coming of age

South American journalist Paul Faustino begins his interview with World Cup Soccer star El Gato and learns a fantastic story of a young, lonely boy growing up in the middle of a rain forest who wandered upon a mysterious soccer field and an apparition that appeared to him daily.

Alternates between two stories--contemporarily, seventeen-year-old Jacob visits a daunting Amsterdam at the request of his English grandmother--and historically, nineteen-year-old Geertrui relates her experience of British soldiers's attempts to liberate Holland from its German occupation.

Fourteen-year-old Saxso, a member of the Abenaki tribe in Canada, embarks on a dangerous rescue mission when his mother and two younger sisters are taken hostage during an attack by the British on their unprotected village in 1759.

14-year-old John comes of age and gains self-reliance during the summer he spends up in the Wyoming mountains tending his father's herd of sheep.

While her father works on the Manhattan Project, eleven-year-old gadget lover and outcast Dewey Kerrigan lives in Los Alamos Camp, and becomes friends with Suze, another young girl who is shunned by her peers.

After harsh early years, Pip, an orphan growing up in Victorian England, is given the means to become a gentleman by an unknown benefactor and learns that outward appearances can be deceiving. Presented in comic book format.

When a boy and girl are drowned in the Blackwater River, thirteen-year-old Brodie must decide whether to confess that he may have caused the accident.

A fourteen-year-old boy attempts to be the youngest person to reach the top of Mount Everest.

Twelve-year-old Fletcher Moon, the youngest qualified private detective in the world, receives a diploma and gold-plated detective's shield after completing an Internet course, and sets out to solve petty crimes at school, but he forced to go on the run when, while investigating the town's biggest crime family, his badge is stolen and he is framed for several crimes he did not commit.

During the 1967 school year, on Wednesday afternoons when all his classmates go to either Catechism or Hebrew school, seventh-grader Holling Hoodhood stays in Mrs. Baker's classroom where they read the plays of William Shakespeare and Holling learns much of value about the world he lives in.