Twelve-year-old Foster McFee and her mother escape from her mother's abusive boyfriend and end up in the small town of Culpepper, West Virginia, where they use their strengths and challenge themselves to build a new life, with the help of the friends they make there.

A little boy has a nightmare that he can't read and is relieved when he wakes up and finds that it isn't true.

In this version of Sleeping Beauty, told in verse, the Princess is threatened with a curse which will start with a paper cut; devastated that all her books have been taken away, she sets out with her dog, Prince, to find the fairy who cast the curse and make her reverse it.

Realizing that her father's lack of work has endangered her family, nine-year-old Juice decides that she must return to school and learn to read in order to help their chances of surviving and keeping their house.

"Maple Mehta-Cohen has been keeping a secret: she can't read all that well. She has an impressive vocabulary and loves dictating stories into her recorder, especially the adventures of a daring sleuth who's half Indian and half Jewish like Maple herself, but words on the page just don't seem to make sense to her. Despite all Maple's clever tricks to hide her troubles with reading, her teacher is on to her, and now Maple has to repeat fifth grade"--...

JoJo's first night in her own room is interrupted by a lion, then a bear, then a tiger and, while the first two obey her keep out sign, the tiger cannot.