When fourteen-year-old baseball player Hutch feels threatened by the arrival of a new teammate named Darryl, he tries to work through his insecurities about both Darryl and his remote and silent father, who was once a great ballplayer too.

After he is cut from his travel basketball team--the very same team that his father once led to national prominence--twelve-year-old Danny Walker forms his own team of cast-offs that might have a shot at victory.

When their home next to a brook is destroyed by beavers, a large family of golden mice is aided by Poppy the deer mouse and her grumpy porcupine friend, who in the process forges a relationship with the son he had abandoned.

When his father tells him not to leave the lion he is drawing on the beach, a little boy starts making a very, very long tail--and a trail to follow back.

To prevent the Mayan gods from battling each other and destroying the world, thirteen-year-old Zane must unravel an ancient prophecy, stop an evil god, and discover how the physical disability that makes him reliant on a cane also connects him to his father and his ancestry.

"Fourteen-year-old Robbie never knows from one day to the next if there is going to be enough to eat or if his father will even come home."--

After his mother's death, twelve-year-old Skiff Beaman decides that it is up to him to earn money to take care of himself and his father, so he undertakes a dangerous trip alone out on the ocean off the coast of Maine to try to catch a hugh bluefin tuna.

Joey, who is still taking medication to keep him from getting too wired, goes to spend the summer with the hard-drinking father he has never known and tries to help the baseball team he coaches win the championship.

"Lenny loves baseball. And not just playing baseball -- he loves reading about it, too. Lenny thinks the more he knows, the better he'll play ... and he needs all the help he can get! But it's not until he comes across some interesting information in his Big Book of Baseball Facts -- Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron, two of the best hitters in baseball history, failed most of the time! -- that Lenny realizes his odds are pretty good! With renewed determination...

"Teddy has been training all summer with his new friends Jack and Gus to make the new travel football team in Walton, but when his long-absent dad comes back to town and into his life he is faced with a much bigger challenge"--