Jerry Spinelli

After his parents die, Jeffrey Lionel Magee's life--and his name--changes. Maniac Magee appears in Two Mills looking ragged and undernourished, and the kids make fun of him until they see him on the football field. But somehow, despite his own problems, Maniac Magee manages to bring a new direction to everyone he encounters along his path.

He's a boy called Jew. Gypsy. Stopthief. Runt. Happy. Fast. Filthy son of Abraham -- He's a boy who lives in the streets of Warsaw. He's a boy who steals food for himself and the other orphans. He's a boy who believes in bread, and mothers, and angels He's a boy who wants to be a Nazi some day, with tall shiny jackboots and a gleaming Eagle hat of his own. Until the day that suddenly makes him change his mind. When the trains come to empty the Jews...

Now that he is in the fourth grade, Suds learns that a fear of spiders or a babyish lunchbox will never get him into the coveted group, the Fourth Grade Rats.

When the school assigns each eighth-grader the name of a teenager who died in the past year as a lesson in mortality, Worm Tarnauer, who thrives on being invisible, doesn't count on Becca Finch, the seventeen-year-old car crash victim who changes everything.

Mourning the loss of his mother, nine-year-old David forms an unlikely friendship with independent, quirky thirteen-year-old Primrose, as the two help each other deal with what is missing in their lives.

"Jake and Lily are twins and have always felt the same--like two halves of one person--but the year they turn eleven and Jake begins hanging out with Bump Stubbins, everything changes"--Publisher.

Living with her warden father in an apartment above a 1950s prison, Cammie O'Reilly struggles to come to terms with the loss of her mother, who died saving her from harm when she was a baby, and interacts with some of the reformed inmates.

The lives of four young people in different circumstances are changed by their encounters with books.

This Italian-American Newbery Medalist presents a humorous account of his childhood and youth in Norristown, Pennsylvania.

Four totally different kids have only one thing in common--they're all about to report to the principal's office.