A traumatic event near the end of the summers has a devastating effect on Melinda's freshman year in high school.

Teenage America, a not-black, not-white, not-anything boy who has spent many years in institutions for disturbed, antisocial behavior, tries to piece his life together.

Written in the form of interviews, reports, and journal entries, the story of three troubled teenagers ends in a tragic school shooting.

Written in free verse, explores how three teenagers try to cope with the consequences of their mother's addiction to crystal meth and its effects on their lives.

Fifteen-year-old Macy, officially labeled "disturbed" by her school, records her impressions of her rough neighborhood and home life as she tries to rescue her brother from Child Protective Services, win back her overachieving best friend after a fight, and figure out whether to tell her incarcerated father about her mother's cheating.

Thirteen-year-old Martin Boyle struggles to break a family curse after discovering that he has only twelve weeks to live.

"After fourteen-year-old Eden is raped by her brother's best friend, she knows she'll never be the way she used to be"--

Alternating passages that draw on the myths of Persephone and Narcissus juxtapose the differing viewpoints of a teenaged girl and her older brother as she tries to prevent a manipulative psychotherapist from using her journal as material in a book.

Finley, an unnaturally quiet boy who is the only white player on his high school's varsity basketball team, lives in a dismal Pennsylvania town that is ruled by the Irish mob, and when his coach asks him to mentor a troubled African American student who has transferred there from an elite private school in California, he finds that they have a lot in common in spite of their apparent differences.

Theodore Finch is fascinated by death, and he constantly thinks of ways he might kill himself. But each time, something good, no matter how small, stops him. Violet Markey lives for the future, counting the days until graduation, when she can escape her Indiana town and her aching grief and guilt in the wake of her sister's recent death. When Finch and Violet meet on the ledge of the bell tower at school, it's unclear who saves whom. And when they...