In a near-future society that claims to have gotten rid of all monstrous people, a creature emerges from a painting seventeen-year-old Jam's mother created, a hunter from another world seeking a real-life monster.

"Nia Imani is a woman out of place and outside of time. Decades of travel through the stars are condensed into mere months for her, though the years continue to march steadily onward for everyone she has ever known. Her friends and lovers have aged past her, and all she has left is work. Alone and adrift, she lives for only the next paycheck, until the day she meets a mysterious boy, fallen from the sky. A boy, broken by his past. The scarred child...

A young, mute boy who is apprenticed to a dragon-slayer suspects that the winged beasts do not exist, until he--and his master--learn the truth.

Fifth-grader Cally Louise Fisher stops talking, partly because her father and brother never speak of her mother who died a year earlier, but visions of her mother, friendships with a homeless man and a disabled boy, and a huge dog ensure that she still communicates.

"Parker hasn't spoken since he watched his father die five years ago. He communicates through writing on slips of paper and keeps track of his thoughts by journaling. A loner, Parker has little interest in school, his classmates, or his future. But everything changes when he meets Zelda, a mysterious young woman with an unusual request: 'treat me like a teenager'"--

Twelve-year-old Kester Jaynes, who has been locked away at a school for troubled children, is called upon to save the last animals living in a post-apocalyptic world where disease has killed most living things.

Twelve-year-old Thea, devastated after seeing her best friend die, begins to open to the possibility of new friendships and forgiveness, and comes to believe in what cannot be fully explained.

"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...

For most of her eleven years, Delly has been in trouble without knowing why, until her little brother, RB, and a strange, silent new friend, Ferris, help her find a way to be good--and happy---again.

In 1927, flower seller Floralie, eleven, and a new, mute friend, Nino, follow clues left by her long-lost mother from England to the garden of Claude Monet in France.