Just after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, a Mexican American boy goes with his mother from Los Angeles to New Mexico to meet her family for the first time, and, while there, he discovers his family's hidden Jewish heritage.
Seventy-year-old Sir Magnus, grandfather of a family of life-size rag dolls living in a house in England and pretending to be human, has a premonition that all of them will soon die and that they will return to being lifeless and useless.
While spending the summer of 1940 on a farm in the English countryside to escape wartime London, fourteen-year-old Ellie falls in love with a handsome Austrian refugee and faces a conflict of loyalties when he reveals that he is sympathetic to the German enemy.
In his senior year at Idaho's Pineville High School, Jake finds himself in charge of six other teenagers who must board at the tacky Scenic-Vu Motel, since they live too far from town to commute from their homes to school every day.
