Everything changes for thirteen-year-old Travis, a new student who is trying to hide his illiteracy, when he meets a sassy classmate with her own secrets and a remarkable teacher.

"Maple Mehta-Cohen has been keeping a secret: she can't read all that well. She has an impressive vocabulary and loves dictating stories into her recorder--especially the adventures of a daring sleuth who's half Indian and half Jewish like Maple herself--but words on the page just don't seem to make sense to her. Despite all Maple's clever tricks to hide her troubles with reading, her teacher is on to her, and now Maple has to repeat fifth grade....

Twelve-year-old Foster McFee and her mother escape from her mother's abusive boyfriend and end up in the small town of Culpepper, West Virginia, where they use their strengths and challenge themselves to build a new life, with the help of the friends they make there.

The young man known as Teach secretly learned to read, write, and use numbers growing up alongside the master's son. And although on this Southern plantation these are skills he can never flaunt, Teach doesn't keep them to himself: In the course of a week, he'll teach little ones the alphabet in the corner stall of a stable and hold a moonlit session where men scratch letters in the dirt. He'll decipher a discarded letter bearing news of Yankee soldiers...

Isolated on her mountain, Amber meets and befriends a girl from the city who gives her the determination to learn to read and write.

Kari loves to have her father read to her, until she discovers that he cannot read and is making the stories up.

After realizing that the Underwear Dragon misbehaves only because he cannot read, Sir Cole and his would-be assistant, Claire, are determined to help the fearsome beast.

Property Jones and her family are in dire straits when they win a drawing for the greatest bookstore in England but the previous owner was hiding something nearly as big as Property's secret.-- Provided by Publisher.