When living with her mother, an alcoholic ex-beauty queen, becomes unbearable, almost seventeen-year-old Maybelline "Maybe" Chestnut runs away to California, where she finds work on a taco truck and tries to track down her birth father.

In early 1960s Alabama, eleven-year-old Ben, carrying an urn with his father's ashes, sets out on an eventful journey to the Augusta National, "the Sistine Chapel of golf courses," to make peace with his father.

Bo Dickinson is a seventeen-year-old girl from a bad family, but she is also over-protected, legally blind, Agnes Atwood's best friend--so when Bo calls in the middle of the night, desperate to get out of town, Agnes helps her to steal the Atwoods' car and the two girls go on the run, even though Agnes is not sure exactly what they are running from.

Best friends Annabelle and Tiffany risk placing all of dollkind in danger when they run away while trying to prevent Tilly from being sent back to London before they can determine if she is Annabelle's long-lost baby sister.

In 1938, twelve-year-old William has already decided to leave home when his younger sister informs him that she and their brother and sister are going too, and right away, but complications arise when an acquaintance decides to "help" them.

Sam Krupnik, mad at his mother because she won't let him wear his new plastic fangs in the house, decides to run away to Alaska.

In order to save her baby sister, fourteen-year-old Chu Ju leaves her rural home in modern China and earns food and shelter by working on a sampan, tending silk worms, and planting rice seedlings, while wondering if she will ever see her family again.

Twelve-year-old Lizzie Durango lives in a zoo, spending her days taking note of the animals' behaviors, then she meets runaway Tyler Briggs and together they investigate the wolves who are suddenly dying.

"When she learns that her mother is sick in Ohio, Mim confronts her demons on a thousand-mile odyssey from Mississippi that redefines her notions of love, loyalty, and what it means to be sane"--

"Nikki can't wait to leave Texas and follow her dreams of a music career... After a painful betrayal by her sister and a heated argument with their mother, Nikki is kicked out and finds herself homeless. She decides to go to California to pursue her singing career. When her best friend, Malachai, discovers her plan to flee Texas, he begs her to spend the remainder of spring break with him. He believes that over the course of a week, he can convince...