While spending the month of August on the Massachusetts shore with her father, stepmother, and their new baby, almost thirteen-year-old Maggie finds beauty in and draws strength from a great blue heron, even as the family around her unravels.
Branded as traitors by the king's authorities, Crispin and his guardian, Bear, flee to coastal towns in fourteenth-century England, where they perform a musical juggling act and bond as a family after befriending a disfigured girl.
The doomed flight of two young indentured servants from their unkind master brings together an unlikely assortment of people in a mid-eighteenth-century Pennsylvania town.
Sixteen-year-old John Proud is tormented by the ghost of an evil ancestor, with his own name and his own face, who was hanged in 1854 for being a demon.
As the only passenger, and the only female, on a transatlantic voyage in 1832, thirteen-year-old Charlotte finds herself caught between a murderous captain and a mutinous crew.
Orphan Peter York, taken in by the taciturn Quaker Mr. Shinn in 1768, is confused by the mixed signals he receives from his guardian and decides he must take matters into his own hands when the community is roused to search for two young indentured servants who have escaped.
A ninth-grader's suspension for humming "The Star-Spangled Banner" during homeroom becomes a national news story, and leads to him and his teacher both leaving the school.
An outcast eight-year-old boy, orphaned by the Civil War, is taken in by the owner of a traveling medicine show and, despite the doubts of others, years later he confirms the man's faith in him.
