Fourteen-year-olds Raphael and Gardo team up with a younger boy, Rat, to figure out the mysteries surrounding a bag Raphael finds during their daily life of sorting through trash in a third-world country's dump.

In Bolivia in 1999, when their father is unjustly arrested and their mother leaves, Francisco, seventeen, and his sister Pilar, eight, must move to the dirty, dehumanizing, and corrupt prison. 1999, Bolivia. Francisco's father is arrested on false charges and sent to prison by a corrupt system. Now Francisco and his young sister must move into prison with their father. There, they find a world unlike anything they've ever known. Prison life is dirty,...

In the security-obsessed, elitist United States of the near future, where a standardized test determines each person's entire life, a powerful man runs a corrupt empire until seventeen-year-old Ann and other students take the lead in boycotting the test.

Ernesto knows he should be supporting Carmen Ibarra's father who is running for city council against the corrupt incumbent Monte Esposito, but Monte is his girlfriend Naomi's cousin and he doesn't want to upset her already volatile family.