolphin belongs to the sea. That is, until the day Ani's stiffness and swollen joints mean she can no longer get out of bed, and Ani is forced to reveal just how important swimming is to her. What follows is the journey of a girl who must grieve who she once was in order to rise like the tide and become the young woman she is meant to be"--

Middle schooler Liberty likes to make her own maps of the stars, in fact she is obsessed with them, especially since her family is falling apart; her parents are getting divorced, her nine-year-old sister will barely leave the house and carries a stuffed tiger at all times, her father is suffering from depression, but will not talk about it, and the brothers down the street, once friends, have turned into bullies--so when a tiny meteorite literally...