With the help of her best friend, sixteen-year-old Mindy sorts through her relationships with her solicitous mother and her detached father as she tries to come to terms with the fact that her mother is dying from a brain tumor.
Sixth grader Kara tries to conceal from her friends, her absent father, and the authorities that her mother is sliding deeper and deeper into mental illness.
Life with their mentally ill mother becomes unbearable for twelve-year-old Sarah and fifteen-year-old Carlie as they are deprived of food and forbidden to use the bathroom.
Talented basketball player Ashlee Carson works hard to win a place in the nationals, but her strict mother wants her to focus on academics and Ashlee must ask her deadbeat father, a former professional basketball player, for support.
En route to Germany in search of the maternal love she never had, eighteen-year-old Patty Bergen lingers in Paris and experiences her first love affair.
After her mother dies in a rescue mission on a snowy mountain, twelve-year-old Roz wonders if talking to God, and to the boy for whom her mother died, can help her understand what happened.
Sixteen-year-old Cassie, daughter of a famous comedienne, wishes she could spend more time with her sought-after mother and at the same time be recognized as a separate identity.
Tallahassee lives with her freespirited mother, but when Mother goes to L.A. to try her luck in TV and movies, Tallahassee goes with her uncle whose conventional lifestyle makes her question her mother's values--and her own.
When seventeen-year-old Carrie's notoriously unstable mother disappears, only Carrie seems interested in pursuing the truth through a world where she can trust no one but herself.
After years of moving from one cult to another, fourteen-year-old Caro and her idealistic mother find a sense of community with a group of homeless people trying to survive on the streets of San Francisco.
