While living very different lives on opposite coasts, seventeen-year-old Elizabeth and eighteen-year-old Lauren become acquainted by email the summer before they begin rooming together as freshmen at UC-Berkeley.

While hoping to work as the clown in an amusement park dunk tank on the New Jersey shore the summer before his junior year in high school, Chad faces his best friend's serious illness, hassles with police, and the girl that got away.

As she turns twelve during the summer of 1953, Penny gains new insights into herself and her family while also learning a secret about her father's death. It's1953 and 11-year-old Penny dreams of a summer of butter pecan ice cream, swimming, and baseball. But nothing's that easy in Penny's family. For starters, she can't go swimming because her mother's afraid she'll catch polio at the pool. To make matters worse, her favorite uncle is living in a...

Peter describes the highs and lows of life with his younger brother, Fudge.

Although twelve-year-old Cassidy Bean keeps a book of bad things, she did not expect her summer with the Tremont family in rural New Jersey to be one of them--but this year Ursula, a local hoarder, has died under mysterious circumstances, and Cassidy finds that there a great many bad and dangerous things hidden in her house, including, perhaps, her vengeful ghost.

After moving across the country, thirteen-year-old Natalie auditions for her new school's play and overcomes her fears and insecurities about performing in a wheelchair.

Although Jeff and Tad, encouraged by a new friend, Lindsey, make a deal to help one another overcome aftereffects of their cancer treatments in preparation for eighth-grade graduation, Jeff still craves advice from his older brother Stephen, who is studying drums in Africa.

Jared, a high-scoring member of the Hudson City Middle School basketball team, gets angry when the point guard accuses him of being responsible for their string of losses, but finally realizes they can win only if he becomes a team player.

Thirteen-year-old Robert "Qwerty" Stevens uses the time machine he finds in his back yard to visit Thomas Edison's workshop in 1879, and there helps develop the electric light bulb, but then needs his sister's help to return to his own time.

New Jersey girl Zora Emerson is attending her pre-college prep at Halstead University, where the incredibly wealthy and stuck-up students go, and after only a week she is feeling academically confident but socially out of place; then an awkward mix-up of cell phones brings her into closer contact with Owen Whittelsey (prince of a small European country) and his security guards--but it is when Owen asks her to be his date at his brother's royal wedding...