Old Maynard Jenkins tells about the terrible blizzard that occurred one Christmas when he was a boy, when the weather was so cold in Lizzard, Indiana, that Santa Claus moved his workshop there and it snowed for two weeks straight.
When he and his high-school basketball teammates steal from a fraternity house in their small Indiana town, Nate contends with his guilt, his loyalty to his friends, and his desire to help his older brother who comes under suspicion for the crime.
After spending over four years in a mental institution for murdering a friend in Alaska, fourteen-year-old Kip begins a completely new life in Indiana with his father and stepmother under a different name, but has trouble fitting in and finds there are still problems to deal with from his childhood.
In 1923, in Pierre, Indiana, fourteen-year-old Andy realizes a dream when he makes the high school basketball team, but when an accident keeps him from playing, he ventures into journalism and begins to understand the meaning of sportsmanship.
Twelve-year-old Libby, the daughter of an Indiana cattle farmer, raises two calves in hopes of winning the annual steer competition at the county fair, but fails to follow her father's warning about developing a bond with animals that are destined to be sold at auction.
When fourteen-year-old Viola is sent from her beloved Brooklyn to boarding school in Indiana for ninth grade, she overcomes her initial reservations as she makes friends with her roommates, goes on a real date, and uses the unsettling ghost she keeps seeing as the subject of a short film--her first.
High school junior and columnist for the school newspaper, Jenny Greenley is good at dispensing advice to others, but when nineteen-year-old film heartthrob Luke Striker pays a visit to research a role, he creates such havoc that not even Jenny is sure she can fix it.
Eighteen-year-old Emma, a freshman at Indiana University, has enough trouble trying to figure out relationships but when her father wins fifty million dollars in a lottery, life becomes even more confusing and complicated.
Ten-year-old Isobel's mother packs her suitcase and leaves home. Abandoned by her mother, invisible to her grief-dazed father, Isobel is nurtured by the stories of her great-grandmother.
Orphaned and maimed, Freckles' bitterness about his fate is lessened when he is hired to guard a stretch of lumber in the wild Limberlost and, after meeting the beautiful "Swamp Angel, " he determines to find out about his past.
