I’m glad you asked that question. I just spent months searching for a high school biology book for our eldest child. Every book I found either was too expensive, didn’t include enough information, and/or included controversial topics that had nothing to do with biology. So, I’ll be checking into the biology curricula recommended here, too.
I'm not sure about lower grades, but college textbooks can frequently be purchased through Amazons' used book section quite inexpensively.
(If I was the last person in the world to figure that out, pardon me for butting in...sometimes I've gotten new books much cheaper than the price of used books at the college bookstore, and with 2 in college it helps considerably...my favorite "game" at the beginning of the semester is "beat the bookstore's prices")
I haven’t had a chance to check out Abeka biology but I know it has good lab manuals.
I’ve peeked at some BJU. Some higher schools diss it, because it is Christian oriented (aka not big on evolution) but I found it was one of the few curricula that I didn’t have to outline and make extra handouts. It has good natural outlining built into the text.
Apologia was a big disappointment to me. I guess it’s good if you have no science background, because the book is a running conversation. He comes from the reasearch analytical background, but I found my kids didn’t process it into memory as well. It’s good if you can’t figure out how to do something.
People have told me for Physics the Apologia text is good. I didn’t like it for Chemistry.