In 1963, having come to live with her young aunt in the Kansas countryside while her parents sort out their problems, a thirteen-year-old Chickasaw Indian girl nicknamed Dovey ponders her past and her future.
When a failed wheat crop nearly bankrupts the Betterly family, twelve-year-old May's father pulls her from school and hires her out to a couple new to the Kansas frontier.
The Ingalls family travels from the big woods of Wisconsin to a new home on the prairie, where they build a house, encounter Native Americans, dig a well, and fight a prairie fire.
Twelve-year-old Abilene Tucker is the daughter of a drifter who, in the summer of 1936, sends her to stay with an old friend in Manifest, Kansas, where he grew up, and where she hopes to find out some things about his past.
Gabriel Lynch, an African-American teenager who has moved with his mother from New York to live on his stepfather's Kansas homestead, brings serious trouble down upon himself and his family when he leaves the farm to join a group of cowboys who turn out to be a gang of criminals.
Just when twelve-year-old Summer thinks nothing else can possibly go wrong in a year of bad luck, an emergency takes her parents to Japan, leaving Summer to care for her little brother while helping her grandmother cook and do laundry for harvest workers.
Cape Bluff Elementary School hosts a talent show and a ballerina, comedian, rapper, singer, and rock musician enter, but no one knows which kid will win.
