Jack tries to have a perfect picnic with his mother, but things do not turn out as they expected.

"An excited and frustrated boy watches hopefully as wintry weather develops slowly into a 'big snow.'"--

The residents of Hard Pan, California, come together to help Brigitte and Lucky when the County Health Department threatens to close down the café, and meantime Miles's life is complicated by his mother's return.

While his life seems perfectly good as it is, Cardell, a young coyote, learns to tolerate--and even like--the coyote that is courting his mother.

A five-year-old boy, ready and eager on his first day at "the big kids' school," must calm his very worried mother.

Maverick Falconer is just starting middle school and he wishes he were a hero like his father because maybe then he could deal with his mother's drinking and series of abusive boyfriends, not to mention the kids who bully him in middle school (pretty much the same ones who bullied him in elementary school)--but as the year passes he begins to realize that other kids have problems too, and maybe if they can all survive sixth-grade things will get better....

Twelve-year-old Frankie Joe Huckaby, forced to live with the father he never knew, a stepmother, and four half-brothers in Illinois, starts a delivery service to finance his escape back to his mother in Texas, not realizing he is making a better life for himself than he ever had with her.

Twelve-year-old Felix's appearance on a television game show reveals that he and his mother have been homeless for a while, but also restores some of his faith in other people.

When his mother sends Herbie the young hedgehog out on his first big foraging adventure, a big wind sweeps him far from home.