emotional problems

At the request of her social worker, thirteen-year-old Linda gradually reveals how her life with her unstable mother and her younger brothers led to her rape and the murder she witnessed.

In her writing for a concerned teacher, sixteen-year-old Raina reveals her troubles with a dysfunctional family, life on the streets, drug abuse, and finally an unplanned pregnancy.

Maggie, an insecure fifteen-year-old, is drawn into an obsessive friendship with Kimberley, a beautiful but troubled young model.

After living in California for five years, Anh welcomes her cousin Lan, a Vietnamese refugee, and tries to help Lan come to terms with the terrible events in her past.

Sixteen-year-old Christy, living with her reformed hippy parents in Chicago, has her belief in astrology strongly reinforced when, on a visit to the plastic surgeon to have the tattooed name of her former boyfriend, Benjamin, removed from her chest, she meets the very attractive Ben, who is having a tattoo of the name "Christy" removed from his arm.

Sent to a boarding school by her mother, Marina, a disfigured Australian girl who refuses to speak, reveals her thoughts and feelings in a diary.

In the Florida projects, sixteen-year-old Jayson struggles with the harsh realities of his life which include an abusive mother, a drug-addicted father, and not fitting in at his predominately white school, and bring him to the brink of suicide.

Several high school students relate their feelings about school, themselves, and events as they unfold on the fateful one-year anniversary of the killing of a fellow student.

On the anniversary of his sister's murder, Leo, tormented by his mother's insane accusations and his own waking nightmares, kidnaps a wealthy girl intending to kill her, but instead their long night together helps them both face their futures.

Having stopped eating after the death of her father, seventeen-year-old Laurel feels herself losing control of her life in the hot, magical world of Los Angeles.