For Adam Reed, basketball is a passport. Adam's basketball skills have taken him from an orphanage in Poland to a loving adoptive mother in Minnesota. When he's tapped to play on a select AAU team along with some of the best players in the state, it just confirms that basketball is his ticket to the good life: to new friendships, to the girl of his dreams, to a better future.

"It's nerd-turned-jock Felton Reinstein's last year before college, and the choices he makes now will affect the rest of his life. That's a lot of pressure. Before leaving home forever, Felton will have to figure out just who he is, even if, sometimes, it sucks to be him"--

When Gabe, aka Chunk, a teenager who derives his greatest satisfaction from playing in the school band, finds out that the cheerleaders have appropriated the band's usual source of income (funds from the soda vending machine) for a new dance team, he takes on the school's social hierarchy to fight for the right of band geeks.

Second-grader Aiden Allen has seriously wild hair; in fact it keeps forming itself into weird shapes, and interfering with his school day, and nothing he says will make it behave--until finally Aiden and his hair come to a compromise that involves washing.