Coming home from boarding school, Ashlyn has big plans for the summer until her wealthy father is arrested for tax evasion, her mother enters a rehab facility for "exhaustion," and Ashlyn, not a fan of the outdoors, is sent to a rustic team-building retreat center in the middle of nowhere.

Feeling torn between two boys and growing more resentful of her father's hidden past, teenaged psychic Sabine witnesses a gruesome murder while using astral projection to spy on her secret half-sister Jade.

During the summer before their seventh-grade year, Kristy, Mary Anne, Claudia, and Stacey tackle difficulties, including family problems, crushes, moving, and making new friends.

Seventh-grader Sara wants to be normal but her panic attacks and other episodes cause her to isolate herself until, in group therapy, she meets talkative and outgoing Erin, her first friend.

Overburdened by his parents' bickering and a bully's attacks, fifteen-year-old Lucky Linderman begins dreaming of being with his grandfather, who went missing during the Vietnam War, but during a visit to Arizona, his aunt and uncle and their beautiful neighbor, Ginny, help him find a new perspective.

Told in two voices, sixteen-year-old Kennedy Jones and seventeen-year-old Nolan Chandler are drawn together by strange signals related to family tragedies, and find they are more connected than they could have imagined.

"The acclaimed, bestselling author--winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize--tells the enthralling story of how an unexpected romantic encounter irrevocably changes two families' lives. One Sunday afternoon in Southern California, Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating's christening party uninvited. Before evening falls, he has kissed Franny's mother, Beverly--thus setting in motion the dissolution of their marriages and the joining...

The family routine is upset during Ramona's year in second grade when her father unexpectedly loses his job.

Told from two viewpoints, neighbors and former best friends Hannah and Emory, seventeen, must face what caused their rift after Hannah saves the life of Emory's boyfriend, Luke.

When Naomi's absent mother resurfaces to claim her, Naomi runs away to Mexico with her great-grandmother and younger brother in search of her father.