Pet is here to hunt a monster. Are you brave enough to look? There are no monsters anymore, or so the children in Lucille are taught. Jam and her best friend, Redemption, have grown up with the lesson that the city is safe for everyone. But when Jam meets Pet, a creature who some might call monstrous but, in reality, is anything but, she must reconsider what she's been told. Pet has emerged from one of her mother's paintings to hunt a true monster--and...

Steffi doesn't talk. Rhys can't hear. They understand each other perfectly. Love isn't always a lightning strike. Sometimes it's the rumbling roll of thunder... Steffi has been a selective mute for most of her life--she's been silent for so long that she feels completely invisible. But Rhys, the new boy at school, sees her. He's deaf, and her knowledge of basic sign language means that she's assigned to look after him. To Rhys it doesn't matter that...

Raised by an unstable father who keeps constantly on the move, Sam Border has long been the voice of his younger brother, Riddle, but everything changes when Sam meets Emily Bell and, welcomed by her family, the brothers are faced with normalcy for the first time.

Sometimes Charity cannot control her body and because she has low-functioning autism, Charity cannot communicate her thoughts to anyone else even though she feels all of the frustrations, fears, and doubts of a typical thirteen-year-old.

In a world where animals no longer exist, Kester Jaynes feels like he hardly exists either. He's been locked away in a home for troubled children and cannot speak. Then one night some talking pigeons come to help him escape-- and the animals need him to save them too.

Rachel, having chosen to be mute following the sudden death of a classmate, shares responsibility with the other sixth-graders who decide not to report that the substitute teacher failed to show up.

"Parallel plotlines set in different times, one told in text and one in art, inform each other as a young girl unravels the mystery of a ghost next door"-- 1982: Mary is a lonely orphan at the Thornhill Institute For Children at the very moment that it's shutting its doors. When her few friends are all adopted or re-homed and she's left to face a volatile bully alone, her revenge will have a lasting effect on the bully, on Mary, and on Thornhill...

"Judith stopped talking long ago when Mom left her in the care of beloved Aunt Cora. Going back into a regular fifth-grade classroom won't be easy, but she has her Dog and new friend who will help her through"--

When Elise leaves homeschooling for public school, she copes by speaking as little as possible, but soon her silence becomes an impediment to friendship and to dealing with family secrets.

Writing poetry helps fifth-grader Harper Lee Morgan cope with her father's absence, being evicted, and having to skip school to care for her brother while their mother works, and things look even brighter after she befriends a mute girl and a kindly disabled woman.