Fourteen-year-olds Raphael and Gardo team up with a younger boy, Rat, to figure out the mysteries surrounding a bag Raphael finds during their daily life of sorting through trash in a third-world country's dump

A little girl, who wants most of all to have a real home and to go to a regular school, hopes that the valley her family has come to, which so resembles the pattern on her treasured blue willow plate, will be their permanent home

From age six through her high school valedictory speech, believing she and her mother are wizards helps young Echo cope with poverty, hunger, her mother's drug abuse, and much more.

"Set in Depression Era Virginia, this is the story of orphaned Amelia and her struggle to keep her siblings together"--

A twelve-year-old street urchin and the son of Chicago's most important jeweler strike up an unlikely friendship in the days before the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, and both are nearly trapped when the city goes up in flames

A dog whose beloved owner has died and an orphaned ten-year-old girl find each other while enduring poverty and homelessness in early-twentieth-century Boston

In 1940s Chicago, fifteen-year-old Ruby hopes to escape poverty by becoming a taxi dancer in a nightclub, but the work has unforeseen dangers and hiding the truth from her family and friends becomes increasingly difficult.

After Amerley is raped by her employer's son she realizes she has two choices--stay quiet and keep her job or live her truth and speak up for herself and for justice. Ghana. Eldest of four girls, Amerley is offered a job working for one of her mother's old school friends. She has to accept: her wages will feed her family, help her sisters stay in school, and ensure that her mother won't have to worry about them. Amerley's move to Accra isn't easy,...

"Omar must contend with being treated like a second-class citizen when he gets a scholarship to an elite boarding school"--

Ten-year-old Rupert, from a very large, very poor family, accidentally becomes part of an eccentric rich family's life beginning at Christmas, and soon sees that wealth is not everything.