Seventh-grader Zoey Albro focuses on caring for three younger siblings and avoiding rich classmates at school until her fascination with octopuses gets her on the debate team and she begins to speak out.

Sixth grader Alec can't put a good book down. So when Principal Vance lays down the law -- pay attention in class, or else -- Alec takes action. He can't lose all his reading time, so he starts a club. A club he intends to be the only member of. After all, reading isn't a team sport, and no one would want to join something called the Losers Club, right? But as more and more kids find their way to Alec's club -- including his ex-friend turned bully...

Missing the familiarity of first grade and imagining the impossible tasks assigned by his next teacher, a boy refuses to start second grade.

Unable to celebrate the holidays in the wake of his older brother's death in a gang-related shooting, Lolly Rachpaul struggles to avoid being forced into a gang himself while constructing a fantastically creative LEGO city at the Harlem community center. Where I live, it's all about borders. And territories. And crews. When you're a little kid in Harlem, you can pretty much go anywhere and do anything as long as you're careful. But when you start...

When Victoria Cruz wakes up in the psychiatric ward of a Texas hospital after her failed suicide attempt, she still has no desire to live, but as the weeks pass, and she meets Dr. Desai and three of the other patients, she begins to reflect on the reasons why she feels like a loser compared with the rest of her family, and to see a path ahead where she can make a life of her own.

Twelve-year-old Cooper Vega and his military family has moved so often that he is used to new schoolmates not knowing his name, but at the moment he has a bigger problem--his new phone is haunted by the ghost of Roderick Northrop, a boy from the sixteenth-century, who needs his help to finish a quest, which is somehow tied up in the Stratford Middle School production of Romeo and Juliet.