Living with her mother and grandparents on their Michigan farm, eleven-year-old Iris tries to find out about her father, who died before she was born, and to solve a local murder mystery involving a friend of her grandmother.
Fourteen-year-old Shem spends six months in the Michigan wilderness alone with a dying Indian woman, who helps him, not only to survive, but to mature to the point where he can return to his family and the difficulties of life as a cripple in a frontier village.
Steve Luxenberg shares the shocking secrets he uncovered about his mother's past after learning that she was not an only child, as she had always claimed, but instead had a mentally handicapped sister who was sent to an institution when the girls were in their twenties and discusses how his discoveries impacted his relationship with his mother.
A teenage girl tries to balance her life, but her time is split between her first love, a cake-decorating business, her dad's reality television show, and her efforts to find her missing mother.
Fourteen-year-old Shem spends six months in the Michigan wilderness alone with a dying Indian woman, who helps him, not only to survive, but to mature to the point where he can return to his family and the difficulties of life as a cripple in a frontier village.
