Jerry Spinelli

Even though his classmates from first grade on have considered him strange and a loser, Daniel Zinkoff's optimism and exuberance and the support of his loving family do not allow him to feel that way about himself.

Cammie O'Reilly is an unusual kid with an even more unusual home life. She hangs out with a flamboyant black shoplifter named Boo Boo, her housekeeper is a sullen arsonist named Eloda Pupko, and she lives above the entrance of a prison where her dad is the warden. Trying to cope with the death of her mother, who died saving Cammie's life, causes Cammie to become a depressed, angry tween, driven mad by her life in prison. The more Cammie tries to figure...

Still moping months after being dumped by her Arizona boyfriend Leo, fifteen-year-old Stargirl, a home-schooled free spirit, writes "the world's longest letter" to Leo, describing her new life in Pennsylvania.

When the school assigns each eighth-grader the name of a teenager who died in the past year as a lesson in mortality, Worm Tarnauer, who thrives on being invisible, doesn't count on Becca Finch, the seventeen-year-old car crash victim who changes everything.

A little boy ponders the many possible jobs in his future, from paper-plane folder and puppy-dog holder to mixing-bowl licker and tin-can kicker.

"Mama Seeton's simple and comforting whistle calls her family home, no matter how far away they may be"--

Now that he is in the fourth grade, Suds learns that a fear of spiders or a babyish lunchbox will never get him into the coveted group, the Fourth Grade Rats.