“Moving . . . Readers will nod their heads in sympathy with this guy who breaks the rules for all of the right reasons.” —The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books
 
A Bank Street College of Education Best Book of the Year
Indiana Too Good to Miss State Reading List 2018
 
Timothy is on probation. It’s a strange word—something...

Gary Soto writes that when he was five "what I knew best was at ground level." In this lively collection of short essays, Soto takes his listener to a ground-level perspective, recreating in vivid detail the sights, sounds, smells, and textures he knew growing up in his Fresno, California, neighborhood. The "things" of his boyhood tie it all together: his Buddha "splotched with gold," the taps of his shoes, and the "engines of sparks that lived beneath...

Lara just got told off on Facebook. She thought that Christian liked her, that he was finally going to ask her to his school's homecoming dance. It's been a long time since Lara's felt this bad, this depressed. She's worked really hard since starting high school to be happy and make new friends. Bree used to be BBFs with overweight, depressed Lara in middle school, but constantly listening to Lara's problems got to be too much. Bree's secretly glad...

The headlines say she killed her family. The truth? She doesn't remember. Andrea McNulty goes to sleep on her eighteenth birthday with a near-perfect life: she's a high school field hockey star, a doted-upon big sister, the beloved daughter of two happy parents. But when, she wakes up in a motel room the next morning, unable to remember what happened the previous night and covered in blood, Andi is a fugitive. According to the news, Andi's parents...