A young girl draws a family portrait, then makes it more accurate by adding common objects to show aspects of each member's personality, such as her father's playfulness, her mother's sweetness, and her brother's strength.

Nancy wants to adopt a special puppy so that she is no longer the only fancy member of her family, but after a day of puppy sitting a papillon, she realizes that being fancy is not always the most important thing.

When his parents call off the family vacation and enroll their son in a creative writing class instead, twelve-year-old Steve comes up with a wacky moneymaking project.

Eleven-year-old Isabella's parents are divorced, so she has to switch lives every week. Because of this, Isabella has always felt pulled between two worlds. And now that her parents are divorced, it seems their fights are even worse, and they're always about her. And she is beginning to realize that being split between Mom and Dad involves more than switching houses, switching nicknames, switching backpacks: it's also about switching identities. Her...

When Ellie's parents go out of town, she's forced to go camping with her aunt, uncle, cousins, and baby brother, Ben-Ben. Ellie can handle mosquitoes and poison ivy, but sharing a cabin with her annoying relatives? No way! From her aunt's strict rules to her cousin Eric's constant teasing and gross pranks, Ellie needs her sketch diary to survive this family vacation!

Follows the adventures and misadventures of ten-year-old Jane Moffat living with her widowed mother and three siblings in their new home in Cranbury, Connecticut, in the early twentieth century.

Twelve-year-old Victor Spoil comes from a long line of famous supervillains and he's fully expected to join their ranks one day. But Victor doesn't have a single bad-guy bone in his body. As a last-ditch effort before they give up and let him be a--gasp!--civilian, Victor's exasperated parents send him to apprentice under a disgraced supervillain called The Smear. When the stakes get high as Victor is forced to choose between his mentor and his family...

Thirteen-year-old Zinnia Taylor uncovers family secrets and self truths while clearing a mysterious overgrown trail that begins on her family's farm in Kentucky.

Zulaikha, a thirteen-year-old girl in Afghanistan, faces a series of frightening but exhilirating changes in her life as she defies her father and secretly meets with an old woman who teaches her to read, her older sister gets married, and American troops offer her surgery to fix her disfiguring cleft lip.

Dubbed a "reluctant reader" by his teacher, twelve-year-old Derek spends summer vacation learning important lessons even though he does not complete his summer reading list.