single-parent families

Tasha Flanagan uses her blog, Blabbermouth, as a weapon against her mother's new boyfriend, Jed Hazell, and his daughter when she begins to suspect they are hiding a guilty secret.

With her father out of the picture and her mother working long hours, twelve-year-old Cassie unconsciously describes her anger and confusion in a fantasy novel she is writing for school.

China Cup Cameron, a fourteen-year-old single mother with only her paralyzed Uncle Simon for support, takes on tremendous personal debt in hopes of a beautiful funeral after her daughter dies.

Fifteen-year-old Tut lives in squalor with his fisherman father on the coast of Maine, but his English teacher and a new neighbor girl are determined to turn his life around and force him to speak, which he has not done since his mother's death.

When his girlfriend leaves him and their five-month-old baby, seventeen-year-old Matt struggles to make a life for himself and Mahalia, the daughter he adores.

Fifteen-year-old Phebe Knight, a lifelong ballerina who seems to have lost her focus on dance, decides to spend the summer in Switzerland with her father where she meets teenage chess champion Nikolai Kotalev and becomes involved in his obsessive quest to find the perfect teacher.

All thirteen-year-old Raspberry can think of is making money so that she and her mother never have to worry about living on the streets again.

In a series of diary entries, thirteen-year-old Judi recounts her struggles to lose weight, hide her bulimia from her mother, find a boyfriend, and decide on a profession.

Sixteen-year-old Dylan uses her psychic abilities to help police solve crimes against children, but keeps her extracurricular activities secret from her friends at school.

Zaki Shirazi, a fatherless boy, is raised in contemporary Pakistan along with his female cousin, Samar, while surrounded by outspoken women, and as the cousins grow up and their lives diverge, they learn about the nature of happiness, selfhood, and commitment.