Brought to Moscow in 1990s Russia by his mother's abusive boyfriend, five-year-old Mishka is forced by a gang of homeless children to lie and steal until he finds comfort and love with a pack of dogs. Includes historical note.

A child tries to understand the life of a man he has seen sleeping under a bridge. The boy's mother patiently answers his questions and explains how people s life paths can be so different. The child observes the things he has in common with the man and wonders where his own path will lead.

Growing up in the shadows cast by two world wars, Annabelle has lived a mostly quiet, steady life in her small Pennsylvania town. Until the day new student Betty Glengarry walks into her class. Betty quickly reveals herself to be cruel and manipulative, and while her bullying seems isolated at first, things quickly escalate, and reclusive World War I veteran Toby becomes a target of her attacks. While others have always seen Toby's strangeness, Annabelle...

Ted Hammond, the only sixth grader in his small Nebraska town's one-room schoolhouse, searches for clues to the disappearance of a homeless family. Ted Hammond loves a good mystery, and in the spring of his fifth-grade year, he's working on a big one. How can his school in the little town of Plattsford stay open next year if there are going to be only five students? Out here on the Great Plains in western Nebraska, everyone understands that if you...

Teenaged Raspberry Hill tries to sort out her confused feelings of disgust, shame, and love for her homeless, drug addicted father and worries that she may have inherited his lying and stealing ways.

Sixteen-year-old Indy struggles to conceal that she is pregnant by rape and then, turned out by relatives, must find a way to survive on her own in Nassau.

While ten-year-old Maya attends an elite private school on scholarship her classmates are unaware that she and her family are living in a homeless shelter, but on one poignant day Maya discovers having a house is not the only way to have a home.

Twelve-year-old Felix's appearance on a television game show reveals that he and his mother have been homeless for a while, but also restores some of his faith in other people.

Fifteen-year-old Tyrell, who is living in a Bronx homeless shelter with his spaced-out mother and his younger brother, tries to avoid temptation so he does not end up in jail like his father.

"The Fitzgerald-Trouts are four barely related siblings living together in a small car on a lush tropical island, but when they begin to outgrow their small vehicle, they must band together to find a new home"--