Trouble with Lent
Paul McCusker
Book summary
This is a faith-centred family and school adventure in which Lenten choices sit alongside a spelling bee and a Bigfoot quest.
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Paul McCusker
This is a faith-centred family and school adventure in which Lenten choices sit alongside a spelling bee and a Bigfoot quest.
Dave McGrail
Readers navigate friendship tensions, a shared crush, discomfort about body hair and an invitation to join a popular group that comes with a price. Their decisions determine how their story unfolds.
Jerry Spinelli
The book offers several school-life storylines, including a student's wish to change his appearance, another student's plan concerning bullies, a mysterious valentine message and an invention nearing its reveal.
Therese Weiner
A first day at school turns difficult when Patcheeno is picked on for his breed. His teacher and big sister help him persist, and the story ends with the pups accepting him.
Jennifer L. Holm
Babymouse wants to stand out rather than conform, and takes that ambition into the film club, where she sets out to make a movie.
Kendell Shaffer
An arrest changes Kalifornia’s living arrangements and school life. She must adapt to her father’s rules and police-academy drills while navigating a new partnership and trying to help someone in danger.
Gitty Daneshvari
This is a comic school mystery as well as a friendship story: the newcomers must piece together what is happening while learning how the school’s social world works.
Rachel Wise
Sam’s attachment to print clashes with a proposed online school newspaper, and she learns her best friend supports the change. The story also follows Sam’s school-paper interests and her budding crush.
J.L. Powers
This is a school-set murder mystery about the fallout from a violent clash between two students. Its six boy narrators offer different perspectives as friends and enemies face loss, suspicion and racial tensions.
Mary Wilcox
Expect a school-based mystery alongside friendship and family dynamics, with acting and celebrity culture in the background. The central puzzle concerns missing photographs and suspicion falling on a newcomer.
Inge Barth-grozinger
Follow Erich as ordinary concerns give way to exclusion and hardship under Nazi rule. Alongside the discrimination, the story includes friends and neighbours who remain loyal despite the risk.
Michael Harmon
This is a story of two brothers on the run, with skateboarding, a search for family and wilderness survival shaping their journey.
Thatcher Heldring
This is a baseball-centred school story about ambition meeting competing responsibilities. Roy wants to impress a future high-school coach, while his academic difficulties, tutoring and strained relations with teammates complicate that goal.
Bruce Hale
A talking cat leads Zeke from everyday family and school difficulties into an eccentric underground fantasy, with zombies, spies and other unusual characters. The mix promises comic adventure alongside the pressures of home and school.
Clémentine Beauvais
This is a cycling road-trip story about three schoolmates whose public journey brings friendship and national attention. Its plot combines social-media fame with self-acceptance and humour.
Dean Lorey
This fantasy adventure follows Charlie as he enters a school for people who fight monsters. His unusual power, new friendships and a dangerous portal bring the threat from his nightmares into a struggle involving his family and Earth.
Patrick Jones
This is a romance set against conflict between African American and Somali students. Rodney and Jawahir’s relationship brings questions of loyalty and social division into the foreground.
Elizabeth Winthrop
Grace and Arthur lose their schooling to mill work, while Sunday lessons and their letter to the Child Labor Board offer a route to challenge the situation. Lewis Hine’s photography brings attention to their lives.
Glenda Millard
Art is Perry’s favourite activity, and drawing gives him a way to express what he finds hard to say. The competition creates an opportunity for that communication.
Libba Bray
This historical supernatural story combines Gemma’s visions and the spiritual world with boarding-school life, strained belonging and an unsettling mystery around the young man following her.
Bob Blaisdell, Carlo Collodi
The appeal is in a lively, wayward hero whose choices propel a string of comic and perilous adventures. The book also offers a clear thread of advice about behaviour and responsibility.
Elizabeth Berg
Katie’s move and efforts to make friends place her first-love experience within a wider story of adjusting to a new school and family life.
Beverly Cleary
A warm, everyday school-and-family story follows Ramona through friendship, spelling struggles and the adjustment to a baby sister, with both awkward moments and small successes.
Rachel Wise
A school story about balancing newspaper work with a crush, friendship disagreements and a wish to try gymnastics.
Jacqueline Wilson
A family story about Floss’s choice to live with her father, whose failing café brings financial strain and upheaval. School friendships add another thread, and the ending is open rather than fully settled.
John David Anderson
Sticky notes spread around the school, carrying both friendly and cutting messages.
Cecily von Ziegesar
This is an ensemble story of affluent teenagers whose spring-break plans bring friendships and romantic relationships into contact. The plot moves between Sun Valley and Manhattan.
David Levithan
This is a teen romantic comedy about trying to repair a relationship after a mistake, set in a school where gender and sexuality norms are unusually playful.
Cassidy Cathy
This is a contemporary Alice-inspired story that mixes a hospital setting with dreamlike memories, friendship and an unsettled question about finding a way back.
James Patterson, Christopher Tebbetts
This is a school-and-family story about coping with upheaval and trying to start afresh.
A ghost-communicating heroine faces a new school and joins her friend in investigating an old mystery. The adventure moves into New York’s subway system, with humour part of its presentation.
Robert Lawrence Stine
A cooking contest brings friendship and rivalry together with a mysterious ingredient whose trouble keeps growing. The premise blends school competition with a fantastical slime threat.
Claudia Mills
This is a school-and-family story about Nora balancing a new aunt role with assignments and a difficult science-fair partnership. Her interest in organising facts gives the story a distinctive focus.
Philip Siegel
A lively school-set relationship story centres on Becca’s paid schemes to split couples, with a complicated assignment bringing her back into Huxley’s orbit.
Kate Saksena
This is a family-and-school story about a teenager seeking someone to confide in while life at home is difficult. Her letters to a musician give the story a correspondence-based element.
Jacqueline Wilson
The story links a school history project with Charlie’s reflections on her family situation, giving the Victorian subject a personal relevance for her.
Maria Gripe
The story centres on an unlikely friendship that brings change to a child who has felt lonely. Hugo’s unusual interests and independent ways give the friendship a distinctive character.
Jody Lamb
A school-year story about wanting to be seen differently, finding a close friend and coping with a parent’s drinking at home.
Christophe Mauri
A determined schoolboy’s attempt to reclaim his place drives the adventure. The contents suggest a layered story, with sections on a battle, family matters and an inheritance.
Amelia Atwater-Rhodes
A school outsider finds herself caught between the supernatural world she has written about and new relationships at school. The story combines vampire and witch elements with questions of belonging and trust.
Robert Lawrence Stine
A school production becomes unsettling when apparent sabotage and the possibility of a real phantom both enter the picture. Brooke’s concern about Zeke’s enthusiasm gives the spooky mystery a friendship angle.
A school story about teasing, worries about keeping up in class and the search for friendship, with Jeff and Nick's homemade comic as a creative outlet.
Sophie Laroche
This is a school-and-friendship story shaped by Lou’s loyalties and feelings. The blurb’s turn towards things going wrong promises a change in tone, but does not explain its nature.
Eva Ibbotson
A school dance troupe’s journey becomes a story of friendship and helping a young prince in danger, set against the threat of Nazi persecution in 1939.
Louise Rozett
A first-person story follows Rose as she navigates bereavement, family strain, anger and a potentially complicated school romance. Her sharp, self-aware voice includes wordplay and direct asides to the reader.
Leslie McFarlane
This is a children’s detective story built around a contest between two school sleuthing clubs and a missing item. The details given do not establish whether the mystery is solved successfully.
Lauren Child
Ana hopes to manage her problems like Ruby Redfort, her favourite fictional detective. A school spelling competition worries her, while her mischievous classmate Carlitos gets into trouble. Ana must face her fears and consider what it means not to leave a good friend aside.
Donna D. Cooner
This is a story about a teenage online creator coping with bereavement and a changed social world. It brings together family loss, online attention and the uncertainty of starting at a new school.
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