Using the writing techniques she has learned in school, fourth-grader Laney relates how an obese girl new to the class changes the lives of those around her, despite being bullied by her peers.
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.
In 1681 in Boston, fourteen-year-old William, a Narraganset Indian captured in a raid six years earlier, leads a productive and contented life as a printer's apprentice but is increasingly anxious to make some connection with his Indian past.
In "The Friendship," four children witness a confrontation between an elderly African American man and a white storekeeper in rural Mississippi in the 1930s. In "The Gold Cadillac," two African American girls living in the North are proud of their father's new Cadillac until they take it on a vacation to the South and encounter racial prejudice for the first time.
When Junior accidentally gets caught in his own coyote trap deep in the woods, he is rescued by the reclusive woman known as Mad Mary and begins an unforgettable adventure.
Answers questions children often ask about racism, discussing what it is, where racist ideas come from, gangs, the effects of racism, how to make things better, and related topics.
