The mothers of four very different sixth-grade girls pressure them into forming a book club, and find, as they read the classic novel "Little Women," that they have more in common than they thought.
When thirteen-year-old Sherry Baldwin's essay wins a magazine contest, she, her father, and best friend Junie go to Hollywood, where she helps her ghost-detective mother and another ghost investigate a series of burglaries.
After selling oranges in the market, a Haitian mother and daughter have enough money to ride the tap-tap, a truck that picks up passengers and lets them off when they bang on the side of the vehicle.
Sixteen-year-old Giselle, who has buried herself in her dance studies and thoughts of her late father for a decade, comes to terms with her relationship with her famous ballerina mother and newly surfaced memories of her father's abuse when she ventures out of the world of the Manhattan elite and meets a charming boy named Will.
Joining her mother on a business trip to Hawaii, Dylan plans to work on her self-esteem and getting her mother's attention, but instead finds herself pursuing a rich, attractive boy who only has eyes for a bad-girl tennis star.
In addition to coping with her changing relationship with her mother, twelve-year-old Margaret spends her summer trying to sort out her feelings for the boy next door who claims to love her.
While coping with her grandmother's sudden death and her mother's resulting depression and fascination with a spiritualist church, whose ministers claim to communicate with the dead, fifteen-year-old Liz finds herself falling for a new neighbor whose mother is dying of cancer.
Millie and her artist mother move away from their best friends to a new town, where her mother gets a proper job and a boyfriend, and Millie learns to cope with all the changes.
Ten-year-old Thora, daughter of a mermaid mother and a human father, has many adventures at sea until she must return to the English seaside town of Grimli and save her mother who has been captured by the greedy real estate developer, Frooty de Mare.
