Twelve-year-old Ben must cope with the loss of his father, who died the year before, and his mother's overprotectiveness when he enters the annual Striped Bass Derby on Martha's Vineyard.
After moving with his emotionally distant father to the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, twelve-year-old Owen faces a lonely summer until he meets an abused girl who may be a space alien.
While trying to earn money for a motor bike, fourteen-year-old Joe Pederson becomes involved with the Mexicans who work on his family's farm and develops a better relationship with his father.
When her father kills himself after losing his money in the stock market crash, twelve-year-old Frances, now a penniless orphan, decides to hop aboard a freight train and live the life of a hobo.
Willy doesn't believe in any of his grandmother's superstitions, until he ventures down by the Big Swamp one dark night and comes to realize how smart Grandma is.
Twelve-year-old Lucas Whitaker, orphaned in 1849 when his entire family is claimed by consumption, takes a job as an apprentice with Doc Beecher, and learns the truth about the difference between superstition and science.
After stealing a dead man's boots, a poor wandering bagpiper uses them to play a trick on an unfriendly farmer but then finds the trick turned back on him.
While coping with his parents' separation, eleven-year-old Skeet spends most of Spring Break in his skiff on a Florida river, where he finds a manatee shot to death and begins looking for the killer.
