realistic fiction

When Mia arrives at her new school, her goal is to be open to and friendly with everyone, but everyone at Park Street School fits into a clique. When the Popular Girls Club takes an interest in Mia's awesome fashion style and wants to recruit her, Mia must decide between them and her great new Cupcake Club friends. It's like choosing between her divorced mom and dad and her old house and new house. Is it always going to be Mia in the middle, or can she mix it up?.

"Katie is miserable when her best friend is invited to join the Popular Girls Club and Katie is left out. Is there an Unpopular Girls Club she can join? Luckily, Katie finds her way with a great new group of friends-Mia, Emma, and Alexis-and together they become the Cupcake Club. Sometimes starting from scratch turns out to be the icing on the cupcake"--.

Twelve-year-old Ellie, who has cerebral palsy, finds her life transformed when she moves with her mother to small-town Oklahoma to help care for her grandfather, who has Alzheimer's Disease.

Free is excited about a local poetry contest because of its cash prize, but when he and Dyamonde befriend a classmate who is homeless and living in a shelter, they rethink what it means to be rich or poor.

"Into the Wind is a middle-grade novel about the unlikely friendship between a boy and an elderly woman"--.

Thirteen-year-old Hannah Higgins is convinced her summer is ruined when she is forced to travel to Africa and work in a remote village in Kenya with her mom and uncle. Never having been to a developing country, she finds the food gross and the community filthy. She has to live without electricity or running water. Then she is told she must attend school. Just when she thinks nothing could make this trip any worse, she learns people there are dying of hunger and preventable disease. Hannah becomes frustrated and wants to help, but when poverty threatens the lives of people she loves, all she wants to do is go home.

Beauty, who is of Taino Indian, African, and Boricua heritage, was taught to be strong and proud, but hatred toward people who look like her bruises her heart until her community opens her eyes to the truth.

A young boy describes what it is like to have a father who is a soldier and, especially, how difficult it is while Daddy is far away at war.

Inspired by a mysterious message, seventeen-year-old Ginny Park sets off to find herself as she reflects on her experiences of growing up Zainichi, an ethnic Korean born in Japan, and the incident that forced her to leave years prior.

In a small Ugandan village, Kato wakes early to start the long, barefoot trek beyond his village and along fields dotted with cattle and guarded by soldiers. His destination is the village well, where he will pump a day's supply of water into two jerry cans. Like every day, Kato lets the water splash over his hot tired feet before carrying his heavy load back home, where his chores await him. But this is no ordinary day. The aid worker's truck has come to the village square, and in the back is a gift so special, the little boy rushes home to look for something to repay the aid worker. Alma Fullerton's spare, lilting prose tells a deceptively simple story of one day in a little boy's life. But in a place ravaged by a generation of civil war and drought, a village well brings life, a gift of shoes is a cause for celebration, and a simple flower becomes an eloquent symbol of peace and gratitude.