Frances O'Roark Dowell

Twelve-year-olds Kate and Marylin, friends since preschool, draw further apart as Marylin becomes involved in student government and cheerleading, while Kate wants to play guitar and write songs, and both develop unlikely friendships with other girls and boys.

Middle-schooler Isabelle Bean follows a mouse's squeak into a closet and falls into a parallel universe where the children believe she is the witch they have feared for years, finally come to devour them.

Since the death of his mother, Tobin's family life and school life have been in disarray, but after he starts raising chickens with his seventh-grade classmate, Henry, everything starts to fall into place.

In a series of letters to her cousin, twelve-year-old Arie Mae relates her life in a mountain valley of North Carolina in the 1920s.

Sixth grade is a MOST confusing time. Best friends aren't friends anymore. Worst enemies suddenly want to be partners in crime. And classmates you thought you knew have all sorts of surprising stuff going on. The kids in Mrs. Herrera's class are dealing with all these things and more--specifically, three more: 1. There's a new girl who just seems to be spying on them all and scribbling things in a notebook. Maybe she IS a spy? 2. Someone is stealing...

In the segregated south of Kentucky in 1953, twelve-year-olds Callie, who is black, and Wendell, who is white, are brought together by an old dog that is clearly seeking something or someone, but they not only face prejudice, they find trouble at a haunted cabin in the woods.

"Sam the Man is not a vegetable man. But when a school project has him paired up with the worst of all the vegetables -- the rutabaga-- he soon will learn that it's not half bad. And as he grows fond of his new little friend, Sam the Man will have to come up with plan on how to keep him happy before he rots!"--