Through journal entries sixteen-year-old Miranda describes her family's struggle to survive after a meteor hits the moon, causing worldwide tsunamis, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions.

Baby, 13 and motherless, is young enough to drag her dolls around in a vinyl suitcase and old enough to know more than she should about life on the streets. She lives with her father Jules, who has a penchant for heroin. To survive, Baby spins stories, cracks herself up, and slips through life. Her beauty captures the attention of Alphonse, and his stable of young girls. Jules sends her to reform school, but Baby finds a way out and into the hands...

A fourteen-year-old boy attempts to be the youngest person to reach the top of Mount Everest.

Thirteen-year-old Lakshmi leaves her poor mountain home in Nepal thinking that she is to work in the city as a maid only to find that she has been sold into the sex slave trade in India and that there is no hope of escape.

Presents fifteen interlinked sonnets to pay tribute to Emmitt Till, a fourteen-year-old African American boy who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955 for supposedly whistling at a white woman, and whose murderers were acquitted. The brutality of his murder, the open-casket funeral, and the acquittal of the men tried for the crime drew wide media attention. Award-winning poet Marilyn Nelson reminds us of the boy whose fate helped spark the civil rights...