Precious Jones, a Harlem teenager who has survived years of abuse, learns she is HIV positive, but she leaves her violent mother, finds a home in a halfway house and keeps learning to read and write.

Peter Houghton, a bullied seventeen-year-old who killed ten people in a nineteen-minute shooting at his New Hampshire high school, is convicted and later kills himself in prison.

The two storylines meet at the end.

In the book, Dorothy clicks the heels of her Silver Shoes and returns to Kansas.

Pongo and Missis, dalmatians whose fifteen puppies are stolen by Cruella de Vil to be made into fur coats, rescue them along with eighty-two other stolen puppies from Cruella’s country house.

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.