runaway children

Best friends Hannah and Zoe leave their down-and-out New Jersey town and drive west chasing storms, making new friends, and seeking the intangibles--audacity, insouciance, happiness--that their lives have lacked.

Wally, who was adopted from a Russian orphanage and raised in a wealthy New York City family, finds herself living on the streets at fifteen, and, at sixteen, she sets out to locate her birth mother before her Russian gangster father can.

After a judge sentences Miguel to spend a year in a group home and write in a journal, he makes plans to escape the youth detention center and go to Mexico, where he can put his past behind him.

Little Angus wakes up angry, and decides to run away from home when his mother scolds him for being rude--but he is very soon lost, hungry, and more than a little frightened.

A boy named Mark, tired of being sick with cancer, conceives a plan to climb Mount Rainier, and runs away from home with his dog, Beau--but with over two hundred miles between him and his goal, and only anger at his situation to drive him on, nothing will be easy, and only his best friend, Jessie, suspects where he is heading.

When Danny find himself stranded at the bottom of a giant construction hole, he makes use of the items in his backpack to get through the next few days and befriends a poetry-spouting mole.

In 1942, when life turns sour at the carnival that has always been her home, eleven-year-old Bee takes her dog, Peabody, and piglet, Cordelia, and sets out to find a real home, aided by two women only Bee and her pets can see.

When Mandie Shaw runs away from her log cabin home in 1899, she convinces Cherokee friends to help her escape into the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. After a treacherous journey, they reach the extravagant mansion of Uncle John, only to discover that his ship has been lost at sea. The house staff, headed by caretaker Jason Bond, kindly allows Mandie to remain. When strangers arrive claiming to be the rightful heirs to Uncle John's fortune, Mandie and her new friend Polly find themselves in a race through hidden passages to locate Uncle John's will.

Told in their separate voices, twelve-year-olds Petra, who escaped her abusive father's Amsterdam house in 1663, and Bram, a half-Javanese/half-Dutch boy, relate their adventures at sea after Petra stows away and Bram, son of the ship's carpenter, helps her disguise herself as a boy.