While under house arrest for one year for stealing a wallet, young Timothy keeps free-verse notes on his life in a court-ordered journal as he deals with having a sick brother and tries to stay out of trouble.

A sixteen-year-old with schizophrenia is caught up in the events surrounding an attempted robbery by two other teens who eventually hold him hostage.

As further evidence of his family's bad fortune which they attribute to a curse on a distant relative, Stanley Yelnats is sent to a hellish correctional camp in the Texas desert where he finds his first real friend, a treasure, and a new sense of himself.

Despite having moved out of the rough housing project where he grew up, ten-year-old Junebug continues to encounter crime, gangs, and violence.

Fourteen-year-old Tommy is a troublemaker, but he's basically got a good heart, in spite of the awful circumstances of his home life. When his mother abandons him, he is sent fo foster care, where he must learn to fend for himself. Then he meets Daquan, and the two young men form an instant bond based on their hard hardships. Together they try to navigate life without a parent's guidance and avoid the darker elements of the dirty streets of Boston....

Beverly Hills teenager Rachel Buchanan gets in trouble with the law and winds up at mysterious Blackthorn Academy in Pennsylvania, where she uncovers secrets about the school and becomes entangled in a case of international espionage.

"When privileged white sixteen-year-old Cindra is sent to a reform camp in Montana, she becomes transfixed by Lucky, a mysterious camp employee. As the connection between them grows, Lucky and Cindra become lovers and escape into the Rocky Mountains to create an idyllic life, living off Lucky's vast knowledge of the wilderness. But they can run from the outside world for only so long, and the consequences of their naïve fantasy of a future together...

Mike Klingenberg is a troubled fourteen-year-old from a disfunctional family in Berlin who thinks of himself as boring, so when a Russian juvenile delinquent called Tschick begins to pay attention to him and include Mike in his criminal activities, he is excited--until those activities lead to disaster on the autobahn.

"When Charlie Boykin was young, he thought his life with his single mother on the working-class side of Nashville was perfectly fine. But after his mother arranges for him to be admitted as a scholarship student to an elite private school, he is suddenly introduced to what the world can feel like to someone cushioned by money. That world, he discovers, is an almost irresistible place where once can bend the rules-and break them-and still end up untarnished...

El joven Stanley Yelnats comienza un viaje de autodescubrimiento cuando es enviado a un centro de detención juvenil en Texas, donde los niños son forzados a cavar agujeros de un metro de profundidad como un castigo, un proceso por el cual Stanley sospecha que el guardián tiene motivos ocultos.