In this wide-reaching anthology, read powerful stories and narratives of family, friendship, history, life, and hardship. Meet young writers, curious students, future doctors, engineers, and lawyers, and little sisters. Hear about heritage, identity, longing for acceptance, sleeping on airplanes, and forever friends.

— Simon Traub-Epstein, International Library of Young Authors

From the publisher: “This book has something for everyone. It is not what you would call a ‘happy’ book, exactly, but it is definitely good reading. We have fiction stories and nonfiction stories. We have some excellent poetry, mainly about fathers and babies. There are stories about wonderful grandmothers and important uncles and friends that are such good friends they are like family. We have stories about families with lots and lots of girls and stories about favorite cousins. There is an important Native American story and another about being bilingual. There is a piece about moving in and there is a piece about moving out and there are a couple of pieces about moving forward. There are lessons in this book for parents and an essay about self-discovery. We have a sports story. We have stories with fantasy and magic. We have jokes! (We're not kidding! We even have a story set in another country. There are stories about hard times and stories about hard times that have turned into good times. One story is really abstract and makes you think hard. One story shows the bright side of having difficult parents. And, there are even recipes—well, one recipe and it is a good one. All of the stories, we can promise, are excellent.”