Nick and Marta are both suspicious when their biology teacher, the feared Mrs. Bunny Starch, disappears, and try to uncover the truth despite the police and headmaster's insistence that nothing is wrong.
In 1938, with the help of a lady doctor and an aging, card-cheating, dice-rolling horse thief, a seventeen-year-old orphan steals thirteen horses from Chickalookee, Florida's doomed rodeo, and finds a family in the process.
Sassy and her family go to Florida during summer vacation to visit Grammy for her birthday, and when the weather takes a turn for the worse, Sassy learns that love is more important than decorations and caterers.
Roy, who is new to his small Florida community, becomes involved in another boy's attempt to save a colony of burrowing owls from a proposed construction site.
Ten-year-old India Opal Buloni describes her first summer in the town of Naomi, Florida, and all the good things that happen to her because of her big ugly dog Winn-Dixie.
