In 1937, during the Depression, fifteen-year-old Mary Alice, initially apprehensive about leaving Chicago to spend a year with her fearsome, larger-than-life grandmother in rural Illinois, gradually begins to better understand and admire her grandmother's unusual qualities.

Told from two viewpoints, Derek Fitzpatrick, kicked out of boarding school, must move with his stepmother to her childhood home in Illinois, where he meets Ashtyn Parker, who may be able to achieve her dream of a football scholarship with bad boy Derek's help.

Twelve-year-old Lily mourns her brother, and has not spoken since the accident she feels she could have prevented, but the summer Tinny comes to town she is the only one who realizes Lily's secret.

In a lonely Illinois cemetery one cold October night, teen ghosts recount the stories of their deaths in different time periods, from 1870 to the present, to sixteen-year-old Mike, who unknowingly picked up a phantom hitchhiker.

Eighteen-year-old Rani, a budding photographer, grapples with first love, family boundaries, and the complications of a cross-cultural relationship.

A boy recounts his annual summer trips to rural Illinois with his sister during the Great Depression to visit their larger-than-life grandmother.

During a visit to her grandparents' Illinois farm in 1944, ten-year-old Molly tries to prove the innocence of a German-American neighbor whom the FBI suspects of smuggling anti-American propaganda. Includes historical notes about life on the home front in World War II.

Unless eleven-year-old Parker can find a way to remove the sinister puppet that refuses to leave his hand, he will wind up in military school or worse but first he must stand up for himself to his best friend Wren, his mother, and his nearly-absent father.

What if they just stopped? What if in a grand, scruffy stab at corporate disobedience, teenagers en masse simply stopped spending their money on the cynical crap that's relentlessly mainlined to them: the addictive and deadly cigarettes, the hateful music, the crude and desensitizing videos and movies? What if they stopped buying that $#!% - just to cause trouble? That's the radical notion behind Like We Care, a biting, clever, and hilarious satire...

When seventh-grader Bette finds an angel coin she puts it in her pocket and forgets it but soon the mysterious and kind Gabby moves into her building and helps her face her major losses, and then the coin connects her with three classmates who all find new ways to believe in themselves.