Amelia McBride attends a dance with a boy, learns that her father is being deployed to a dangerous area with the military for a year, and sorts out life's lessons with her friends and family.
Ivy and Ray accompany their parents on a trip to the Florida Everglades in order to find their only living relative, a distant cousin who, according to their great-grandfather's memoirs, absconded with a valuable, if unspecified, item.
Julie and her cousins set out on an old-fashioned wagon train to celebrate the Bicentennial, and Julie is unprepared for the challenges of prairie life, but when she and her cousins have a chance to make history, Julie rises to the challenge.
In 1974 at her new San Francisco school, nine-year-old Julie does not want to tell her class about her parents' divorce, or to tell her sister about messing up her school assignment, but when she breaks her finger playing basketball and her whole family rallies around her, she realizes the importance of telling the truth.
Julie and Ivy try to come up with a unique way to educate the public on the region's endangered eagles and raise enough money to help the wildlife rescue center release two injured eagles back into the wild.
In 1976, Ivy must choose between participating in a gymnastics tournament and attending a family reunion, and fears she will wind up disappointing everyone, no matter what she decides to do.
In the mid-1970s, Julie decides to run for student body president after being sent to detention unfairly and comes to find that many of her classmates do not like her prospective vice president, Joy, because she is deaf.
