Sixteen-year-old Hector is the hope of his family, but when he seeks revenge after his brother's gang-related death and is sent to a San Antonio reform school, it takes an odd assortment of characters to help him see that hope is still alive.
A little boy in a war-ravaged country is separated by a wire fence from the streams and hills he used to visit with his father, but he finds hope when he begins to nurture a green shoot found growing in the rubble.
A poem, illustrated by photographs, illustrations, collages, and paintings, in which the author expresses his hopes for a future of freedom, peace, and understanding.
While vacationing in the country, eleven-year-old Toby, a cancer patient, learns some important lessons about living and dying from an elderly poet and her cow.
Despite observing his father's illness and the suffering of the fire-eating Mr. McNulty, as well as enduring abuse at school and the stress of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Bobby Burns and his family and friends, living in England in 1962, still find reasons to rejoice in their lives and to have hope for the future.