Catherine Ryan Hyde

"Trevor McKinney, a twelve-year-old boy in a small California town, accepts his teacher's challenge to earn extra credit by coming up with a plan to change the world. His idea is simple: do a good deed for three people and instead of asking them to return the favor, ask them to 'pay it forward' to three others who need help"--

In a version of the 1999 book rewritten for a middle-grade audience, Trevor McKinney, a twelve-year-old boy in a small California town, accepts his teacher's challenge to earn extra credit by coming up with a plan to change the world. His idea is simple: do a good deed for three people and instead of asking them to return the favor, ask them to "pay it forward' to three others who need help.

"Lewis Madigan is young, gay, out of work, and getting antsy when he's roped into providing end-of-life care for his insufferable homophobic neighbor, Chester Wheeler. Lewis doesn't need the aggravation, just the money. The only requirements: run errands, be on call, and put up with a miserable old churl no one else in Buffalo can bear. After exchanging barbs, bickering, baiting, and pushing buttons, Chester hits Lewis with the big ask. Lewis can't...

One day, something’s going to snap. . . .

Ernie doesn't have a lot of friends at school. Just Will. They have stuff in common—like fishing. But more important, they have common enemies: the school jocks, who seem to find bullying just another sport.
For the most part, Ernie and Will take life at high school in stride. Until Will has one very bad day. Now nothing is remotely funny. Ernie finds himself a witness—to...

For five years Pearl has managed to keep the past from catching up to her and her bright, frail five-year-old son. Life has given her every reason to mistrust people, but circumstances force her to trust her neighbor Mitch with watching Leonard while she goes off to work. Then one day Pearl drops her son off…and never returns.
They are an unlikely pair: Mitch is a young, unattached business owner, and Leonard is a precocious, five-year-old...

"Raymond Jaffe feels like he doesn't belong. Not with his mother's new family. Not as a weekend guest with his father and his father's wife. Not at school, where he's an outcast. After his best friend moves away, Raymond has only two real connections: to the feral cat he's tamed and to a blind ninety-two-year-old woman in his building who's introduced herself with a curious question: Have you seen Luis Velez? Mildred Gutermann, a German Jew who narrowly...

Roseanna Chaldecott spent her life as a high-powered lawyer in Manhattan. But when her best friend and law partner dies suddenly, something snaps. Unsure of her future, Roseanna heads upstate on one tank of gas and with no plans to return. In the foothills of the Adirondacks, Roseanna discovers the perfect hideout in a ramshackle farm. Its seventy-six acres are rich with possibilities and full of surprises, including a mother and daughter squatting...

Bea has barely been scraping by since her husband died. After falling for a telephone scam, she loses everything and is forced to abandon her trailer. With only two-thirds of a tank in her old van, she heads toward the Pacific Ocean with her cat -- on a mission to reclaim whats rightfully hers, even if it means making others pay for what she lost. When fifteen-year-old Allie's parents are jailed for tax fraud, shes sent to a group home. But when her...

A boy creates a scheme which involves helping three people who must each help three people and so on. His plan actually works, though not in the way he anticipated, and not until his own world is forever changed for better and worse.