It's 'bead season' at Slippery Rock High. This year the bead-snatching grad game called Gotcha has been banned as an official school activity because the teachers have decided to put an end to what they consider a dangerous tradition. The game goes underground, and more grads than ever are participating. The game quickly spins out of control, and Katie finds herself losing friends and falling victim to her classmates' obsession with Gotcha. She...

Kirsten and Walk, seventh-graders at an elite private school, alternate telling how race, wealth, weight, and other issues shape their relationships as they and other misfits stand up to a mean but influential classmate, even as they are uncovering a long-kept secret about themselves.

Thirteen-year-old Danny Dawson lives on a cattle station in the Australian outback, where his family struggles to cope with the accidental death of his older brother a year earlier and his sister's pregnancy by an Aboriginal.

Opin, his brother Emjay, and their mother live in a car and are trying to get to Los Angeles where they hope an uncle and a new life are waiting, but even after finding a stray dog, Opin's longing for a stable home intensifies as his brother's reckless ways hit a new high.

After her father loses his job and she finds out that her parents have lied to her, fifteen-year-old Ames feels betrayed enough to become involved with a criminal who will stop at nothing to get what he wants.

After ignoring several warnings to stop dating his teacher, Garrett is sent to Lake Harmony, a boot camp that uses unorthodox and brutal methods to train students to obey their parents.

When Allie is contacted by the ghost of a dog, she and Dub investigate the surly new boy at school and his father, who may be running a puppy mill, to see if they are involved.

While dealing with her parents' separation and her best friend's distance, Amanda is able to work out some of her anxiety through her fifth-grade project--writing a diary from the point of view of a ten-year-old girl whose brothers fight on opposite sides in the Civil War.

At a family reunion, Shelley comes to terms with her parents' divorce, her mother's absence, her new stepmother, and being the "stable" member of her colorful family.

Thirteen-year-old Irene helps in her grandfather's plant nursery, makes new friends, and begins to learn what she really wants and needs after her father, having lost his job as an investment banker, moves her and her mother to his father's farmhouse upstate.