While on a mission to prove to Merlin that they can use magic wisely, Jack and Annie travel to seventeenth-century Venice, Italy, to save the city from disaster.
Shortly after he gets the perfect dog, Riley, eleven-year-old William must fight for his dog's life after Riley is taken away because he chases and injures an elderly neighbor's old horse.
After a young Dutch girl writes to her new American friend in thanks for the care package sent after World War II, she begins to receive increasingly larger boxes.
Ten-year-old Fred (short for Frederika) narrates the story of school and village life among the Athapascans in Alaska during 1948 when Miss Agnes arrived as the new teacher.
Falsely accused of theft and murder, an orphaned peasant boy in fourteenth-century England flees his village and meets a larger-than-life juggler who holds a dangerous secret.
When the first mate of the freight boat Neptune falls ill, it is up to Abigail, the captain's daughter, to steer the ship up the Hudson River from New Jersey to New York City.
