When Toby finally decides to join the middle school basketball team, he does not anticipate the changes that will occur in his relationship with his best friend JJ, who is the team's star player, as well as in other areas of his life.
In Vienna, Austria, in 1940, two nine-year-old boys, one Jewish and one Aryan, are classmates and best friends when events of the Nazi occupation draw them even closer together as they fight to survive and escape together.
An all-American girl with Chinese ancestors and a new immigrant from China find little in common when they meet in their fourth grade classroom, but they are both missing their best friends and soon discover other connections.
In 1963, Pearl, an eleven-year-old black girl in Fairfax, Virginia, learns about the real nature of friendship from the popular but untrustworthy Lenore, and Artemesia, a poor girl who moves into the neighborhood for a brief time.
In 1941, circumstances bring together Brick, a boy from New York's apple country, and Mariel, a young girl made shy by her bout with polio, and the two make a journey from Brooklyn back to help Brick's elderly neighbors save their apple crop and to help Mariel learn about her past.