Audrey Cuttler's life is turned upside down when her ex-boyfriend's song about their break up hits the top of the charts, making Audrey a prime target for the paparazzi, who are documenting her every move, hoping to catch her messing up, and causing her nothing but misery.
With his mother working long hours and in pain from a romantic break-up, eighteen-year-old Logan feels alone and unloved until a zany new student--who is hiding a big secret--arrives at his small-town Missouri high school.
When living with her mother, an alcoholic ex-beauty queen, becomes unbearable, almost seventeen-year-old Maybelline "Maybe" Chestnut runs away to California, where she finds work on a taco truck and tries to track down her birth father.
Polly Martin decides to swear off boys for the summer after a junior year full of dating disasters and is pleased when she learns her grandmother, an advice columnist, is moving in, but her resolve weakens when she meets skateboarder Xander Cooper, and her grandma is too busy trying to pick up men to offer much help.
Sisters Zen and Xander Vogel are each dealing with the death of their mother in different ways, with Xander risking her future by experimenting with late-night parties, men, and dangerous drugs and Zen struggling to protect her sister and discover what she wants out of life.
In 1941 Chicago, fifteen-year-old Ruby, a Polish-American girl from the slums, leaves her meat-packing plant job to be a "taxi" dancer, paid a dime apiece to dance with men in a dance hall, and becomes entangled with the mob.
Karl Shoemaker, starting his senior year in Lightsburg, Ohio, in 1973, vows to break out of the therapy group he has been forced to attend during school hours and become "normal.".
In a small East Texas town largely ruled by prejudices and bullies, fourteen-year-old Austin sets out to win a ride in the next parade and, in the process, grows in her understanding of friendship and helps her widowed mother through her mourning.
