Eleven-year-old Felix becomes a bat boy for a minor league baseball team, hoping to someday be like his father, a famous Cuban outfielder.

Nick and Marta are both suspicious when their biology teacher, the feared Mrs. Bunny Starch, disappears, and try to uncover the truth despite the police and headmaster's insistence that nothing is wrong.

One month before graduating from his Central Florida high school, Quentin "Q" Jacobsen basks in the predictable boringness of his life until the beautiful and exciting Margo Roth Spiegelman, Q's neighbor and classmate, takes him on a midnight adventure and then mysteriously disappears.

While coping with his parents' separation, eleven-year-old Skeet spends most of Spring Break in his skiff on a Florida river, where he finds a manatee shot to death and begins looking for the killer.

Nick, Julies, Laurie, and their friends try to prevent a hydra from destroying Florida.

When she discovers the price of the coveted clubhouse, ten-year-old Piper and her fellow Gypsy Club members try to earn the money by creating a birthday-party-planning business.

Rob, who passes the time in his rural Florida community by wood carving, is drawn by his spunky but angry friend Sistine into a plan to free a caged tiger.