When their grandfather arranges for them to spend two week at Sunny Oaks, the four Alden children enjoy settling into the routines of farm life but become suspicious about a mysterious horse locked in the stables.
Describes the joys of a summer spent with a family in Knoxville: eating vegetables right from the garden, going to church picnics, and walking in the mountains.
Through a hot, dry Oklahoma summer, twelve-year-old Franny tends wild animals brought by her neighbors, hears gossip during a weekly quilting bee, befriends a new neighbor who has some big secrets, and learns to hope.
Sent with her younger brother to God?y Island to live with her aunt and grandfather after Germans bomb Norway in 1940, ten-year-old Merit longs to join her parents in the Resistance and when her aunt, a teacher, is taken away two years later, she resents even more the Nazis' presence and her grandfather's refusal to oppose them. Includes historical facts and glossary.
Twelve-year-old Julia knows that her physical deformity will keep her from a normal life, but counts on the continuing friendship of her life-long slave, Mitka, until they learn that both of their futures in first-century Pompeii are about to change for the worse.
Sixteen-year-old Willa, living in a Depression-era West Virginia mining town, works hard to help her family, experiences love and friendship, and finds an outlet for her writing when her family becomes part of the Arthurdale, West Virginia, community supported by Eleanor Roosevelt.
When Amber, a smart, middle-class, high school student, is hit by a truck, she meets her deceased grandmother in a dreamlike place, then takes a wrong turn and awakens in the body of a wealthy, beautiful, popular classmate with serious problems.
Jock looks forward to spending two months of the summer working at his grandfather's golf complex, but when the rest of his eccentric family go with him they all learn a lesson about the bond of family.
