Big Nate is living it up! When Nate's asked to befriend a new student, he's all for it--until he actually MEETS the kid. Is Nate stuck with a fun sponge? Or will his new buddy be the life of the party?

What if you aren't the Chosen One? The one who's supposed to fight the zombies, or the soul-eating ghosts, or whatever the heck this new thing is, with the blue lights and the death? What if you're like Mikey? Who just wants to graduate and go to prom and maybe finally work up the courage to ask Henna out before someone goes and blows up the high school. Again. Because sometimes there are problems bigger than this week's end of the world, and sometimes...

Vignettes of children whose less than desirable behavior is masked in insidious but acceptable ways.

"Lu knows he can lead Ghost, Patina, Sunny, and the team to victory at the championships, but it might not be as easy as it seems. Suddenly, there are hurdles in Lu's way--literally and not-so-literally--and Lu needs to figure out, fast, what winning the gold really means"--

While navigating his first year of high school and awaiting the birth of his new baby brother, Scott loses old friends and gains some unlikely new ones as he hones his skills as a writer.

After a year in exile on an Alaskan island as punishment for severely beating a fellow student, Cole Matthews returns to school in Minneapolis having made peace with himself and his victim--but he finds that surviving the violence and hatred of high school is even harder than surviving in the wilderness.

Encourages every boy to embrace all of the things that make him unique, and to be curious, brave, kind, thoughtful, and more.

"In an alternative version of Victorian London, a seventeen-year-old Dodger, a cunning and cheeky street urchin, unexpectedly rises in life when he saves a mysterious girl, meets Charles Dickens, and unintentionally puts a stop to the murders of Sweeny Todd"--

Eighteen-year-old James living in New York City with his older sister and divorced mother struggles to find a direction for his life.

Adri promises to remember his parents' words of wisdom about how to live his life, such as "Find your own way. You don't have to follow the crowd" and "Make wishes on the stars in the nighttime sky."