In the late seventeenth century, fifteen-year-old Kit, driven to desperation by the starvation of one brother and the mistreatment of his simple-minded twin, realizes his dream of becoming an apprentice in London but feels drawn by duty to return home to Essex.
At boarding school, Katie tries to focus on swimming and becoming popular instead of the painful memories of her institutionalized schizophrenic older brother.
Three young women, Madeline, Desiree, and Ariel, who live in separate decades, struggle with similar issues regarding family, men, self-respect, empathy, and forgiveness.
In 1959 Georgia, Polly, a twelve-year-old white girl, and Timbre Ann, a fourteen-year-old African-American, find their friendship tested when arsonists begin setting fires to businesses owned by African-Americans and the townspeople are separated by Jim Crow laws.
Skye Hamilton, invited to attend the exclusive Alphas-only boarding school, must gird herself for the intense competition between young members of the country's best and brightest.
Twelve-year-old Patrick Condon assumes his brother John's identity and runs away to join the army in order to get away from his boring life in Ireland; however, as World War I erupts, the boy experiences much more than he expected.
Cameron Smith, a disaffected sixteen-year-old diagnosed with mad cow disease, sets off on a road trip with a death-obsessed, video-gaming dwarf he meets in the hospital in an attempt to find a cure.
Seeing no way out of his difficult life in Harlem, seventeen-year-old Jeremy "Lil J" Dance flees into a house after a drug deal goes awry and meets a strange man who reveals different turning points in Lil J's life when he could have made better choices.
Camelia, who has recently discovered she shares her crush Ben's power of psychometry, finds herself in a tortured love triangle when a figure from Ben's past arrives and Camelia discovers that both boys are hiding dangerous secrets.
Madison, a senior at a suburban New York high school, tries to uncover who is responsible for the disappearance of her friends, popular students mentioned in the posts of an anonymous blogger, while she, herself, is being stalked online and in-person.
