(Mock Newbery Winner/Actual Newbery Honoree) Three friends who have long enjoyed acting out imaginary adventures with dolls and action figures, embark on a real-life quest to bury a doll made from the ashes of a dead girl.

(Mock Newbery Honoree) Examines the role of African-Americans in the military through the history of the Triple Nickles, America's first black paratroopers, who fought against attacks on the American West by the Japanese during World War II.

(Mock Newbery Honoree/Actual Newbery Winner) Rescuing a squirrel after an accident involving a vacuum cleaner, comic-reading cynic Flora Belle Buckman is astonished when the squirrel, Ulysses, demonstrates astonishing powers of strength and flight after being revived.

In a poor village outside of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Serafina works hard to help her family, but dreams of going to school and becoming a doctor. When the earthquake hits, Serafina must summon all her courage to find her father and get medicine for her sick baby brother as she promised.

Just when twelve-year-old Summer thinks nothing else can go wrong in a year of bad luck, an emergency takes her parents to Japan, leaving Summer to care for her little brother while helping her grandmother cook and do laundry for harvest workers.