families

Four friends in middle school face challenges both on and off the basketball court with issues that affect their families, friendships, school, and sports.

A fictional journal in which eleven-year-old Minnie Swift tells how her family dealt with the difficult times during the Depression and how the arrival of an orphan from Texas changed their lives in Indianapolis just before Christmas 1932.

Rosa is excited when her new cousin, Benji, is born, but when Grandma wants to remove a beloved armchair, Rosa puts her foot down and insists that the chair, just like Benji, is a member of the family.

Nancy wants to adopt a special puppy so that she is no longer the only fancy member of her family, but after a day of puppysitting a papillon, she realizes that being fancy is not always the most important thing.

Autumn of 1986 in the Ozarks finds eleven-year-old April Grace adjusting to middle school, coping with her mother's difficult pregnancy, helping Isabel with the church play, and trying to figure out why the new boy at school will not leave her alone.

A claustrophobic boy dreams of going to college and becoming a newspaperman rather than a miner like his father, but when all union miners in the Coeur d'Alene Mining District are arrested, Mick develops new respect for his father while taking over responsibility for his family.

Surprised by her scientist father's gift of a robot for her birthday, ten-year-old Celia comes to appreciate its help in organizing her chaotic day-to-day life until it suddenly mysteriously disappears.

In the summer of 1986, eleven-year-old April Grace, who lives on a rural Arkansas farm with her family, across a field from her grandmother, has her sense of Christian charity tested when a snooty couple from San Francisco moves into a dilapidated house down the road and her grandmother takes up with a loud, obnoxious, and suspicious-acting Texan.

Edward is one of a large and close family that loves baseball, music, books, and each other, and when he unexpectedly dies and his parents donate his organs, his wonderful eyes go to a perfect recipient.

Twelve-year-old Frank witnesses his mother's struggles to muster support for women's right to vote even as the family's life is transformed by a year running a lodge in western Massachusetts in the early 1920s.