Fourteen-year-old Nick finds life dreary at the military academy run by his strict father and dreams of becoming a cartoonist, but then various events converge to bring him a better understanding of his father.
Since the death of his older brother, thirteen-year-old Billy Baggs has had a distant relationship with his father, but life on their farm in Northern Minnesota begins to change when he starts to play baseball.
Bo learns about kindness, love, loyalty, appearances, and pretense from the unusual characters he meets when he is sent to live with his father after his mother decides to remarry.
After receiving an apparent crank call from a man claiming to have committed murder, fifteen-year-old Andy finds his close relationship with his father crumbling as he struggles to make everyone believe him.
To a thirteen-year-old Vermont farm boy whose father slaughters pigs for a living, maturity comes early as he learns "doing what's got to be done," especially regarding his pet pig who cannot produce a litter.
After receiving an apparent crank call from a man claiming to have committed murder, fifteen-year-old Andy finds his close relationship with his father crumbling as he struggles to make everyone believe him.
After his mother's death, twelve-year-old Skiff Beaman decides that it is up to him to earn money to take care of himself and his father, so he undertakes a dangerous trip alone out on the ocean off the coast of Maine to try to catch a huge bluefin tuna.
A fictionalized biography of eighteen-year-old John Kipling, son of writer Rudyard Kipling, who remembers his boyhood and the events leading up to World War I, as he lies dying on a battlefield in France.
While training for a triathlon, seventeen-year-old Bo attends an anger management group at school which leads him to examine his relationship with his father.
After their father dies of boxing injuries, George is determined to prevent his younger brother, who sees boxing as his legacy, from pursuing a career in the sport.
