When his long-absent father suddenly reappears, nine-year-old Rivers struggles with conflicting feelings and re-examines his relationship with the great-uncle who had served as his father.
When a family tragedy occurs, ten-year-old Alyssa "Blister" Reed changes schools, moves to an apartment with her depressed mother while her father gets his own place, and tries to believe her grandmother, who tells her she is "elastic" and can handle it all.
Olivia helps her quirky friend Hal, whose synesthesia causes him to experience everything in colors, with a prank intended to get rid of Hal's potential stepfather, but there are unexpected consequences, including the disappearance of Hal's mother.
In 1938, fourteen-year-old Cece, an aspiring radio actress, encounters lies, secrets, and hoaxes both at home and in the studio where she is transcribing the script for Orson Welles's "War of the Worlds" broadcast.
Eleven-year-old Whit's zookeeper parents have rarely allowed him to go outside of the Alabama zoo they run, but he stops seeing it as such a cage when he meets "Bird Girl, for whom the place is a refuge from problems at home.
Joey tries to keep his life from degenerating into total chaos when his mother sends him to be home-schooled with a hostile blind girl, his divorced parents cannot stop fighting, and his grandmother is dying of emphysema.
Since the death of his mother, Tobin's family and school life have been in disarray, but after he starts raising chickens with his seventh-grade classmate, Henry, everything starts to fall into place.
When Maya accompanies her mother to India to sell her grandfather's house, she uncovers family history relating to her parents' divorce and learns more about herself and her relationship with her mother.
Twelve-year-old Boom Broom thought his life couldn't get any worse, until he stumbles upon a foul-tempered merbaby and must find a way to return her to the world of the merfolk in the hopes of breaking the curse she seems to have put on Boom.
