After chess led to the destruction of her family four years earlier, Mallory Greenleaf's focus is a dead-end job that keeps the lights on for her mother and sisters. When she plays in a charity tournament and wipes the board with current world champion Nolan Sawyer, the victory opens the door to sorely needed cash prizes. Mallory struggles to keep her family separated from the game, but she soon realizes that the games aren't only on the board. The...

The family routine is upset during Ramona's year in second grade when her father unexpectedly loses his job. Ramona Quimby is a character intimately known by Beverly Cleary readers. In this story of Ramona's year in second grade they will come to know Mr. Quimby equally well. As it opens he loses his job without warning, and Ramona's seven-year-old view of this all-too-frequently family crisis rings every change of mood from tears to laughter. Not...

A twelve-year-old boy named Moose moves to Alcatraz Island in 1935 when guards' families were housed there, and has to contend with his extraordinary new environment in addition to life with his autistic sister.

Theodore Finch is fascinated by death, and he constantly thinks of ways he might kill himself. But each time, something good, no matter how small, stops him. Violet Markey lives for the future, counting the days until graduation, when she can escape her Indiana town and her aching grief and guilt in the wake of her sister's recent death. When Finch and Violet meet on the ledge of the bell tower at school, it's unclear who saves whom. And when they...

"This Arden edition of Hamlet, arguably Shakespeare's greatest tragedy, presents an authoritative, modernized text based on the Second Quarto text with a new introductory essay covering key productions and criticism in the decade since its first publication. A timely up-date in the 400th anniversary year of Shakespeare's death which will ensure the Arden edition continues to offer students a comprehensive and current critical account of the play,...

When she is abandoned by her alcoholic mother, high school senior Ruby winds up living with Cora, the sister she has not seen for ten years, and learns about Cora's new life, what makes a family, how to allow people to help her when she needs it, and that she too has something to offer others.

Seventh-grader Zoey Albro focuses on caring for three younger siblings and avoiding rich classmates at school until her fascination with octopuses gets her on the debate team and she begins to speak out.

Set in Coketown, a fictional industrial town in the north of England, Hard Times was born of its author's indignation at the soul-crushing conditions of the industrial age, and yet it vibrantly transcends the stock situations and polemical weaknesses typical of social protest fiction of the time. The indelible characters-Mr. Gradgrind, whose utilitarian educational philosophy emotionally cripples his own children; the hypocritical factory owner Josiah...

Portico Reeves' secret identity as Stuntboy allows him to use his superpower keep everybody safe, but when his superhero parents start fighting a lot he feels the responsibility to save them.

Thirteen-year-old Lakshmi, though poor, enjoys her life until the Himalayan monsoons wash away her family's crops and she is sold to a brothel in India by her stepfather. She remembers her mother's wisdom, "Simply to endure is to triumph," until the day comes that she can reclaim her life.