Annika, a twelve-year-old foundling in late nineteenth-century Vienna, inherits a trunk of costume jewelry, and soon afterwards a woman claiming to be her aristocratic mother arrives and takes her to live in a strangely decrepit mansion in Germany.
Having moved to Annapolis, Maryland, with her medievalist parents, high school junior Ellie enrolls at Avalon High School where several students may or may not be reincarnations of King Arthur and his court.
Twelve-year-old Gabby feels that she needs a mother to help her grow into a woman, so when things between her father and his latest girlfriend do not work out, Gabby set off for the last place she remembers seeing her own mother.
In 1972 in Seattle, a teenager in a Japanese American family struggles for his own identity, along with a group of three friends who share his anger and confusion.
Fourteen-year-old Jason faces an identity crisis after discovering that he is the son of aliens who stayed on earth following a botched invasion mission.
Emiko, an ordinary teen living a boring life in the suburbs, learns of the existence of an underground art scene and decides to try her hand at being an "art freak," but she finds it is not easy for an outsider to break into a group of outsiders.
Over the course of a long summer in Wales, sixteen-year-old Ginny, the mixed-race, artist daughter of an English father and a Haitian mother, learns that she has a half-brother from her father's earlier marriage, and that her own mother may still be alive.
Thirteen-year-old Arthur, now serving as a squire to Lord Stephen of Holt Castle, turns his attention to fulfilling some of his other dreams, such as meeting his birth mother, marrying the beautiful Winnie, and most of all, becoming a Crusader.
Willa, who wants to feel extraordinary, thinks that she's in love with the father of the boy next door until she realizes that her "ordinary" true love is the boy himself.
