The most autobiographical of Dickens' works, David Copperfield often echoes the writer's own life. It tells a moving story of David's journey from birth to maturity, a journey which inextricably links his life with some of Dickens' most colorful and extraordinary families.

Orphaned as a child and sent to live among religious caretakers in Canada, Beck endures harsh labor and searches for love while traveling back and forth across the American border during the height of the Great Depression.

When Sonia's father loses his job and she must move from her small, supportive private school to a public middle school, the half-Jewish half-Indian sixth-grader experiences culture shock as she tries to navigate the school's unfamiliar social scene, and after her father is diagnosed with clinical depression, she finds herself becoming even more confused about herself and her family.

Seventeen-year-old Claire Alalay likes herself best when she plays her father's old piano, a welcome escape from the sadness of missing him -- and from her traditional Filipino mother's prayer groups. After placing third in a local competition, and with hopes of earning a college scholarship, Claire auditions for Paul Avon, a prominent piano teacher, who agrees to take Claire as a pupil. Soon Claire loses herself in Paul's world and his way of digging...

Throughout her high school years, as her mother battles cancer, Lupita takes on more responsibility for her house and seven younger siblings, while finding refuge in acting and writing poetry. Includes glossary of Spanish terms.

Phoebe, fifteen, the daughter of a famous mother and unearthly father, suddenly begins experiencing radical changes as she enters one scene after another from 1950s and 60s science fiction movies.

While on trial as an accomplice to a murder, sixteen-year-old Steve Harmon records his experiences in prison and in the courtroom in the form of a film script as he tries to come to terms with the course his life has taken.

A fourteen-year-old boy attempts to be the youngest person to reach the top of Mount Everest.

The kind of creativity that is rewarded at age fifteen is not always enough to propel someone through life at age thirty; not everyone can sustain, in adulthood, what seemed so special in adolescence. The summer that Nixon resigns, six teenagers at a summer camp for the arts become inseparable. The friendships endure and even prosper, but also underscore the differences in their fates, in what their talents become and the shapes their lives take.

In 1929 in a sleepy Cornish village, aspiring writer Lou Trevelyan, age seventeen, is introduced to the glamour and secrets of high society by summer neighbors Caitlin and Robert Cardew.