Ten-year-old Gim Lew Yep immigrates from China to America with his father, whom Gim barely knows, and fears he will be a disappointment to his family when he arrives at Angel Island.
After his father is killed in the attack on Pearl Harbor, Adam, his mother, and sister are evacuated from Hawaii to California, where he must deal with his feelings about the war, Japanese internment camps, his father, and his own identity.
In late nineteenth-century California, when Chinese immigrants are being driven out or even killed for fear they will take jobs from whites, fifteen-year-old Eliza Jane McCully defies the townspeople and her lighthouse-keeper father to help a Chinese boy who has been kind to her.
A fictionalized account of Charley (Charlotte) Parkhurst who ran away from an orphanage, posed as a boy, moved to California, and fooled everyone by her appearance.
In 1853, a 13-year-old California boy runs away to prospect for gold but is abducted by the infamous highwayman Joaquin Murieta and forced to accompany the robber band on a month-long tour.
An epistolary novel set in the 1850s, in which thirteen-year-old Eldora, who was raised in Massachusetts as an orphan, moves with her guardians to San Francisco, where she begins teaching two "Mexicano" children English, befriends a boy searching for gold, and finds herself face-to-face with her influential mother.
In 1881, the scrappy, rough-and-tumble baseball team in a California mining town enlists the help of a quick-witted twelve-year-old orphan and the notorious outlaw Billy the Kid to win a big game against the National League Champion Chicago White Stockings.
Rhyming verse chronicles the life of Charley Parkhurst, an orphan who grew up to become a legendary stagecoach driver, and whose death revealed a surprising secret.
