In 1970s Ohio, Lenny and her younger brother, Davey, who suffers from a rare form of gigantism, cope with his declining health by poring over each installment of Burrell's Build-It-at-Home Encyclopedia Set.

Victoria Torres has always had a family birthday party that she shares with her beloved grandmother, but this year she is so impressed by her classmate's birthday party at GlamaRama, the mall's newest spa store, that she decides that she wants to celebrate her twelfth birthday there--and her mother refuses to do both.

Fourteen-year-old Kevin is very good at lying and doing so makes life easier, but when he finds himself in big trouble with his friends, family, and teachers, he must find a way to end his lies forever.

Obe Devlin spends a lot of his time cleaning up the creek that runs through what little is left of his family's once extensive farmland, and worrying about what the developers are doing nearby, and the pollution it is causing--but one day he finds a strange creature by his creek that eats plastic, and soon the animal he calls Marvin Gardens becomes his personal secret, which he believes needs to be protected from pretty much everybody.

Twelve-year-old Rahul Kapoor, an Indian-American boy growing up in small-town Indiana, struggles to come to terms with his identity, including that he may be gay.

Emotionally crippled by his obsessive-compulsive disorder, teenager Matthew Corbin rarely leaves his room on a cul-de-sac in London, and he passes the day observing and writing down his neighbors doings from his window--and when a toddler staying next door disappears Matt is the key to solving a mystery and possibly saving a child's life--if he can manage to expose himself, and his secret guilt, to the outside world.

Since her father's death, Cora, twelve, longs for a permanent home for herself, her special-needs sister, and their mother while navigating middle school and studying trees using her father's field notes.

Discovering a book of Langston Hughes's poetry in the library helps Langston cope with the loss of his mother, relocating from Alabama to Chicago as part of the Great Migration, and being bullied.

All her life Aurora has heard stories about how wonderful and lucky Heidi is, and soon this paragon (now grown up and expecting a baby) will be visiting; but before she arrives part of their house is damaged in a fire, and worse, Aurora's beloved dog disappears--and while her parents have always believed in "soof" (Heidi's mom's word for love), Aurora, who has never really fit in with children her own age, will just have to find her own soof.

"The Fitzgerald-Trouts are four barely related siblings living together in a small car on a lush tropical island, but when they begin to outgrow their small vehicle, they must band together to find a new home"--