Twelve-year-old Meg travels the rooftops and streets of 1862 London, England, in search of her missing brother, Orion, accompanied by a family friend, the famed author Charles Dickens, whose quest is to find his next novel.
What were once just boys' games become matters of life and death as Petros and his older brother Zola each wonder if, like their resistance-fighter cousin, they too can make a difference in a Nazi-occupied Greece.
Hamlet's attempts to be a "normal" eighth grader become increasingly difficult when her genius seven-year-old sister and her eccentric Shakespeare scholar parents both begin to attend her school.
An orphaned boy is raised by ghosts and other denizens of the graveyard.
Thirteen-year-old Nathaniel, aided by the famous magician Harry Houdini, plots to unmask a phony spirit advisor attempting to relieve the boy's great-aunt of her fortune.
In the Bronx, New York, during the McCarthy era, twelve-year-old Jamie keeps a terrible secret about her family, but when the truth is exposed, her parents lose their jobs and she is fired from the school newspaper.
Frustrated at life with an autistic brother, twelve-year-old Catherine longs for a normal existence but her world is further complicated by a friendship with an young paraplegic.
Even though his mother feels baseball ruined her marriage to his father, she allows fourteen-year-old Brian to become a bat boy for the Detroit Tigers, who have just drafted his favorite player back onto the team.
Haya Leah Molnar, née Eva Zimmermann, recalls growing up in Bucharest, Romania, during the 1950s. Though she heard Yiddish and kept Kosher at home, Eva remained unaware of her Jewish heritage. This ignorance protected Eva at her Communist-run school.
Three female students from Ashbury High write to three male students from rival Brookfield High as part of a pen pal program, leading to romance, humiliation, revenge plots, and war between the schools.
During a student exchange program, seventh-graders Ivy June and Catherine share their lives, homes, and communities, finding that although their lifestyles are total opposites, they still have a lot in common.
With national pride and occasional fear, a brother and sister face the increasingly oppressive occupation of Korea by Japan during World War II, which threatens to suppress Korean culture entirely.
Life in New York in the 1980s is made more difficult for a middle school girl by problems at home and at school.
A quirky and utterly logical seventh-grade girl named Emma-Jean Lazarus discovers some interesting results when she gets involved in the messy everyday problems of her peers.
Seventh-grader Erin Swift writes about her friends and classmates in her private blog, but when it accidentally gets posted on the school Intranet site, she learns some important lessons about friendship.
Eleven-year-old Verbena Polter gets through a difficult summer of turbulent emotions and the revelation of a disturbing family secret with an odd new friend who believes she is the ghost of a girl who drowned many years before.
Spurred by a special project from her social studies teacher, seventh-grader Bethesda Fielding uncovers the secret identity of her music teacher, which leads to a most unusual concert performance and a tutoring assignment.
Through letters to his little sister, who is living in a different foster home, sixth-grader Lonnie, also known as "Locomotion," keeps a record of their lives while they are apart, describing his own foster family, including his foster brother who returns home after losing a leg in the Iraq War.
After the suspicious death of her mother in 1895, sixteen-year-old Gemma returns to England, after many years in India, to attend a finishing school where she becomes aware of her magical powers and ability to see into the spirit world.
After being sold to a cruel couple in New York City, a slave named Isabel spies for the rebels during the Revolutionary War.
