Napoli, Donna Jo

Nick wishes for some pink mail addressed just to him and his sister helps make it happen.

Sly uses her detective skills to help her friends solve mysteries that all involve some kind of code.

While drawing pictures of the animals she sees on her trip to Australia, a young girl named Ally meets Pauline, an aborigine woman and fellow artist, from whom Ally learns that art is not always created with just paper and paints, and that mistakes are actually happy accidents.

Tired of his mother's overprotectiveness and intrigued by the life of African American explorer Matthew Henson, twelve-year-old Alvin travels north and spends a season with a trapper near the Arctic Circle.

Ten-year-old Eileen's life changes drastically when her father separates from her mother and moves out, taking with him the piano on which she is used to practicing every day.

Bobby the bonobo is not accepted by the chimps at the zoo where they all live, but after he has an afternoon adventure in the city and gets a mohawk hair cut, the chimps change their minds about him.

Adam consults his talking freckles again after the new girl in middle school joins the boys soccer team.

In a novel based on Chinese Cinderella tales, fourteen-year-old stepchild Xing-Xing endures a life of neglect and servitude, as her stepmother cruelly mutilates her own child's feet so that she alone might marry well.

When her pet rabbit's newborn babies die, and her doctor tells her that she may have scoliosis, and her aunt is diagnosed with cancer, ten-year-old Laurel feels constantly reminded of the mortality of all living things.

When sixteen-year-old Sep develops a disease that causes white blotches to appear on her skin, she rushes into a relationship with a boy she has always thought of as just a friend.