Maggie Callahan journeys across the rugged Pennsylvania frontier to find her kin but, just before she reaches her destination, she is taken captive by a band of Seneca warriors and forced to travel with them along the war trail.
Finley, an unnaturally quiet boy who is the only white player on his high school's varsity basketball team, lives in a dismal Pennsylvania town that is ruled by the Irish mob, and when his coach asks him to mentor a troubled African American student who has transferred there from an elite private school in California, he finds that they have a lot in common in spite of their apparent differences.
Discusses the details and the impact of the Supreme Court's decision in Lemon v. Kurtzman, which was about the use of public funds in connection with religion.
Eighteen-year-old Ash wants nothing to do with senior prom, but when disaster strikes and her desperate friend, Nat, needs her help to get it back on track, Ash's involvement transforms her life.
Twenty-six-year-old Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom, unhappy with his life, deserts his pregnant wife and young son and becomes involved with another woman, but when his wife gives birth, he returns home, only to be met by tragedy.
Eighteen-year-old Ned, having taken to hanging out at the barracks of state police Troop D in rural Pennsylvania after the death of his father, Trooper Curtis Wilcox, becomes obsessed with learning the truth about a 1954 Buick Roadmaster--apparently a conduit to the underworld--the squad has had secreted in a locked shed since 1979 when its owner mysteriously disappeared.
When his older brother suddenly joins the army and is sent to the Persian Gulf, sixteen-year-old Gary begins to take a new look at the restaurant that has been the focal point of his family and their small Pennsylvania town.
Describes a typical day in the life of James Forten, a man born in Philadelphia to free African-American parents, who learned to be a sailmaker, and later became a wealthy, respected businessman with his own shop.
