Told in alternating voices, the teacher and students in room 117 find their lives changed over the course of a school year.

In middle school, words aren't just words. They can be weapons. They can be gifts. The right words can win you friends or make you enemies. They can come back to haunt you. Sometimes they can change things forever. When cell phones are banned at Branton Middle School, Frost and his friends Deedee, Wolf, and Bench come up with a new way to communicate: leaving sticky notes for each other all around the school. It catches on, and soon all the kids in...

"Susie B. has a lot to say. Like how it's not fair that she has to be called Susie B. instead of plain Susie. Or about how polar bears are endangered. Or how the Usual Geniuses are always getting picked for cool stuff over the kids like her with butterflies in their brain. And it's because Susie B. has a lot to say about these very important things that she's running for student council president! If she's president, she can advocate for the underdogs...

"Hallie and Jaye are both sixth graders at Brookdale Middle School, but they couldn't be more different. Jaye is one of the popular kids who'll do almost anything to maintain her status. Hallie's only friend has moved away, and she couldn't care less what anyone thinks of her. So when the two girls are paired up as partners for a pitch competition held by their Business Education and Entrepreneurship class, it's not exactly a perfect match. After...

I never get up to sharpen my pencil in class without raising my hand. I make a list of even the smallest sins when I go to reconciliation at church, not forgetting a single jealous thought or eyeroll at Dad. In first grade I peed my pants because my teacher said we couldn't use the bathroom during an assembly. I do what I'm told. Until today.

"Yusuf is excited to start middle school in his small Texas town, but with the twentieth anniversary of the September 11 attacks coming up, suddenly it feels like the country's same anger and grief is all focused on his Muslim community"--

Oscar has just lost his beloved younger sister to cancer, Noah is a genius who has been homeschooled all his life but has decided he wants to go to middle school, Riley is an artist who has just moved back to West Beacon with his mother after she was held up at gun point--they are three unlikely friends with troubles in their lives, but when they meet in their middle school pottery class, they begin to learn how to piece their lives back together...

"In this empowering deconstruction of the so-called American Dream, a twelve-year-old Japanese American girl grapples with, and ultimately rises above, the racism and trials of middle school she experiences while chasing her dreams. As the daughter of immigrants who came to America for a better life, Annie Inoue was raised to dream big. And at the start of seventh grade, she's channeling that irrepressible hope into becoming the lead in her school...

Cash, Fitch, and Bird Thomas are three siblings in seventh grade together in Park, Delaware. In 1986, as the country waits expectantly for the launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger, they each struggle with their own personal anxieties. Cash, who loves basketball but has a newly broken wrist, is in danger of failing seventh grade for the second time. Fitch spends every afternoon playing Major Havoc at the arcade on Main. And Bird, his twelve-year-old...

"The story of twelve-year-old Alice, a misfit who is ignored by her own family and shipped off to boarding school. She'd love a friend, and one day she rescues mysterious Millie Maximus from drowning in a lake. Millie, it turns out, is a Bigfoot, part of a clan that lives deep in the woods. Alice swears to protect Millie and her tribe, and the two girls try to find a place where they both fit in"--