family problems

Escaping school and family problems in a cemetery, fourteen-year-old Allie begins attending strangers' funerals, which leads to her first real friendship and a mystery that she believes only she can solve.

In a small Alabama town in 1947-1956, Sonny searches for answers about his father's disappearance, "Uncle Marty," who looks after the family, and Mamby, their black housekeeper.

Fourteen-year-old Harley, an artistic teenager living with her alcoholic father and angry mother, suspects that she is adopted and begins a search for her biological parents.

At the age of fifteen Stephen begins having nightmares like the ones that drove his older brother away from home, and eventually the dreams lead to a discovery that is shocking but that ultimately allows his family to come back together.

Seventeen-year-old Susan looks forward eagerly to her senior year in high school but finds her comfortable assumptions and optimistic expectations of life and people shattered by the return home of her older sister, a failed rock singer with a bitter grudge against the family.

The sudden departure of her inseparable friend Julie for California and her own father's unexpected illness challenge many of fourteen-year-old Toni's basic assumptions about friendship and her own happy and secure life.

Stephanie's relationship with her best friend, Rachel, changes during her first year in junior high as she tries to conceal a family problem and meets a new girl from California.

Sixteen-year-old Kylie Galen thinks her misbehavior in the wake of her grandmother's death and her parents' separation are the reasons she has been sent to Shadow Falls Camp, but learns it is a training ground for vampires, werewolves, and other "freaky freaks," of which she may be one.

Kylie Galen arrives at Shadow Falls Camp intent on learning the extent of her supernatural abilities, but predictions of doom, confusion about love, and other complications force her to put her plans on hold, and it soon becomes apparent someone from the dark side of the supernatural world has plans for her.

Thirteen-year-old Irene helps in her grandfather's plant nursery, makes new friends, and begins to learn what she really wants and needs after her father, having lost his job as an investment banker, moves her and her mother to his father's farmhouse upstate.