When Fran and her brother and sisters reunite with their mother after living with foster families for two years, Fran has a difficult time adjusting to her new life.
Although she sucks her thumb, smells bad, and loses herself in the make-believe world of the three bears' dollhouse, ten-year-old Fran knows how to take care of her baby sister better than anybody else.
The daughter of a Russian immigrant family, newly arrived in Manhattan in 1908, has conflicting feelings about her mother's increasingly radical union involvement.
Dennis, whose main interests include environmental protection and saving the world from nuclear holocaust, meets a girl whose only passion seems to be her 1957 Thunderbird car.
Jeff, a high school senior, becomes obsessed with creating a new, beautiful, person out of an unhappy fat girl, but when she begins to think independently, he loses control of the situation.
Two high school classmates, an aspiring actress and a young astronomer, struggle with the changes in their lives, unaware that these changes are leading them to each other.
Although she sucks her thumb, smells bad, and loses herself in the make-believe world of the three bears' dollhouse, ten-year-old Fran knows how to take care of her baby sister better than anybody else.
