Already a leader in New York's underground world of homeless children, Buddy Clark takes on the responsibility of protecting the overweight, emotionally disturbed friend with whom he has been playing hooky from eighth grade all semester.

Number 47, a fourteen-year-old slave boy growing up under the watchful eye of a brutal master in 1832, meets the mysterious Tall John, who introduces him to a magical science and also teaches him the meaning of freedom.

Visiting her grandmother in the Louisiana bayou, ten-year-old Maddy begins to realize that she may be the only sibling to carry on the gift of her family's magical legacy.

Fifteen-year-old Drew "True" Robinson loves being the best point-guard prospect in high school basketball, but learns the consequences of fame through a former player, as well as through the man who expects to be his manager when True reaches the NBA.

The fortunes of a mulatto girl--as a slave during the Civil War and then as a woman freed by the Emancipation Proclamation.

The first year they are eligible to vote, Marva and Duke meet at their polling place and, over the course of one crazy day, fall in love.--

In this story told in a series of rhyming poems, Gorilla the cat enjoys answering the telephone, eating soul food, and sharing mischievous adventures with her young owner.

Seventeen-year-old Richie Perry, just out of his Harlem high school, enlists in the Army in the summer of 1967 and spends a devastating year on active duty in Vietnam.

Third-grader EllRay is becoming famous for messing up, and when his little sister accidentally kills EllRay's class goldfish, and then he forgets his teacher's read-aloud book at home, it only makes matters worse.

With love and determination befitting the "world's greatest family, " twelve-year-old Deza Malone, her older brother Jimmie, and their parents endure tough times in Gary, Indiana, and later Flint, Michigan, during the Great Depression.