The home Bart Dawes has lived in for twenty years, and the laundry plant where he works, are about to be razed to make way for a new highway extension, but Bart is not ready to go out without a bang.

As further evidence of his family's bad fortune which they attribute to a curse on a distant relative, Stanley Yelnats is sent to a hellish correctional camp in the Texas desert where he finds his first real friend, a treasure, and a new sense of himself.

Since his mother's death, Jayson, twelve, has focused on basketball and surviving but he is found out and placed with an affluent foster family of a different race, and must learn to accept many changes, including facing his former teammates in a championship game.

Michael was in a hurry. He was scrambling up the ladder at Drake & Sweeney, a giant D.C. firm with eight hundred lawyers. The money was good and getting better; a partnership was three years away. He was a rising star with no time to waste, no time to stop, no time to toss a few coins into the cups of panhandlers. No time for a conscience. But a violent encounter with a homeless man stopped him cold. Michael survived; his assailant did not. Who was...

"A story about a homeless boy and his imaginary friend that proves in unexpected ways that friends matter, whether real or imaginary"--

From Newbery Medalist Hesse comes her first novel in more than five years--a powerfully evocative and accessible family story, set in Brooklyn at the turn of the 20th century, by turns serious, funny, and with a touch of magical realism. Includes a full-color spread. Illustrations. In 1903 Brooklyn, fourteen-year-old Joseph Michtom's life changes for the worse when his parents, Russian immigrants, invent the teddy bear and turn their apartment into...

"Joe Lattimore, homeless and trying desperately to provide for his young family, agrees to fight in a no-holds-barred fight, only to have his opponent die. Lattimore now finds himself at the mercy of the fight's organizers who blackmail him into burglarizing a house. However, when he breaks in, he finds a murdered woman on the floor and the police have received an anonymous tip naming him for the crime. Robin Lockwood, an increasingly prominent young...

In 1893 New York, thirteen-year-old Maks, a newsboy, teams up with Willa, a homeless girl, to clear his older sister, Emma, from charges that she stole from the brand new Waldorf Hotel, where she works. Includes historical notes.