Sparking enthusiasm for a play about the founding of their North Carolina mountains Catholic girls' school, a charismatic ninth grader and her recently orphaned best friend set in motion a series of events that have decades-long ramifications.

Gaining courage from Joan of Arc, fourteen-year-old Mary Murphy navigates the waters of Chesapeake Bay in a submersible built with her friend, Kip, escaping the home where her violent father has just returned from prison. Includes facts about domestic violence and submersibles.

Fourteen-year-old Jeremy Barker, facing his first year of Catholic high school and major family issues, sees the code he lives by, gleaned from zombie movies, put to the test as he tries to set right what he thinks are terrible wrongs committed by his father.

Sixteen-year-old Mexican American Yami Flores starts Catholic school, determined to keep her brother out of trouble and keep herself closeted, but her priorities shift when Yami discovers that her openly gay classmate Bo is also annoyingly cute.

Catholic-schooled seventh-graders Sophie, Margaret, Rebecca, and Leigh Ann help an elderly neighbor solve a puzzle her father left for her estranged daughter twenty years ago.

Alaskans Luke, Chickie, Sonny, Donna, and Amiq relate their experiences in the early 1960s when they are forced to attend a Catholic boarding school where, despite different tribal affiliations, they come to find a sort of family and home.

Fourteen-year-old Ellie Magari's mother left shortly after Ellie was born, and her father has raised her, but Ellie always figured that one day she would meet her mother and ask her some pertinent questions--but now her mother has died, and Ellie does not know exactly how to feel about that, but she is determined, with the help of her friends in the St. Francis of Assisi's Howling Wolves marching band (where she plays the glockenspiel), to make some...

When supremely organized seventh-grader, Molly McGinty, loses the notebook she relies on to keep her life in order she spends the day in chaos. Annotation. TODAY MOLLY Learned her wacky grandma was coming to spend the day at school with her; Lost her Notebook with Everything that Matters in it, including her homework; Got a black eye. Tore her skirt. And it's only 9 a.m. Could things get any worse? You bet! From the Hardcover edition.