In 1911, Turner Buckminster hates his new home of Phippsburg, Maine, but things improve when he meets Lizzie Bright Griffin, a girl from a poor, nearby island community founded by former slaves that the town fathers--and Turner's--want to change into a tourist spot.
Joey and his younger sister, Mary Alice, who live in Prohibition-era Chicago, travel to a rural part of Illinois to visit their tough and vivacious Grandma Dowdel, who concocts outlandish schemes against various members of her small-town community.
Ten-year-old Bud, a motherless boy living in Flint, Michigan, during the Great Depression, escapes a bad foster home and sets out in search of the man he believes to be his father--the renowned bandleader, H.E. Calloway of Grand Rapids.
A twelve-year-old boy named Moose moves to Alcatraz Island in 1935 when guards' families were housed there, and has to contend with his extraordinary new environment in addition to life with his autistic sister.
During World War I, Canadian soldier Allan McBride, shell-shocked, unwittingly deserts from his unit in France and faces possible death by firing squad when he is arrested and court-martialed.
Jamie is excited to be sailing on the Titanic the biggest ship in the world, and eager to explore the ship, but then disaster strikes and there are not enough lifeboats for everyone.
Margaret Ann Motley has always wanted a room of her very own, but when her English cousin Courtney moves in with Margaret's family to escape the blitz, Margaret loses her only chance of having her own room and begins to resent Courtney, until she realizes how difficult Courtney's own life has been.
Brash young apprentice Johnny Tremain, injured in an accident that leaves him unable to practice his trade, becomes involved with Rab, a Boston printer, who draws Johnny with him into the events of the Revolutionary War.
In a series of diary entries, Princess Elizabeth, the eleven-year-old daughter of King Henry VIII, celebrates holidays and birthdays, relives her mother's execution, revels in her studies, and agonizes over her father's health.
