single-parent families

After living her life in her actress mother's world of make-believe, ninth-grader Dandelion comes to realize that it is better to face reality.

The summer before she enters the seventh grade becomes the summer of Alice's first boyfriend, and she discovers that love is about the most mixed-up thing that can possibly happen to you, especially since she has no mother to go to for advice.

Thirteen-year-old Drew starts the summer of 1986 helping in her mother's cheese shop and dreaming about co-worker Nick, but when her widowed mother begins dating, Drew's father's book of lists, her pet rat, and Emmett, a boy on a quest, help her cope.

Rising seventh-grader Lucy plans on a perfect summer at the Maine lake where her family has owned a cottage for decades, but the family of a classmate she dislikes has bought a home there and her widowed father is bringing a girlfriend to visit.

Fourteen-year-old Joel sees the first snow of the year as a time to make resolutions. He resolves to live a long life, see the sea, and see a naked lady. Joel's efforts to achieve his resolutions become complicated, especially when he tries to help his father return to his life as a sailor.

Ernie, an overweight high school student and long-time target of bullies, relies on his best friend Will to watch his back until Will, overwhelmed by problems at home and guilt over his brother's death, seeks a final solution.

Fisher Brown, a sixteen-year-old overachiever, is on the verge of academic burnout when he impulsively decides to stop cramming for the SATs for one weekend and accompany his neighbor to an out of town job repairing a roof.

Although teachers, counselors, and social workers try to help, it is a stray cat that finally enables eleven-year-old Jordan to stand up to the father who has beaten her and her brother for years.

Anxious to distract his "overly" strict mother, twelve-year-old Stuart and his best friend, a girl named Mack, determine to fix her up with Mack's Uncle Joe.

In a small Iowa town in 1952, eleven-year-old Charlie Nebraska, whose father died in the Korean War, learns the meaning of both racism and heroism when he befriends Luther Peale, a young man who once played for the old Negro Baseball League.