When he finds a lost beagle in the hills behind his West Virginia home, Marty tries to hide it from his family and the dog's real owner, a mean-spirited man known to shoot deer out of season and to mistreat his dogs.

Alice fills the summer before her junior year of high school with a job at the mall, hanging out with her friends, and wishing she had a bigger family. It's the summer before junior year, and Alice is looking forward to three months of excitement, passion, and drama. But what does she find? A summer working in a local department store, trying to stop shoplifters, and more "real life" problems than she could have ever imagined: A good friend becomes...

Alice's first year in high school gets off to a difficult start when she and her boyfriend Patrick break up, but with the help of her father, older brother, and best friends, she gains a better sense of her own self-worth.

A wife and her grumpy husband go to market.

In March of 1941, when a severe blizzard suddenly hits Bismarck, North Dakota, a girl trying to save her stranded father and brother inadvertently helps the man who killed her mother four years before.

Alice is adjusting to her new stepmother, her brother's new apartment, her new boyfriend, and getting a driver's license.

Fourth-grader Alice tries unsuccessfully to avoid embarrassing mistakes and to establish better relations with her older brother Lester. Can someone die of embarrassment? Everything seems to go wrong for Alice: whether it's being seen in her underpants by Donald Sheavers from next door or saying dumb things in class. Worst of all, she's managed to get Lester really mad at her. Will life ever get any easier? Fourth grade can't end soon enough for Alice!...

Alice experiences the joys and embarrassments of seventh grade while advising her father and older brother on their love lives.

During a student exchange program, seventh-graders Ivy June and Catherine share their lives, homes, and communities, and find that although their lifestyles are total opposites they have a lot in common.

Eleven-year-old, motherless Alice decides she needs a gorgeous role model who does everything right; and when placed in homely Mrs. Plotkins's class she is greatly disappointed until she discovers it's what people are inside that counts.