Washoe County Library System

It all starts when six kids have to meet for a weekly chat--by themselves, with no adults to listen inches There, in the room they soon dub the ARTT Room (short for "A Room to Talk"), they discover it's safe to talk about what's bothering them--everything from Esteban's father's deportation and Haley's father's incarceration to Amari's fears of racial profiling and Ashton's adjustment to his changing family fortunes. When the six are together, they...

The youngest of three siblings, fourteen-year-old Anke feels both relieved and neglected that her father abuses her brother and sister but ignores her, but when she catches him with one of her friends, she finally becomes angry enough to take action.

Outcasts and best friends Serena Velasco and Melody Grimshaw strive together to survive senior year and break away from their rural factory town.

"Hayley Kincaid and her father move back to their hometown to try a "normal" life, but the horrors he saw in the war threaten to destroy their lives"--

Nearly a year after his brother's suicide, sixteen-year-old Cliff "Neanderthal" Hubbard gets recruited to make life better at Happy Valley High by the school's quarterback, who claims he had a vision from God.

While her sister Junie, six, is in the hospital fighting cancer, Isa, an twelve-year-old loner, feels forgotten until a magic tree helps her whole family to heal.

Thirteen-year-old Genesis tries again and again to lighten her black skin, thinking it is the root of her family's troubles, before discovering reasons to love herself as is.

Seventeen-year-old Carson Speier is bored of Billings, Montana, and resentful that he has to help his mother take care of his father, a dying alcoholic whom he has not seen in fourteen years--but then he meets Aisha, a beautiful African American girl who has run away from her own difficult family, and together they embark on a journey of discovery that may help them both come to terms with their lives.

The lives of Jason Wilder and Meili Wen intersect in the delinquent-proof room for in-school suspension, known as the Rubber Room, and Jason's growing, fierce protectiveness of Meili explodes into violence when her chance to return to her wealthy lifestyle in Hong Kong--and his opportunity to escape poverty, loneliness, and the past--is threatened.

Seventh-grader Annabelle's mother is a hoarder, and their whole house is full of canned goods, broken toys, fabric, and old newspapers--but when a pile of newspapers (organized by weather reports) falls on Annabelle's younger sister Leslie and their mother is more concerned about the newspapers, it sets off a chain of events that brings their fix-it-all grandmother in and Annabelle realizes that if there is any hope for change she can not isolate...