During the summer before fifth grade, Ferris Wilkey has her hands full with her little sister terrorizing the town, her Aunt Shirley moving into their basement and her grandmother seeing a ghost--one who has wild, impractical and illuminating plans.

Best friends Isaac and Marco face various challenges in sixth grade, such as Isaac getting better grades, Marco winning a spot on the basketball team, and both seeing their efforts make a change in their respective family lives. They hope their friendship and support for one another will be enough to help them from falling short.

As their lives take them in different directions, Lena, Tibby, Carmen, and Bridget discover many more things about themselves and the importance of their relationship with each other.

Two dogs, Mousse and Nut, learn that even though they may like different things, they can still be best friends.

Six stories relate the adventures of three best friends, who happen to be toys.

When eleven-year-old Iris sneaks out at night to make snow angels, she was not expecting to raise the ghost of Avery Moore, a girl her own age; but bringing to light the segregated and abandoned black cemetery seems like the perfect way to help Avery get the recognition she craves, and it will also be a good idea for the school project about the history of her small North Carolina town, where racial tensions are never far from the surface--only it...

Confused by all of the males in her life, thirteen-year-old Alyssa "Blister" Reed wants to help when her best friend Jonah's quest for popularity lands him in deep trouble, but his desire to make her his girlfriend gets in the way.

At cheerleading camp, Hermione is drugged and raped, but she is not sure whether it was one of her teammates or a boy on another team--and in the aftermath she has to deal with the rumors in her small Ontario town, the often awkward reaction of her classmates, the rejection of her boyfriend, the discovery that her best friend, Polly, is gay, and above all the need to remember what happened so that the guilty boy can be brought to justice.

Sam Graves discovers that his elementary school is alive and plotting against the students, and, as hall monitor, it is his job to protect them--but he will need some help from his friends.