Josh Bell, a twelve-year-old basketball star, leads his team to the championship while his father Chuck, a former pro player who refused to see a doctor about his heart, dies after a heart attack.

Wanda Petronski, a poor Polish American girl teased for claiming she has a hundred dresses at home, moves away before her classmates Peggy and Maddie can apologize.

Peter Hatcher’s two-year-old brother Fudge swallows Peter’s pet turtle, Dribble, and has to go to the hospital, where the turtle is removed but does not survive.

Ally Nickerson, who has hidden her dyslexia for years by acting out, is helped by her new teacher Mr.

Melody Brooks, a brilliant eleven-year-old with cerebral palsy who cannot speak or walk, helps her school win a place in the national Whiz Kids quiz finals using her new talking computer, Medi-Talker.

Twelve-year-old Catherine, who writes rules to help her autistic brother David fit in, learns to stop worrying so much about what others think.

In the novel First Blood, the source of the Rambo films, the traumatized Vietnam veteran Rambo is killed at the end.

Billie Jo Kelby, whose hands were burned and whose mother died in a kerosene accident in the 1930s Oklahoma Dust Bowl, runs away by train but returns home.

David Lurie, a disgraced professor living on his daughter Lucy’s farm in post-apartheid South Africa, accepts that Lucy will keep the farm and her baby, conceived when she was raped by three men.

Astrid Magnussen, who spent years in Los Angeles foster homes after her poet mother Ingrid was imprisoned for poisoning an ex-lover with oleander, is asked to testify to help free Ingrid.