Zoe's arms prickle. She turns, trying to take it all in. The ache inside returns. It is not for her. It is too much. A real room with real floors and walls. A room for sleeping, and reading and dancing and . . . in her imagination she has pictured the room, but she has never pictured herself in it.Can seventeen-year-old Zoe make it on her own?A room is not much. It is not arms holding you. Not a kiss on the forehead. Not a packed lunch or a remembered birthday. Just a room. But for seventeen-year-old Zoe, struggling to shed the suffocating responsibility of her alcoholic mother and the controlling guilt of her grandmother, a rented room on Lorelei Street is a fierce grab for control of her own future.Zoe rents a small room from Opal Keats, an eccentric old lady who has a difficult past of her own, but who chooses to live in the possibility of the future. Zoe tries to find that same possibility in her own future, promising that she will never go crawling back. But with all odds against her, can a seventeen-year-old who only slings hash to make ends meet make it on her own? Zoe struggles with this worry and the guilt of abandoning her mother as she goes to lengths that even she never dreamed she would in order to keep the room on Lorelei Street.

Life isn't neat and tidy. It's like a whole lot of balls of brightly colored wool thrown in a basket, with stray beginnings and endings and possibilities everywhere. Let's follow the blue.Fifteen-year-old Bec has always been the good girl. Growing up with an eccentric celebrity chef mother and a father who suffers from depression, Bec is used to taking care of her two younger siblings and being labeled "the sensible one." But when Bec's parents decide to take a six-week tour of the U.S., she decides that she is sick of being responsible and is ready for some adventures of her own. She meets a new friend named Jaz, dyes her hair, wins money, throws her first party, and then there's the boy thing... In this intoxicating novel by award-winning author and poet Brigid Lowry, Bec realizes that maybe she isn't so ordinary after all―and that sometimes it doesn't hurt to, as her mother would say, "lighten up and enjoy the ride."

"IwithVY: I told Ms. Gold about how The Evil Three have been after me, feeding off me since fourth grade.MARCO: It isn't a very pretty story, so if you're looking for 'nice,' you better ask someone else.ANN: We just have to come up wiht some witnesses for our side. Think! Does anyone owe you any favors?BRYCE: I figure, Dude, why not make a little spare change on the side? A buck a bet. All's I has to do was explain that liable was civil for guilty, and they swarmed like flies." Eight first-person narrators give different versions of the same event. Lessons about the inner workings of the judicial system pale beside the insights into human nature. With pathos and a great deal of humor, Amy Goldman Koss keeps you turning pages.

When she breaks up with her boyfriend, a popular skater named C.J. Logan, Kelsey discovers that he doesn't take rejection well when he begins spreading rumors about her, which forces her to salvage her reputation and reinvent herself as a reporter for the school's newspaper.