With insight and a light touch, best-selling, Newbery Honor-winning author Gary D. Schmidt tells two poignant, linked stories: that of a grieving girl and a boy trying to escape his violent past. Following the death of her closest friend in summer 1968, Meryl Lee Kowalski goes off to St. Elene's Preparatory Academy for Girls, where she struggles to navigate the venerable boarding school's traditions and a social structure heavily weighted toward students...

When Colton Burpo made it through an emergency appendectomy, his family was overjoyed at his miraculous survival. Colton, not yet four years old, told his parents he left his body during the surgery. He talked of visiting Heaven and relayed stories told to him by people he met there whom he had never met in life, sharing events that happened even before he was born.

In 1974, when thirteen-year-old Charlie Hall's mother dies and his father retreats into silent grief, Charlie finds himself drifting, nearly friendless, through a northern Idaho junior high school but when a grizzly bear saves his life, Charlie forms an unusual friendship that changes his life.

This time, Riley might really have bitten off more than she's ready for. After practically begging the Council for a more challenging Soul Catch, she is assigned an actual Roman gladiator-Theocoles, the Pillar of Doom. How is Riley, a skinny twelve-year-old, supposed to get through to him? Then she meets the beautiful Messalina, who convinces her that her only chance is to become part of this world. To accomplish this, Messalina helps Riley through...

After a meteor hits the moon and sets off a series of horrific climate changes, seventeen-year-old Alex Morales must take care of his sisters alone in the chaos of New York City.