Duey, Kathleen

While working as an indentured servant on a plantation in Virginia in 1749, thirteen-year-old Summer must prove her innocence when her master's daughter accuses her of stealing.

While her father is away fighting the Normans and other Irish clans, nine-year-old Lara works hard to help harvest food and also cares for the pregnant gray mare that she loves.

The circus is the first home where Maximo has ever felt safe. He dreams of becoming an animal trainer and envies Jodi a girl who was born and raised in the circus and is already an accomplished performer. But ever since Jodi s mom was injured, Jodi has been unable to get back on the high wire. When a train wreck sets a herd of elephants and a dangerous Bengal tiger loose on the countryside, both Max and Jodi must face their worst fears. Can they conquer their terror and survive the longest night of their lives?.

For years, Garret and Molly have dreamed of seeing more of the world than cotton fields and the dusty poverty of their Mississippi Delta farms. They ve been stashing away hard-earned pennies and nickels in a tin-can bank, hidden deep in the bayou. Now rising flood waters threaten the hiding place of their money, and they set out on their homemade raft to retrieve it.

Sneaking out late at night to watch the brave firefighters who had been putting out the blazes that continued to plague Chicago throughout the dry summer of 1871, Nate finds his fate intertwined with that of a sheltered young girl when dangerous winds cause the fires to spread out of control.

In 1892, Max and Jodi, young employees of a traveling circus, find their lives endangered when their train wrecks in a storm.

Katie Rose, taken in by the Stevenses after the death of her parents, dreams of escaping the hard work and dreariness of her life by going to live with her uncle in the west, but her outlook changes when Mr. Stevens brings home a wild Mustang that becomes the focus of Katie's existence.

Katie Rose, having learned that the Stevenses plan to place her in an orphanage and kill the mustang horse that has become her closest friend, runs away with Hiram, a farmhand, with plans to join a wagon train heading West where she hopes to locate her uncle, and give the horse its freedom.

In 1851 in Louisiana, Paul is abandoned in the bayous by his older brothers and it is up to his lame Cajun friend Lily to find him.

In 1847, when her mother's remarriage sends them on a difficult journey to California, Willow is swept overboard fording the South Platte River and must survive and search for her family.