A heartwarming novel about larger-than-life characters and second chances

Former academic Arthur Opp weighs 550 pounds and hasn't left his rambling Brooklyn home in a decade. Twenty miles away in Yonkers, seventeen-year-old Kel Keller navigates life as the poor kid in a rich school and pins his hopes on what seems like a promising baseball career—if he can untangle himself from his family drama. The link between this unlikely pair is

...

"A year has passed since Ari gave birth to Walker, though it went so badly awry she has trouble calling it 'birth' and still she can't locate herself in her altered universe. Amid the strange, disjointed rhythms of her days and nights and another impending winter in upstate New York, Ari is a tree without roots, struggling to keep her branches aloft. When Mina, a one-time cult musician--older, self-contained, alone, and nine-months pregnant--moves...

Told in two voices, middle-schoolers Sammie and David's long-term friendship is endangered when new student Luke begins flirting with Sammie just when David decides to confess his crush on her.

When fourteen-year-old Lindsay meets Talon, who lives in the secret Downsider community that evolved in the subterranean passages of the subway built in New York in 1867, she and her new friend try to bridge the differences between their two cultures.

Brooke and Julian live a happy life in New York -- she's the breadwinner working two jobs and he's the struggling musician husband. Then Julian is discovered by a Sony exec and becomes an overnight success -- and their life changes for ever. Julian's new-found fame means that Brooke must face the savage attentions of the ruthless paparazzi. And when a scandalous picture hits the front pages, Brooke's world is turned upside down.

College dropout Pablo Neruda Rind works a graveyard shift at an upscale, twenty-four-hour deli in Brooklyn. He's up to his eyeballs in credit card debt, never mind his student loans. Pop juggernaut Leanna Smart graduated from child stardom, became an international icon, and has enough social media followers to populate whole continents. When Leanna and Pablo meet at 5:00 a.m. at the bodega in the dead of winter it's absurd to think they'd be A Thing....