Publisher Annotation: Right before winter break, fourteen-year-old Molly Rosenberg reluctantly volunteers to participate in Santa Monica?s annual homeless count, just to get her school?s community service requirement out of the way. But when she ends up meeting Red, a spirited homeless girl only a few years older than she is, Molly makes it her mission to reunite her with her family in time for Christmas. But Red refuses to talk about her past. There...

When we first meet him, Chappie is a punked-out teenager living with his mother and abusive stepfather in an upstate New York trailer park. During this time, he slips into drugs and petty crime. Rejected by his parents, out of school and in trouble with the police, he claims for himself a new identity as a permanent outsider; he gets a crossed-bones tattoo on his arm, and takes the name "Bone." He finds dangerous refuge with a group of biker-thieves,...

Sixteen-year-old Tina and two friends leave Kenya and slip into the Congo, where she and her mother fled years before, in order to seek revenge for her mother's murder but instead they uncover startling secrets.

A moving story of the remarkable bond between a journalist in search of a story and a homeless, classically trained musician—now a major motion picture from DreamWorks starring Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr. When Steve Lopez saw Nathaniel Ayers playing his heart out on a two-string violin on Los Angeles' skid row, he found it impossible to walk away. More than thirty years earlier, Ayers had been a promising classical bass student at Juilliard—ambitious,

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Robert "Cali" Callahan, seventeen, gets swept up into the private-investigator business and must deal with the ramifications of looking for fellow runaways who may not want to be found--and with falling in love with one of them.

Sixteen-year-old Indy struggles to conceal that she is pregnant by rape and then, turned out by relatives, must find a way to survive on her own in Nassau.

The author offers an account of her journey from a fifteen-year-old living on the streets and eating garbage to her acceptance into Harvard, a feat that prompted a Lifetime movie and a successful motivational-speaking career.

In the tradition of Mary Karr's "The Liars' Club" and Rick Bragg's "All Over But the Shouting," Jeannette Walls has written a stunning and life-affirming memoir about surviving a willfully impoverished, eccentric and severely misguided family. The child of an alcoholic father and an eccentric artist mother discusses her family's nomadic upbringing, during which she and her siblings fended for themselves while their parents outmaneuvered bill collectors...

As she struggles to recover and survive, seventeen-year-old homeless Charlotte "Charlie" Davis cuts herself to dull the pain of abandonment and abuse.