Lester has just moved to Cape Cod and is starting in a new school, and George is missing his best friend who has moved away, but the two develop a friendship and learn about scientific experimentation when they start working on a school science project, testing psychic ability in dogs, based on an experiment developed by Dr. Rupert Sheldrake.
When their parents, a screenwriter and a film editor, go off on summer projects, Marigold, Zinnia, and Lily, must visit their Great Aunt Sunny in Cape Cod, where they learn much about themselves and each other and grow closer than ever.
On Cape Cod in 1972, eleven-year-old Naomi, known as Chirp for her love of birds, gets help from neighbor Joey as she struggles to cope with her mother's multiple sclerosis and its effect on her father and sister.
When her best friend Mariel and boyfriend JFK spend the summer away from Cape Cod, sophomore-to-be Willa, who works part-time in her family's inn, is unprepared for new romance and other surprises.
The author chronicles his year-long experiences living in his house on a Cape Cod beach, and describes his surrounding, migrations of the birds, changing seasons, and more.
When her mother remarries again, high schooler Clare has no choice but to spend time with her biological father, Richard, at his home on Cape Cod, where she begins to understand him and learn that she may have been wrong about a lot of things.
Nancy Harmon, freed when the main witness in her trial for the murder of her children flees the country, changes her identity and moves to the east coast where she remarries and has two more children, but her nightmare begins again when she looks out the window one day to find Mike and Missy have disappeared.
Lyddie, the wife of successful whaler Edward Berry, finds her life turned upside down after her husband is lost at sea, forcing her to rebuild her identity and adapt to life as a widow, while struggling to keep her property out of the hands of her closest male relative.
