Twelve-year-old Quijana is a biracial girl, desperately trying to understand the changes that are going on in her life; her mother rarely gets home before bedtime, her father suddenly seems to be trying to get in touch with his Guatemalan roots (even though he never bothered to teach Quijana Spanish), she is about to start seventh grade in the Texas town where they live and she is worried about fitting in--and Quijana suspects that her parents are...

"Yusuf is excited to start middle school in his small Texas town, but with the twentieth anniversary of the September 11 attacks coming up, suddenly it feels like the country's same anger and grief is all focused on his Muslim community"--

In the final days of the Viet Nam War, Hang takes her little brother, Linh, to the airport, determined to find a way to safety in America. In a split second, Linh is ripped from her arms--and Hang is left behind in the war-torn country. Six years later, Hang has made the brutal journey from Viet Nam and is now in Texas as a refugee. She doesn't know how she will find the little brother who was taken from her until she meets LeeRoy, a city boy with...

When Victoria Cruz wakes up in the psychiatric ward of a Texas hospital after her failed suicide attempt, she still has no desire to live, but as the weeks pass, and she meets Dr. Desai and three of the other patients, she begins to reflect on the reasons why she feels like a loser compared with the rest of her family, and to see a path ahead where she can make a life of her own.

Hank feels the pressure of measuring up to Happy, a Lab, but he manages to solve the crisis that erupts when Happy's quirks get out of hand.

Sadie Scofield is entered in the Texas River Odyssey, 260 miles of brutal canoeing, but a chance to finally make up for ruining her father's chance of winning the previous year; but her brother Tanner suddenly opts to paddle for a different team, and sheis left with Cully, a young man who was her best friend years ago, but no longer--260 miles in the same boat to sort out her relationship with the boy she once tried to defend from his abusive father,...

Cade, seventeen, yearns to leave the border town of Tanner, Texas, and when a mysterious girl appears, broken and bleeding, on his family farm the two begin to plan their escape, unaware that a cartel boss wants the girl back.--

Danny Owens is dedicating his seventh-grade football season to his recently-deceased father, an NFL legend, but the pressure to succeed is magnified by his inability to read.

December comes to Texas and there is a catfish fishing contest at Arrowhead Lake with a special prize awaiting the winning adult/child team; Kylie's brother and father are entered as one team, and Kylie Jean convinces her grandfather to enter with her as another team--and Kylie dreams of catching Granddaddy Whiskers, a legendary blue catfish that has eluded fishermen for years.

Eleven-year-old crafter Jubilee Johnson's assumptions about her vagabond life, her estranged mother, and her idol, television's perfect crafter Arletta Paisley, start to change after Jubi and her grandmother move to a small Texas town.