A story about a homeless boy and his imaginary friend that proves in unexpected ways that friends matter, whether real or imaginary.

As further evidence of his family's bad fortune which they attribute to a curse on a distant relative, Stanley Yelnats is sent to a hellish correctional camp in the Texas desert where he finds his first real friend, a treasure, and a new sense of himself.

Since his mother's death, Jayson, twelve, has focused on basketball and surviving but he is found out and placed with an affluent foster family of a different race, and must learn to accept many changes, including facing his former teammates in a championship game.

When her mother's boyfriend Eli, a gunrunner, shatters fourteen-year-old Pearl's world, she starts on a dangerous path.

"When Dan and his parents can no longer pay their mortgage, they end up homeless and living in a local tent city. It's a bad situation, and it only gets worse when the leader of the tent city is brutally beaten. Who is trying to shut down the tent city, and why?"-- Provided by publisher.

Robert "Cali" Callahan, seventeen, gets swept up into the private-investigator business and must deal with the ramifications of looking for fellow runaways who may not want to be found--and with falling in love with one of them.

Thirteen-year-old Robbie never knows from one day to the next if there is going to be enough to eat or if his father will even come home. No one can know, until one day when Robbie has to show the tough new girl Harmony, around school. Their first meeting ends horribly but eventually they come to realize they have a lot more in common than they thought.

On a cold winter day in Chicago, Early's father disappeared, and now she, her mother and her brother have been forced to flee their apartment and join the ranks of the homeless--and it is up to Early to hold her family together and solve the mystery surrounding her father.