Twelve-year-old Riley steps out of her older brother's protective shadow and behind the Dungeon Master's screen, running D&D campaigns for her friends and learning to be independent and self-reliant.

Due to an administrative mix-up, troublemaker Donovan Curtis is sent to the Academy of Scholastic Distinction, a special program for gifted and talented students, after pulling a major prank at middle school.

Twelve-year-old Miriam, poetic, smart, and quirky, is considered a freak by the popular girls at her middle school, and she eventually explodes in response to their bullying, revealing an inner strength she did not know she had.

When eighth-grader Leon decides what to do for his project in the gifted program, it involves coffee houses, pirates, and filmmaking.

When aspiring actress Phoebe and her best friend, the brainy Harper, enter middle school, their friendship is briefly tested by Phoebe's admiration of some of the drama club students and the intensity of her first crush, but ultimately they find that their relationship can withstand the stresses of their expanding lives.

A quirky and utterly logical seventh-grade girl named Emma-Jean Lazarus discovers some interesting results when she gets involved in the messy everyday problems of her peers.

When Finistere's stern acting principal, Ms. Vlad, invites Mr. Dragon to be her vice-principle, the students immediately adore him, but unbeknownst to them, he is nefariously planning to take over the world, and it is up to Javi to stop him before it is too late.

After the death of her mother in an automobile accident, seventh-grader Serena, who has gotten the lead in her middle school play, is left to handle the day-to-day challenges of caring for herself and her younger brother when their father cannot pull himself out of his depression.

When seventh-grader Jake McQuade mistakes the world's first ingestible knowledge pills for jelly beans, he suddenly knows all about physics and geometry and can speak Swahili (though Spanish would be a lot more useful)--but his sort-of girlfriend Grace thinks they can use his new found brilliance to save their middle school from the new principal, who is conspiring to get it shut down.

An admittedly "dork" middle-school teacher arranges for a rock superstar to teach her eighth-grade students, who each tell a story about the same topic, in the style of a rap, poem, monologue, screenplay, haiku, fairytale, and more.