Seventh-grader Abby Lovitt grows up on her family's California horse ranch in the 1960s, learning to train the horses her father sells and trying to reconcile her strict religious upbringing with her own ideas about life.

Esperanza and her mother are forced to leave their life of wealth and privilege in Mexico to go work in the labor camps of Southern California, where they must adapt to the harsh circumstances facing Mexican farm workers on the eve of the Great Depression.

A wealthy Chinese teen is sent to America on her own to attend private school. Claire is a rich 11th grader in Shanghai; Dani is a scholarship student at a private school in Southern California who helps her mother clean houses. When Claire is parachuted into America to finish high school and Dani's mother needs the income from a boarder, they become unlikely housemates.

A young Indian girl, Zia, caught between the traditional world of her mother and the present world of the Mission, is helped by her aunt Karana, whose story was told in "The Island of the Blue Dolphins."

A twelve-year-old boy named Moose moves to Alcatraz Island in 1935 when guards' families were housed there, and has to contend with his extraordinary new environment in addition to life with his autistic sister.

In a small town on the coast of California, everyone over the age of fourteen suddenly disappears, setting up a battle between the remaining town residents and the students from a local private school, as well as those who have "The Power" and are able to perform supernatural feats and those who do not.

Twins Jude and Noah were best friends, until a tragic event during their adolescence drove them apart. Noah narrates the years before their separation, and Jude narrates their later years, allowing readers to witness the complete story of their rift and eventual reconnection.

When teens Zorie and Lennon, a former couple, are stranded in the California wilderness together, they must put aside their differences, and come to terms with lingering romantic feelings, in order to survive.

All the boys in EllRay's third-grade class have something they can brag about. Corey's on the swim team, Kevin is super tall, Jared's dad has an ATV. But EllRay's dad is a geologist - not much to brag about. After all, rocks are boring. Then EllRay sees the crystals in his dad's office, and they are really cool looking. If EllRay just "borrows" them to show his classmates, he knows they'd be impressed. And his dad will never have to know. It's a perfect...

Traces the story of a boy who moves across the country to rural northern California, where his efforts to adjust are challenged by a fast-moving firestorm that places family homes and lives at risk.