Fifteen-year-old Liza tries to deal with the normal everyday crises of life in an Austin, Texas, high school, a process complicated by her mother's fight with breast cancer.
In 1918, having run away from the Washington State lumber camp she calls home, a fourteen-year-old half-Chinese albino named Cordy makes her way to Seattle and finds work in a carnival.
Adam, who is dyslexic and has great difficulty with his homework, struggles to find the right school, resist the lure of drugs, and endure the jealousy of his older sister Caroline.
After learning that his father was adopted, Ace Hobart joins him in a journey from New York to New Mexico, during which they meet Ace's great-grandmother, a circus performer, his grandfather, a Tewa Indian, and other relatives he never knew existed.
Natalie, who lives in the large hotel managed by her father, has a dangerous friendship with Tulip, the wildly uncontrollable girl on a neighboring farm.
After the murder of his father, who has been hiding under the Witness Protection Program, Pete finds himself the target of sinister men who seem to think he knows where a large sum of money is hidden.
In the late 1800s while on a cattle drive which takes him north from Texas, seventeen-year-old Wylie learns that it is no longer necessary to run from the father he never knew.
Living in Georgia during World War II, thirteen-year-old Shanta sometimes feels that her family and neighborhood are more hopeless battlefields than those in foreign lands.
Fifteen-year-old Grant confronts the difficult decision of whether or not to cooperate with his grandfather's wish that he not be placed on life-support systems.
