As further evidence of his family's bad fortune which they attribute to a curse on a distant relative, Stanley Yelnats is sent to a hellish correctional camp in the Texas desert where he finds his first real friend, a treasure, and a new sense of himself.

"Timothy is on probation. It's a strange word -- something that happens to other kids, to delinquents, not to kids like him. And yet, he is under house arrest for the next year. He must check in weekly with a probation officer and a therapist, and keep a journal for an entire year. And mostly, he has to stay out of trouble. But when he must take drastic measures to help his struggling family, staying out of trouble proves more difficult than Timothy...

Paisley (or Leigh, as she prefers to be called) is a high school junior living in Grand Rapids and facing a variety of challenges. Her father left her family, her mom tries to escape her hardships through drinking, and Paisley has had to shoulder much of the responsibility of caring for her younger sister. With a broken home, rejection from the church, and a lot of tough questions, faith has never been an important part of Paisley's life. That all...

After ignoring several warnings to stop dating his teacher, Garrett is sent to Lake Harmony, a boot camp that uses unorthodox and brutal methods to train students to obey their parents.

Mike Klingenberg is a troubled fourteen-year-old from a disfunctional family in Berlin who thinks of himself as boring, so when a Russian juvenile delinquent called Tschick begins to pay attention to him and include Mike in his criminal activities, he is excited--until those activities lead to disaster on the autobahn.