Jenna Lamia

After her father runs off with a dental hygienist, Raymie Clarke decides it is up to her to repair her family. She plans to win the Little Miss Central Florida Tire competition so her father will see her picture in the paper and come home. However, Raymie has competition in Beverly Tapinski and Louisiana Elefante. All of the girls want to win the pageant for different reasons, and none ever imagined they would become friends.

Four students, with their own individual stories, develop a special bond and attract the attention of their teacher, a paraplegic, who chooses them to represent their sixth-grade class in the Academic Bowl competition.

"A magnum opus for our morally complex times from the author of Freedom Young Pip Tyler doesn't know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she's saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she's squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother--her only family--is hazardous. But she doesn't have a clue who her father is, why her mother has always concealed her own real name, or how she can ever have...

In an otherworldly story set against the backdrop of Cold War-era America, an amphibious man is discovered in the Amazon--and subsequently finds love within the human race.

"Following a tragedy that further alters the course of her life, twelve-year-old Lucy Everhart decides to continue the shark research her marine biologist mother left unfinished when she died years earlier"--Provided by publisher.