A year after her mother has deserted the family, eleven-year-old Shelby goes to stay with her, deep in the Louisiana bayou, where they both confront old hurts and regrets.

"Told from different viewpoints, this is the story of five seventh-graders who face their own personal challenges [and] are also determined as a group to help two very special people reconcile a long-standing dispute"--

"Four sisters rely on each other--and a bit of mysterious magic--to cope with their mother's illness"--

The Pickles are new to Midnight Gulch, Tennessee, a town which legend says was once magic--but Felicity is convinced the magic is still there, and with the help of her new friend Jonah the Beedle she hopes to bring the magic back.

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.

Eleven-year-old Juliet, her newly separated mother, and her older sister have moved to a Mission Beach, where she forms an instant bond with a girl her own age, Emma, even throwing bottles with secret messages into the sea. An email arrives, inviting Juliet to join the Starry Night Society, and all she has to do is make someone else's wish come true--but what about her own family, from whom she seems to be growing apart?

Twelve-year-old Candice Miller is spending the summer in Lambert, South Carolina, in the old house that belonged to her grandmother, who died after being dismissed as city manager for having the city tennis courts dug up looking for buried treasure--but when she finds the letter that sent her grandmother on the treasure hunt, she finds herself caught up in the mystery and, with the help of her new friend and fellow book-worm, Brandon, she sets out...

As ten-year-old Gwyn searches for a missing neighbor in her new town in Iowa, she learns much about her mother, who grew up there but has suffered from memory loss since Gwyn was four.

"Twelve-year-old Nell Perkins knows there is magic at work that she can't yet understand. Her mother has been taken by witches and turned into a bird. Nell must journey to get her mother back, even if it takes her deep into the Wicked Places, the frightening realm where Nightmares resides. There she must break the spell and stop the witches from turning our world into a living nightmare"--Amazon.com.

Ella Brook can't wait to grow up and be a fairy just like her mom, even though her fairy mom's spells often backfire and Ella usually has to come to the rescue with a well-timed suggestion or manual clean-up.