Hoping that if she wins a local beauty pageant her father will come home, Raymie practices twirling a baton and performing good deeds as she is drawn into an unlikely friendship with a drama queen and a saboteur.

Stephanie's relationship with her best firend, Rachel, changes during her first year in junior high as she tries to conceal a family problem and meets a new girl from California. Rachel is Stephanie's best friend, and ever since second grade they've shared each other's secrets, good and bad. When Alison moves into the neighborhood, Stephanie hopes they can all be best friends. After all, they have even more to share now, including seventh grade and...

After finally getting noticed by someone other than school bullies and his ever-angry father, seventeen-year-old Tyler enjoys his tough new reputation and the attentions of a popular girl, but when life starts to go bad again, he must choose between transforming himself or giving in to his destructive thoughts.

While spending the month of August on the Massachusetts shore with her father, stepmother, and their new baby, almost thirteen-year-old Maggie finds beauty in and draws strength from a great blue heron, even as the family around her unravels.

While Kate pens an evocative historical novel based on family journals, her neighbor, Emily, flees a volatile relationship to an island in the Adirondacks where she, Kate, and Kate's mother, Birdie, face the consequences of their pasts.

When a murder suspect's body is found frozen in the ice of a remote mountain creek, the subsequent investigation poses unsettling questions about how a promising young woman from a loving family could engage in acts of killing and ecoterrorism.

After his estranged soldier son, Danny, is charged with murder while serving in Iraq, Tom Bedford must come to terms with his own past--during which a shocking act of violence ended his parents' idyllic Hollywood union--if he is going to help exonerate Danny.

Expelled from boarding school, Charles' presence at home proves disruptive, especially for sister Rachel, a gifted seventh grader juggling friendships and school activities.

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.

When her mother leaves her family suddenly to take a new job, fourteen-year-old Phoebe tries to deal with her own confused feelings and, in the process, learns some things about love and the complicated ties that bind families together.