When, in the winter of 1691, accusations of witchcraft surface in her small New England village, twelve-year-old Mary Chase fights to save her mother from execution.
After being shuttled between foster homes and institutions for most of his life, fifteen-year-old Floyd Rayfield escapes from a mental institution to a Sioux reservation, desperately seeking a family and a home.
When Justice's brothers start acting strange, she vows to discover what is wrong with them, but as the summer passes, she realizes that her whole family has extrasensory powers that are too much for Justice and her brothers to handle.
When his mother's drinking problem causes him to spend several months with country relatives in upstate Wisconsin, sixteen-year-old Carl begins to build a new life for himself, only to see it threatened by a serious mistake from his painful past.
Although neither fifteen-year-old Mark Severson nor his diabetic cousin Randy are looking forward to the canoe trip that is a family rite of passage, they begin to enjoy themselves as they make their way through Minnesota's lake country, until the trip becomes a fight for survival.