Pet is here to hunt a monster. Are you brave enough to look? There are no monsters anymore, or so the children in Lucille are taught. Jam and her best friend, Redemption, have grown up with the lesson that the city is safe for everyone. But when Jam meets Pet, a creature who some might call monstrous but, in reality, is anything but, she must reconsider what she's been told. Pet has emerged from one of her mother's paintings to hunt a true monster--and...

"Judith stopped talking long ago when Mom left her in the care of beloved Aunt Cora. Going back into a regular fifth-grade classroom won't be easy, but she has her Dog and new friend who will help her through"--

Using a deck of Lotería cards as her muse, eleven-year-old Luz Castillo, a ward of the state who has retreated into silence, finds each shuffle sparking a random memory that, pieced together, brings into focus the events that led to her present situation.

"Danny's life is falling apart. He's become a single father to eleven-year-old Will--who hasn't spoken since the death of his mother in a car crash a year earlier--and Danny has just been fired from his construction job. To make matters worse, he's behind on the rent and his nasty landlord is threatening to break his legs if he doesn't pay soon. Danny needs money, and fast. After observing local street performers in a nearby park, Danny spends his...

A Sight for Sore Eyes tells three stories, and for the longest time, the reader has no inkling of how they will come together. The first is a story of a little girl who has been scolded and sent to her room when her mother is brutally murdered; as Francine grows up, she is haunted by the experience, and it is years before she even speaks. Secondly, we become privy to the life of a young man, Teddy, born of unthinking young parents, who grows...

"On the sharp crags of tiny Tillings Island lies the secret of Izabella Rae Haywood's sixth birthday. That night, her father vanished, taking her voice, and the truth of what really happened along with him"--

In 1939, after cruel treatment at her orphanage renders her mute, Lucy runs away and joins the circus, working with the elephants and unaware that the orphanage matrons are hunting for her.

"After Sharkey's best friend commits suicide (or was it an accident?) in front of him, he spends the summer processing his grief on an abandoned beach resort island where his dad is the caretaker"-- Three years ago JC (aka Sharkey) saw his best friend fall off a unfinished Manhattan skyscraper. Suicide, or accident? He's spent the past years withdrawing from his friends, obsessively watching documentaries, and texting his dead friend. This year...

Rachel, having chosen to be mute following the sudden death of a classmate, shares responsibility with the other sixth-graders who decide not to report that the substitute teacher failed to show up.

Ruby gives up talking at a young age. Her mother isn't always there to notice; she comes and goes and goes and comes, until, one day, she doesn't. Silence becomes Ruby's refuge, sheltering her from the weather of her mother's mental illness and a pressurized suburban atmosphere.