Fifth-grader Cally Louise Fisher stops talking, partly because her father and brother never speak of her mother who died a year earlier, but visions of her mother, friendships with a homeless man and a disabled boy, and a huge dog ensure that she still communicates.

Raised by an unstable father who keeps constantly on the move, Sam Border has long been the voice of his silent 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.

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.

In a near-future society that claims to have gotten rid of all monstrous people, a creature emerges from a painting seventeen-year-old Jam's mother created, a hunter from another world seeking a real-life monster.

Twelve-year-old Thea, devastated after seeing her best friend die, begins to open to the possibility of new friendships and forgiveness, and comes to believe in what cannot be fully explained.

"Fifteen-year-old Tess Turner of Manchester, England, decides to stop speaking in the wake of discovering a heartbreaking family secret"--

Angry that her father has left, twelve-year-old Alice swears that she will live in her family's old Renaissance tent until he agrees to return; but after she meets her mute four-year-old neighbor Piper she finds herself becoming involved in the child's life--and when she hears the little girl speak a word for the first time in years she sets out to prove to Piper's parents that the dismal diagnosis they received for their daughter may be all wrong....

Thirteen-year-old Siena's visions of the past intensify when her family moves to the Maine coast hoping her little brother will begin speaking, and she connects with residents of the house from many years earlier who faced a similar problem.