Sylvia Patterson's life suddenly changes with the integration of Little Rock's Central High in 1957 when she is selected to be one of the first black students to attend the previously all white school.
While searching for a loving family, orphaned Jeremy becomes entangled in a conflict between his city's arrogant and oppressive leader, the Baron von Strompie, and a group of outlandish people called the "cloons.".
After her father's death, aspiring sixth-grade writer Addy McMahon feels like she is cursed with bad luck, and when she temporarily loses her best friend, and is forced to admit that her mother is dating again, she vows she will never write another word.
When Deet's father is jailed for using drugs, Deet learns that prison is not what he expected, nor are other people necessarily the way he thought they were.
Starting in 1972 when she is nine years old, Ling, the daughter of two doctors, struggles to make sense of the communists' Cultural Revolution, which empties stores of food, homes of appliances deemed "bourgeois," and people of laughter.
Destiny, a thirteen-year-old control freak who feels alienated in her messy, haphazard family, helps her adopted best friend when she finds her birth mother and decides to have a relationship with her.
After her father is killed in Afghanistan, twelve-year-old tomboy Jack Cooper and her siblings find themselves moving across the country to live on their great-grandmother's run-down farm, where Jack puts on a brave face to help her brother and sister adjust to their new lives.
In addition to coping with her changing relationship with her mother, twelve-year-old Margaret spends her summer trying to sort out her feelings for the boy next door who claims to love her.
Lucy Moon fights injustice whenever she gets the chance, and when her classmates are arrested for sledding on Wiggins Hill, she takes the opportunity to speak her mind against the charges.
