"Seventeen-year-old 'Hank,' who can't remember his identity, finds himself in Penn Station with a copy of Thoreau's Walden as his only possession and must figure out where he's from and why he ran away."

Between school and Al-Anon meetings, Jenna helps Mrs. Gladstone cope with escalating problems that result from the merger of Gladstone Shoes with Shoe Warehouse Corporation, while managing a new employee with a shoplifting record.

Despite his outward image of popular, attractive high-achiever bound for the Ivy League college of his father's dreams, high school senior Parker sees himself as a fat, unattractive failure and finds relief for his overwhelming anxieties in ever-increasing bouts of binging and purging.

"Twelve-year-old Mysti Murphy of Texas wishes she were a character in a book. If her life were fiction, she'd know how to solve her problems at school; take care of her family when her dad has to spend time in the hospital; and deal with her family's secret: that her mother is agoraphobic and never leaves the house"--

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.

To escape his offbeat family at Thanksgiving, Andrew West accepts a ride from a band of street performers who get their food and clothing from dumpsters, but as he learns more about these "Freegans" he sees that one cannot outrun the past.

Tells, in their separate voices and at a space of fourteen years, of Emmy, whose baby has been stolen, and Sophie, a teenager who defies her nomadic, controlling mother by making friends with a neighbor boy and his elderly aunts.

Sixteen-year-old Maya and seventeen-year-old Lochan tell, in their separate voices, of their confusion and longing as they fall in love with one another after years of functioning as parents to three younger siblings due to their alcoholic mother's neglect.

When her imagined perfect life with her estranged mother begins to unravel, fourteen-year-old Apple finds comfort in reading and writing poetry.

Suffering a hangover from a graduation party, eighteen-year-old Whitley is blindsided by the news that her father has moved into a house with his fiancée, her thirteen-year-old daughter Bailey, and her son Nathan, in whose bed Whitley had awakened that morning.