As further evidence of his family's bad fortune which they attribute to a curse on a distant relative, Stanley Yelnats is sent to a hellish correctional camp in the Texas desert where he finds his first real friend, a treasure, and a new sense of himself.

Young Timothy is sentenced to house arrest after impulsively stealing a wallet, and he is forced to keep a journal into which he pours all his thoughts, fears, and frustrations.

When four teens who would never interact socially find themselves running from a party that is being busted by the cops, they flee in a SUV they find nearby. Unbeknownst to them, they have just stolen a police car that is filled with drugs. Afraid they'll be in terrible trouble, they go to a cabin in the woods to calm down. There they face down their own inner demons as they make decisions that could change the entire course of their futures.

When Liam, a fourteen-year-old graffiti artist, can't keep his grades up and is threatened by a local gang in the projects of Minneapolis, his mother sends him to Lake Michigan for the summer.

A sixteen-year-old with schizophrenia is caught up in the events surrounding an attempted robbery by two other teens who eventually hold him hostage.

Garvie Smith is a sixteen-year-old with a genius level IQ, who can not be bothered with school, smokes cannabis, and hangs out with the bad boys--but when fifteen-year-old Chloe Dow is murdered he comes up against the ambitious Detective Inspector Singh, and both of them are determined to solve the case.

In an attempt to please her friends, sixteen-year-old Dallas goes along with their plan to rob a convenience store and when her father refuses to allow her to come home, she is sentenced to six months in the Girls' Rehabilitation Center.

Seventeen-year-old Jules Parish turned to stealing cars to try to get her sister out of foster care, but after she is caught, a wealthy eccentic offers a promising--but perilous--solution.

Mike Klingenberg is a troubled fourteen-year-old from a disfunctional family in Berlin who thinks of himself as boring, so when a Russian juvenile delinquent called Tschick begins to pay attention to him and include Mike in his criminal activities, he is excited--until those activities lead to disaster on the autobahn.

Since his mother died thirteen-year-old Troy has been skipping school and hanging out with the wrong crowd, and now he and his friend Foster have been sentenced to work in the local Philadelphia stables; at first he is apprehensive around the horses, but soon he bonds with a mare named Chance, and discovers the sport of polo--but also makes some new enemies.