When the Chamber of Secrets is opened again at the Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry, second-year student Harry Potter finds himself in danger from a dark power that has once more been released on the school.

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

"Following the death of her closest friend in summer 1968, Meryl Lee Kowalski goes off to St. Elene's Preparatory Academy for Girls, where she struggles to navigate the venerable boarding school's traditions and a social structure heavily weighted towardstudents from wealthy backgrounds. In a parallel story, Matt Coffin has wound up on the Maine coast near St. Elene's with a pillowcase full of money lifted from the leader of a criminal gang"--

Ten-year-old Auggie Pullman, who was born with extreme facial abnormalities and was not expected to survive, goes from being home-schooled to entering fifth grade at a private middle school in Manhattan, which entails enduring the taunting and fear of his classmates as he struggles to be seen as just another student.

Middle-schooler Greg Heffley nimbly sidesteps his father's attempts to change Greg's wimpy ways until his father threatens to send him to military school.

Starting to emerge from her shell in the months after devastating losses, Annie Lee takes piano lessons from an elderly mall pianist before his disappearance forces her to break a promise to a new friend.

Resolving to become the world's greatest stand-up comedian despite less-than-funny challenges in his life, wheelchair-bound middle school student Jamie Grimm endures bullying from his mean-spirited cousin and hopes he will be fairly judged when he entersa local comedy contest.

Fearing that her humiliations will follow her to high school, Pipi McGee decides to right the wrongs of her early education and save others from being bullied.

After her troublemaking twin, Scarlet, vanishes from Rookwood boarding school, shy Ivy tries to track her down, using pieces of Scarlet's journal carefully hidden all over the school for Ivy to find.

When scholarship student Nikki Maxwell, whose father is the school exterminator, decides to enter the talent show at her expensive private school, her nemesis MacKenzie threatens to reveal Nikki's status to the rest of the school.