Sophie lived in constant fear of her father, who beat her up on a regular basis, until one day when the beating was so severe it sent her to the hospital.

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.

In the journal she is keeping for English class, sixteen-year-old Tish chronicles the changes in her life when her abusive father abandons her and her brother, and her mother follows him.

When a sixteen year old member of a race of shapeshifting killers called doppelgangers assumes the life of a troubled teen, he becomes unexpectedly embroiled in human life and it is nothing like what he has seen on television.

At the end of high school, Johanna finally begins dating the girl she has loved from afar, but Reeve is as much trouble as she claims to be as she and her twin brother damage Johanna's self-esteem, friendships, and already precarious relationship with her sister.

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.

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.

After moving with his emotionally distant father to the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, twelve-year-old Owen faces a lonely summer until he meets an abused girl who may be a space alien.