In 1942, when life turns sour at the carnival that has always been her home, eleven-year-old Bee takes her dog, Peabody, and piglet, Cordelia, and sets out to find a real home, aided by two women only Bee and her pets can see.

After escaping the orphanage where they have spent their lives together, two boys become assistants to a con artist, and while Possum objects to the lying, stealing, and cheating, Billy only cares about making money and taking life easy.

"In 1857 India, 12-year-old Meera escapes a life she has no say in--and certain death on her husband's funeral pyre--only to end up a servant to a British general in the East India Company. When a rebellion against British colonizers spreads, she must choose between relative safety in a British household or standing up for herself and her people"--

There are three things to know about Maia: 1. Ever since her mother left, she has struggled with depression, which once got so bad she had to go to an institution for a while. She doesn't want to go back. 2. Maia is certain that if she finds her mother, and the two of them can talk about whale songs and constellations for a while, then everything will go back to normal again. 3. She is in love with Billy, the handsome and brooding boy who lives in...

Having lost his mother and his hearing in a short time, twelve-year-old Ben leaves his Minnesota home in 1977 to seek the father he never knew in New York City, and meets there Rose, who is also longing for something missing from her life. Ben's story is told in words; Rose's in pictures.

In these stories, Ramsay runs away from relatives, Bob is raised by dogs and Dorinda does housework for distant relatives, and Wenda and her woodchuck companion need to find a way to outsmart Widow Wallop.

A boy named Mark, tired of being sick with cancer, conceives a plan to climb Mount Rainier, and runs away from home with his dog, Beau--but with over two hundred miles between him and his goal, and only anger at his situation to drive him on nothing will be easy, and only his best friend, Jessie, suspects where he is heading.

In this comical twist on sibling rivalry, a girl decides she needs a new family, so she writes "free kid" on a box and waits in the street for some better parents to choose her.

Twelve-year-old Ivy Green, whose mother may have run off with a charismatic preacher to Panhandle, Florida, and classmate Paul Dobbs, who wants to see a Space Shuttle before the program's scrapped, team up for a summer adventure that's full of surprises.

In 1724 England, twelve-year-old Oliver Cromwell Pitts embarks on a journey from his seaside home in Melcombe Regis to London to find his father and his older sister, a journey filled with thieves, adventurers, and treachery.