When a lost dog helps Laura find a way home to her family, they discover family in each other along the way.

The rain kept coming, the dam broke, and lives were lost. One was Lucy Michaels's little brother. She was there and while she saved the lives of many young boy scouts, despite being a child herself, she couldn't save him. Eight years later Lucy is graduating from high school. She will compete in an air rifle competition-- but her stepbrother goes missing right before his most important football game. When the missing person search becomes a murder...

Told with interstitial historical chapters, fourteen-year-old Taína (Ty) must draw from the strength of her Taíno ancestors to bring her family and community hope and healing after a devastating incident.

Everything changes for Isabelle, not quite fifteen, when she is diagnosed with lymphoma--but eventually she survives and even thrives.

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.

Nola Sutton has always been friends with the Swift boys, Cannaan, Brian, and Kevin, but when their father leaves them without saying good-bye the boys start to change, and her long-time friends begin to pull away from her at a time when she needs them more than ever.

Fifteen-year-old Dawn, who cares for her alcoholic mother, tries to suppress a painful childhood memory as she contemplates killing God, whom she blames for her father's disappearance.

Twelve-year-old Joey and his fifteen-year-old sister Philly relate their experiences trying to cope in a family already strained by the mother's extended travel, and pushed further apart by the father's disappointment that Joey is more interested in drawing deer than hunting them.

When their friend Scooter dies of a rare disease, teenagers Nick Gardner and Jaycee Amato set out on a secret journey to find the father who abandoned "The Scoot" when he was an infant, and give him a signed first edition of "Of Mice and Men."

Fifteen-year-old Kass is trying to resist her manic-depressive father's attempts to make her try out for "The X Factor" while she also deals with her crush on the same older boy her best friend likes, her distant mother's mysterious comings and goings, and her younger brother's criminal activities.