Zoe's sixth-grade year at a Brooklyn school for gifted students is marked by changing relationships with her fellow students and teachers, recognition of her talent for cryptography, and a greater awareness of her passion.
Follows Porsche Santiaga, a sharp-tongued, quick-witted young woman who refuses to accept her new life in group homes, foster care, and juvenile detention.
Winter, born into a wealthy drug-dealing family in the Brooklyn ghetto, grows up thinking of herself as the queen of the world, but everything comes crashing down when her father is arrested and all their belongings confiscated by the government.
Eleven-year-old Margaret tries to accept the inevitable changes that come one summer when her father dies and her best friend Maizon goes away to a private boarding school.
As part of a class project on political revolutions, sixteen-year-old Adora Benet devises a plan to overthrow the popular clique at her school and establish a new social order.
While his parents are on a cruise, twelve-year-old Nicholas spends his summer in Brooklyn with his grandmother and uncle and learns, with unintended results, about his Italian-American heritage.
Writing in the notebook which her teacher gave her, thirteen-year-old Celiane describes life with her mother and brother in Haiti as well as her experiences in Brooklyn after the family finally immigrates there to be reunited with her father.
After having been sent, at a very young age, from New York to live with her grandmother in Haiti, fourteen-year-old Mardi returns to join her parents and try to shape a new life in Brooklyn.
