Ten-year-old Bud, a motherless boy living in Flint, Michigan, during the Great Depression, escapes a bad foster home and sets out in search of the man he believes to be his father--the renowned bandleader, H.E. Calloway of Grand Rapids.

After Joey, a young kangaroo, runs away in search of a better place to live, other animals try out his mother's empty pouch while she is looking for him.

Runaways Axi, sixteen, and Robinson, seventeen, who met on a cancer ward, leave small-town Oregon on a cross-country trip to experience the best of life before it is too late.

"Grandpa's in the hospital and hating it. He swears at the nurses and makes trouble for everyone. Dad finds it too stressful to visit, but Gottfried Junior visits Grandpa as often as he's allowed, and when he's not allowed, he goes anyway. Grandpa thinks only of the place he was happiest-the island where he lived with Grandma before she died. He wants to go back one last time, but they won't let him out of the hospital. Gottfried Junior and Grandpa...

To escape her extremely sheltered life, eighteen-year-old Cecilia grabs a chance to strike out on her own in Sweetbriar, Tennessee, where she is transformed by her first job, apartment, and love but always waits for her mother, a U.S. Senator, to find her.

Rose Zarelli, self-proclaimed word geek and angry girl, has some confessions to make. 1. I'm livid all the time. Why? My dad died. My mom barely talks. My brother abandoned us. I think I'm allowed to be irate, don't you? 2. I make people furious regularly. Want an example? I kissed Jamie Forta, a badass guy who might be dating a cheerleader. She is now enraged and out for blood. Mine. 3. High school might as well be Mars. My best friend has been replaced...

"When she learns that her mother is sick in Ohio, Mim confronts her demons on a thousand-mile odyssey from Mississippi that redefines her notions of love, loyalty, and what it means to be sane"--

During a family reunion at the Eastern Wilderness Reserve, adventurers and expert trackers Molly the katt and Oscar the dogg must outsmart the rule-makers when two of their cousins run away together.

In 1923, when New Orleans native and orphan Bobby Lee Claremont boards a train to Chicago, where he hopes to join the criminal element and make a new life for himself, far away from the heavy-handed salvation of the Sisters of Charitable Mercy, he acquaints himself with a group of intriguing and possibly dangerous passengers who cause Bobby Lee to reconsider his plans.

Huck escapes from the lonely cabin in which his drunken, brutal father had imprisoned him; on Jackson's island he meets Jim, a runaway slave. Together they float down the Mississippi River on a raft, occasionally stopping at the banks. In these brief episodes Huck participates in the lives of others, witnessing corruption, moral decay, and intellectual impoverishment. He learns from Jim of the dignity and worth of a human being.