Maria tries on her mother's wedding ring while helping make tamales for a Christmas family get together, but panic ensues when hours later, she realizes the ring is missing.

When Miata leaves on the school bus the skirt that she is to wear in a dance performance, she needs all her wits to get it back without her parents' finding out that she has lost something yet again.

Meet Marisol Luna, a girl who was born to dance. The family is moving to the Chicago suburbs, and Marisol learns that her new neighborhood doesn't have a dance studio. Instead of giving up, resourceful Marisol is determined to keep dancing. With the help of two friends, she figures out a way to combine her old world with a renewed commitment to stretch and try her hardest.

Teresa loves to show off her shiny, new, pedal-powered lowrider car from Grandpa, but the toy soon looks old when she neglects it. Contains some Spanish vocabulary.

Fourteen-year-old Lincoln Mendoza, an aspiring basketball player, must come to terms with his divided loyalties when he moves from the Hispanic inner city to a white suburban neighborhood.

In order to look more like his father, Ricky borrows a mustache from a school costume, but when he loses it on the way home his father comes up with a replacement.

Gary Soto writes that when he was five "what I knew best was at ground level." In this lively collection of short essays, Soto takes his listener to a ground-level perspective, recreating in vivid detail the sights, sounds, smells, and textures he knew growing up in his Fresno, California, neighborhood. The "things" of his boyhood tie it all together: his Buddha "splotched with gold," the taps of his shoes, and the "engines of sparks that lived beneath...

Children and teens from all walks of life deal with the dramas of growing up.

Misunderstanding his wife's instructions, an old man sets out for a party with a door on his back.