For Merci Suárez, eighth grade means a new haircut, nighttime football games, and an out-of-town overnight field trip. At home, it means more chores and keeping an eye on Lolo as his health worsens. It's a year filled with more responsibility and independence, but also with opportunities to reinvent herself. Merci has always been fine with not being one of the popular kids like Avery Sanders, who will probably be the soccer captain and is always...

Chase does not remember falling off the roof, in fact he does not remember anything about himself, and when he gets back to middle school he begins to learn who he was through the reactions of the other kids--trouble is, he really is not sure he likes the Chase that is being revealed, but can he take the opportunity amnesia has provided and restart his life?

Meet the Garbage Pail Kids-Adam Bomb, Babbling Brooke, Brainy Janey, Cranky Frankie, Handy Sandy, Junkfood John, Luke Puke, Nervous Rex, Rob Slob, and Wacky Jackie. You may think they're gross and weird and slobby and strange, but they're not bad kids-they just don't know any better. Even though they all live together in one big tumbledown house and have as much fun as they can while trying to survive Smellville Middle School, they are pretty "normal"...

Moving on with her Cupcake Club friends despite lingering resentment over being ditched by her former best friend for a more popular group, Katie resolves to confront Callie and struggles to find ways to repair the friendship.

The first year of middle school can be exciting, or scarey, just ask Ginny.

"When five kids are invited to a cemetery at midnight, they think it's just a prank. When they find a gravestone that instructs them to dig up a grave, they think it's just a joke. It's no joke. An evil force is unleashed--a force that takes the shape of their worst fears. Once these fears are released, they won't go away. Not without a fight..."--

Hazel knows a lot about the world. That's because when she's not hanging with her best friend, taking care of her dog, or helping care for the goats on her family's farm, she loves reading through dusty encyclopedias. But even Hazel doesn't have answers for the questions awaiting her as she enters eighth grade. What if no one at her new school gets her, and she doesn't make any friends? What's going to happen to one of her moms, who's pregnant again...

"When seventh-grader Mango Delight Fuller accidentally breaks her BFF Brooklyn's new cell phone, her life falls apart. She loses her friends and her spot on the track team, and even costs her father his job as a chef. But Brooklyn's planned revenge--sneakily signing up Mango to audition for the school musical--backfires when Mango not only wins the lead role, but becomes a YouTube sensation and attracts the attention of the school's queen bee, Hailey...

"Remember middle school? Many parents would rather not. It?s often a rough ride, filled with insecurity, peer pressure, awkwardness, and world-rocking change. This book provides practical, hands-on advice for helping your child through this minefield?with information about what he or she is really going through, but isn?t likely to share. Best-selling learning-styles expert Cynthia Tobias and veteran teacher Sue Acu?a reveal what they?ve found by...

"The French have a name for the uniquely hellish years between elementary school and high school: "l'âge ingrat" or "The Ugly Age." Characterized by a perfect storm of developmental changes--physical, psychological, and social--the middle-school years are a time of great distress for parents and children alike, marked by hurt, isolation, exclusion, competition, anxiety, and often outright cruelty. Some of this is inevitable; there are intrinsic...