Living with his alcoholic father on a broken-down sailboat on Puget Sound has been hard on seventeen-year-old Chance Taylor, but when his love of running leads to a high-paying job, he quickly learns that the money is not worth the risk.

Angry and humiliated when his sharecropper father is jailed for stealing food for his family, a young black boy grows in courage and understanding by learning to read and with the help of the devoted dog Sounder.

When eighth-grade school bully Tod and his friends get caught committing a crime on school property, his penalty--staying after school and writing in a journal under the eye of the school guidance counsellor--reveals aspects of himself that he prefers to keep hidden.

Children have different reactions to the same object due to their circumstances.

In 1835, when his father is put in a Philadelphia debtor's prison, twelve-year-old chess prodigy Rufus Goodspeed is relieved to be recruited to secretly operate a chess-playing automaton named The Turk, but soon questions the fate of his predecessors and his own safety.

In contemporary India, 12-year-old Asha will journey across the dangerous Himalayas to find her missing father and save her family's home, guided by a mythical bird and a green-eyed tiger she believes are the spirits of her ancestors, in this unique debut about loss, family, buried treasure and hope.

Falling in love against a backdrop of political turbulence in North Korea, two Pyongyang university students are separated when one makes a desperate choice to save his starving family.

Rising sophomore Travis and his best friend, Creature, spend a summer in a Eugene, Oregon, trailer park dealing with cancer, basketball, first love, addiction, gang violence, and a reptilian infestation.