Sixth-graders Mac and Vince operate a business charging schoolmates for protection from bullies and for help to negotiate conflicts peacefully, with amazing challenges and results.

Bear is quite sure he doesn{u2019}t like visitors. He even has a sign. So when a mouse taps on his door one day, Bear tells him to leave. But when Bear goes to the cupboard to get a bowl, there is the mouse {u2014} small and gray and bright-eyed. In this slapstick tale that begs to be read aloud, all Bear wants is to eat his breakfast in peace, but the mouse {u2014} who keeps popping up in the most unexpected places {u2014} just won{u2019}t go away!...

Harriet M. Welsch is a spy. She's staked out a spy route, and she writes down everything about everyone she sees -- including her classmates and her best friends -- in her notebook. Then Harriet loses track of her notebook, and it ends up in the wrong hands. Before Harriet can stop them, her friends have read the always truthful, sometimes awful things she's written about each of them. Will Harriet find a way to put her life and her friendships back...

In 1866, Omakayas's son Chickadee is kidnapped by two ne'er-do-well brothers from his own tribe and must make a daring escape, forge unlikely friendships, and set out on an exciting and dangerous journey to get back home.

Frustrated at life with an autistic brother, twelve-year-old Catherine longs for a normal existence but her world is further complicated by a friendship with a young paraplegic.

For August, running into a long-ago friend sets in motion resonant memories and transports her to a time and a place she thought she had mislaid: 1970s Brooklyn, where friendship was everything. August, Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi shared confidences as they ambled their neighborhood streets, a place where the girls believed that they were amazingly beautiful, brilliantly talented, with a future that belonged to them. But beneath the hopeful promise there...

Written by the award-winning author of Little Altars Everywhere, this is a funny tour de force of women's, and especially mother-daughter, relationships. SiddaLee Walker prides herself on having escaped her Louisiana hometown and her mother, Vivi Abbot Walker, a local beauty and town character. In her brilliant balance of intergenerational transformation, Wells has created a breathtaking tale of separation and reunion.

Evelyn Couch, a woman caught in the slump of middle age, gains a new outlook on life when she befriends eighty-year-old Ninny Threadgood who tells her the story of the Whistle Stop Cafe and the two women who ran it in the 1930s, best friends Idgie and Ruth.

Twelve-year-old Addie tries to cope with her mother's erratic behavior and being separated from her beloved stepfather and half-sisters when she and her mother go to live in a small trailer by the railroad tracks on the outskirts of Schenectady, New York.

Years afterwards, Ruben Hart tells the story of how, in 1929 Newport, Rhode Island, his family and his best friend's family were caught up in the violent competition among groups trying to control the local rum-smuggling trade.