Twelve-year-old Ben Derby spends his spring break volunteering at a Santa Barbara day care center for homeless children.

Having fled to a family friend's hillside trailer after his mother's boyfriend tried to throw his baby sister against a wall, nine-year-old Jamie finds himself living an existence full of uncertainty and fear.

Seventeen-year-old Alice, released from prison with a new identity after serving six years for murdering a child, tries to keep her anonymity from the British tabloids, while haunted by memories of her past trauma.

Seventeen-year-old Matthew recounts his attempts, starting at a young age, to free himself and his sisters from the grip of their emotionally and physically abusive mother.

Sent to counseling for hitting his girlfriend, Caitlin, and ordered to keep a journal, sixteen-year-old Nick recounts his relationship with Caitlin, examines his controlling behavior and anger, and describes living with his abusive father.

Although twelve-year-old Harper has always liked Moon, an abused, orphaned older boy, their friendship is tested by a discovery Harper makes when Moon joins the Army in 1943.

While learning to bestow dreams, a young dream giver tries to save an eight-year-old boy from the effects of both his abusive past and the nightmares inflicted on him by the frightening Sinisteeds.

Sent to a remote, run-down reform school in Colorado, fifteen-year-old Angela is placed with the better girls, but upon learning that her "dangerous" friends are being isolated and left to live as animals, she takes radical steps to join them and help them escape.

Yanked out of his city life and plunked down in a small Montana town with his newly outed father and his father's boyfriend, seventeen-year-old Ben, angry and resentful about the changed circumstances of his life, begins to notice something is not quite right with the little boy next door and determines to figure out what is going on.

Shy, seventeen-year-old Marcus and his sixteen-year-old brother, Enrique, accompanied by two friends, drive from their home in southern California to Monterey to confront the abusive father who walked out a year earlier, and who now wants to return home.