Zach is riding the Greyhound bus through a snowstorm to visit his older brother Derek, whom he hasn't seen in seven months. That's when their parents finally went broke paying Derek's doctor's bills and had to give him up as a ward of the state. Nothing-not drawing in his sketchbook, not basketball-lets Zach forget that his brother is living in a mental institution five states away. But surprisingly, sitting next to a talkative teenage girl he nicknames...

In the vein of When You Trap a Tiger and Shouting at the Rain, this is the story of the journey one girl undertakes to find herself. After Breda Moriarity gets caught stealing one too many times, Breda's mom sends her to Ireland, a place she has never been, to live with the grandfather she has never met. While Breda doesn’t want to be in this strange land, she finally gets to meet Granda, her mom’s father. He’s a grumpy farmer who is also...

Publisher Annotation: When Lottie's beloved Aunt Helen dies of cancer, it upends her careful, quiet life. Aunt Helen wasn?t a typical aunt. She was the world-famous author of the bestselling Alvin Hatter series. She knew a thing or two about the magic of writing, and how words have the power to make you see things differently. In her will, Aunt Helen leaves Lottie a series of letters?each containing mysterious instructions. As Lottie sets about following...

Publisher Annotation: Ah-Mei and her French grandmother, Nainai, share a rare bond. Maybe it’s because Ah-Mei is the only girl grandchild. Or maybe it’s because the pair look so much alike and neither resembles the rest of their Chinese family. Politics and war make 1960s Shanghai a hard place to grow up, especially when racism and bigotry are rife, and everyone seems suspicious of Nainai’s European heritage and interracial marriage. In this...

When his family's restaurant and Cuban American neighborhood in Miami are threatened by a greedy land developer, thirteen-year-old Arturo, joined by Carmen, a cute poetry enthusiast, fight back, discovering the power of poetry and protest through untold family stories and the work of José Martí.